 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. She trusted him, liked
him, and it was to come back to him afterwards that she had told him things. She
had dipped into the waiting medium at last and found neither surge nor chill -
nothing but the small splash she could herself make in the pleasant warmth,
nothing but the safety of dipping and dipping again. At the end of the ten
minutes he was to spend with her his impression - with all it had thrown off and
all it had taken in - was complete. She had been free, as she knew freedom,
partly to show him that, unlike other little persons she knew, she had imbibed
that ideal. She was delightfully quaint about herself, but the vision of what
she had imbibed was what most held him. It really consisted, he was soon enough
to feel, in just one great little matter, the fact that, whatever her nature,
she was thoroughly - he had to cast about for the word, but it came - bred. He
couldn't of course on so short an acquaintance speak for her nature, but the
idea of breeding was what she had meanwhile dropped into his mind. He had never
yet known it so sharply presented. Her mother gave it, no doubt; but her mother,
to make that less sensible, gave so much else besides, and on neither of the two
previous occasions, extraordinary woman, Strether felt, anything like what she
was giving tonight. Little Jeanne was a case, an exquisite case of education;
whereas the Countess, whom it so amused him to think of by that denomination,
was a case, also exquisite, of - well, he didn't know what.
    »He has wonderful taste, notre jeune
