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card back. The fortune one spends in them!"
    Then he saw both that his way of marching with his own prepared
tribute had affected her as a deviation in one of those directions
he couldn't yet measure, and that she supposed this emblem to be
still the one he had received from her. He accordingly handed her
the card as if in restitution, but as soon as she had it she felt
the difference and, with her eyes on it, stopped short for apology.
"I like," she observed, "your name."
    "Oh," he answered, "you won't have heard of it!" Yet he had his
reasons for not being sure but that she perhaps might.
    Ah it was but too visible! She read it over again as one who had
never seen it. "'Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether'"—she sounded it almost
as freely as for any stranger. She repeated however that she liked
it—"particularly the Lewis Lambert. It's the name of a novel of
Balzac's."
    "Oh I know that!" said Strether.
    "But the novel's an awfully bad one."
    "I know that too," Strether smiled. To which he added with an
irrelevance that was only superficial: "I come from Woollett
Massachusetts." It made her for some reason—the irrelevance or
whatever—laugh. Balzac had described many cities, but hadn't
described Woollett Massachusetts. "You say that," she returned, "as
if you wanted one immediately to know the worst."
    "Oh I think it's a thing," he said, "that you must already have
made out. I feel it so that I certainly must look it, speak it,
and, as people say there, 'act' it. It sticks out of me, and you
knew surely for yourself as soon as you looked at me."
    "The worst, you mean?"
    "Well, the fact of where I come from. There at any rate it IS;
so that you won't be able, if anything happens, to say I've not
been straight with you."
    "I see"—and Miss Gostrey looked really interested in the point
he had made. "But what do you think of as happening?"
    Though he wasn't shy—which was rather anomalous—Strether gazed
about without meeting her eyes; a motion that was frequent with him
in talk, yet of which his words often seemed not at all the effect.
"Why that you should find me too hopeless." With which they walked
on again together while she answered, as they went, that the most
"hopeless" of her countryfolk were in general precisely those she
liked best. All sorts of other pleasant small things-small things
that were yet large for him—flowered in the air of the occasion,
but the bearing of the occasion itself on matters still remote
concerns us too closely to permit us to multiply our illustrations.
Two or three, however, in truth, we should perhaps regret to lose.
The tortuous wall—girdle, long since snapped, of the little swollen
city, half held in place by careful civic hands—wanders in narrow
file between parapets smoothed by peaceful generations, pausing
here and there for a dismantled gate or a bridged gap, with rises
and drops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer contacts,
peeps into homely streets and under the brows of gables, views of
cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled English town and
ordered English country. Too deep almost for words was the delight
of these things to Strether; yet as deeply mixed with it were
certain images of his inward picture. He had trod this walks in the
far-off time, at twenty-five; but that, instead of spoiling it,
only enriched it for present feeling and marked his renewal as a
thing substantial enough to share. It was with Waymarsh he should
have shared it, and he was now accordingly taking from him
something that was his due. He looked repeatedly at his watch, and
when he had done so for the fifth time Miss Gostrey took him
up.
    "You're doing something that you think not right."
    It so touched the place that he quite changed colour and his
laugh grew almost awkward. "Am I enjoying it as much as THAT?"
    "You're not enjoying it, I think, so much as you ought."
    "I see"—he appeared thoughtfully to agree. "Great is my
privilege."
    "Oh it's not your privilege! It has nothing