"Fashionable! Do you all think so much of that?
Why not make one's own fashions? But I suppose I've
lived too independently; at any rate, I want to do what
you all do--I want to feel cared for and safe."

He was touched, as he had been the evening before
when she spoke of her need of guidance.

"That's what your friends want you to feel. New
York's an awfully safe place," he added with a flash of
sarcasm.

"Yes, isn't it? One feels that," she cried, missing the
mockery. "Being here is like--like--being taken on a
holiday when one has been a good little girl and done
all one's lessons."

The analogy was well meant, but did not altogether
please him. He did not mind being flippant about New
York, but disliked to hear any one else take the same
tone. He wondered if she did not begin to see what a
powerful engine it was, and how nearly it had crushed
her. The Lovell Mingotts' dinner, patched up in extremis
out of all sorts of social odds and ends, ought to have
taught her the narrowness of her escape; but either she
had been all along unaware of having skirted disaster,
or else she had lost sight of it in the triumph of the van
der Luyden evening. Archer inclined to the former theory;
he fancied that her New York was still completely