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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—I 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. This counted, it struck him as he walked
beside her with his overcoat on an arm, his umbrella under another
and his personal pasteboard a little stiffly retained between
forefinger and thumb, this struck him as really, in comparison his
introduction to things. It hadn't been "Europe" at Liverpool no—not
even in the dreadful delightful impressive streets the night
before—to the extent his present companion made it so. She hadn't
yet done that so much as when, after their walk had lasted a few
minutes and he had had time to wonder if a couple of sidelong
glances from her meant that he had best have put on gloves she
almost pulled him up with an amused challenge. "But why—fondly as
it's so easy to imagine your clinging to it—don't you put it away?
Or if it's an inconvenience to you to carry it, one's often glad to
have one's