Little Jeanne wasn't, doubtless, to die young, but one couldn't, all the same, bear on her lightly enough.

It was bearing hard, it was bearing as HE, in any case, wouldn't bear, to concern himself, in relation to her, with the question of a young man.
Odious really the question of a young man; one didn't treat such a person as a maid-servant suspected of a "follower." And then young men, young men--well, the thing was their business simply, or was at all events hers.

She was fluttered, fairly fevered--to the point of a little glitter that came and went in her eyes and a pair of pink spots that stayed in her cheeks--with the great adventure of dining out and with the greater one still, possibly, of finding a gentleman whom she must think of as very, very old, a gentleman with eye-glasses, wrinkles, a long grizzled moustache.

She spoke the prettiest English, our friend thought, that he had ever heard spoken, just as he had believed her a few minutes before to be speaking the prettiest French.
He wondered almost wistfully if such a sweep of the lyre didn't react on the spirit itself; and his fancy had in fact, before he knew it, begun so to stray and embroider that he finally found himself, absent and extravagant, sitting with the child in a friendly silence.

Only by this time he felt her flutter to have fortunately dropped and that she was more at her ease.