The amusement, at all events, of a civilisation intenser was what--familiar compatriot as she was, with the full tone of the compatriot and the rattling link not with mystery but only with dear dyspeptic Waymarsh--she appeared distinctly to promise.His pause while he felt in his overcoat was positively the pause of confidence, and it enabled his eyes to make out as much of a case for her, in proportion, as her own made out for himself.She affected him as almost insolently young; but an easily carried five-and-thirty could still do that.She was, however, like himself marked and wan; only it naturally couldn't have been known to him how much a spectator looking from one to the other might have discerned that they had in common.It wouldn't for such a spectator have been altogether insupposable that, each so finely brown and so sharply spare, each confessing so to dents of surface and aids to sight, to a disproportionate nose and a head delicately or grossly grizzled, they might have been brother and sister.On this ground indeed there would have been a residuum of difference; such a sister having surely known in respect to such a brother the extremity of separation, and such a brother now feeling in respect to such a sister the extremity of surprise.Surprise, it was true, was not on the other hand what the eyes of Strether's friend most showed him while she gave him, stroking her gloves smoother, the time he appreciated.They had taken hold of him straightway measuring him up and down as if they knew how; as if he were human material they had already in some sort handled.Their possessor was in truth, it may be communicated, the mistress of a hundred cases or categories, receptacles of the mind, subdivisions for convenience, in which, from a full experience, she pigeon-holed her fellow mortals with a hand as free as that of a compositor scattering type.She was as equipped in this particular as Strether was the reverse, and it made an opposition between them which he might well have shrunk from submitting to if he had fully suspected it.So far as he did suspect it he was on the contrary, after a short shake of his consciousness, as pleasantly passive as might be.He really had a sort of sense of what she knew.He had quite the sense that she knew things he didn't, and though this was a concession that in general he found not easy to make to women, he made it now as good-humouredly as if it lifted a burden.His eyes were so quiet behind his eternal nippers that they might almost have been absent without changing his face, which took its expression mainly, and not least its stamp of sensibility, from other sources, surface and grain and form.He joined his guide in an instant, and then felt she had profited still better than he by his having been for the moments just mentioned, so at the disposal of her intelligence.She knew even intimate things about him that he hadn't yet told her and perhaps never would.He wasn't unaware that he had told her rather remarkably many for the time, but these were not the real ones.Some of the real ones, however, precisely, were what she knew.
They were to pass again through the hall of the inn to get into the street, and it was here she presently checked him with a question.
"Have you looked up my name?"
He could only stop with a laugh."Have you looked up mine?""Oh dear, yes--as soon as you left me.I went to the office and asked.Hadn't YOU better do the same?"He wondered."Find out who you are?--after the uplifted young woman there has seen us thus scrape acquaintance!"She laughed on her side now at the shade of alarm in his amusement.
"Isn't it a reason the more? If what you're afraid of is the injury for me--my being seen to walk off with a gentleman who has to ask who I am--l assure you I don't in the least mind.Here, however,"she continued, "is my card, and as I find there's something else again I have to say at the office, you can just study it during the moment I leave you."She left him after he had taken from her the small pasteboard she had extracted from her pocket-book, and he had extracted another from his own, to exchange with it, before she came back.He read thus the simple designation "Maria Gostrey," to which was attached, in a corner of the card, with a number, the name of a street, presumably in Paris, without other appreciable identity than its foreignness.He put the card into his waistcoat pocket, keeping his own meanwhile in evidence; and as he leaned against the door-post he met with the smile of a straying thought what the expanse before the hotel offered to his view.It was positively droll to him that he should already have Maria Gostrey, whoever she was--of which he hadn't really the least idea--in a place of safe keeping.He had somehow an assurance that he should carefully preserve the little token he had just tucked in.He gazed with unseeing lingering eyes as he followed some of the implications of his act, asking himself if he really felt admonished to qualify it as disloyal.It was prompt, it was possibly even premature, and there was little doubt of the expression of face the sight of it would have produced in a certain person.But if it was "wrong"--why then he had better not have come out at all.At this, poor man, had he already--and even before meeting Waymarsh--arrived.He had believed he had a limit, but the limit had been transcended within thirty-six hours.By how long a space on the plane of manners or even of morals, moreover, he felt still more sharply after Maria Gostrey had come back to him and with a gay decisive "So now--!" led him forth into the world.
