« she
roundly declared.
    Strether resumed for a minute his walk. »She's really perfectly lovely, you
know. Far prettier than any girl I've seen over here yet.«
    »That's precisely on what I perhaps most build.« And she mused a moment in
her friend's way. »I should positively like to take her in hand!«
    He humoured the fancy, though indeed finally to deprecate it. »Oh but don't,
in your zeal, go over to her! I need you most and can't, you know, be left.«
    But she kept it up. »I wish they'd send her out to me!«
    »If they knew you,« he returned, »they would.«
    »Ah but don't they? - after all that, as I've understood you, you've told
them about me?«
    He had paused before her again, but he continued his course. »They will -
before, as you say, I've done.« Then he came out with the point he had wished
after all most to make. »It seems to give away now his game. This is what he has
been doing - keeping me along for. He has been waiting for them.«
    Miss Gostrey drew in her lips. »You see a good deal in it!«
    »I doubt if I see as much as you. Do you pretend,« he went on, »that you
don't see -?«
    »Well, what?« - she pressed him as he paused.
    »Why that there must be a lot between them - and that it has been going on
from the first; even from before I came.«
    She took a minute to answer. »Who are they then - if it's so grave?«
    »It mayn't be grave - it may be gay. But at any rate it's marked. Only I
don't know,« Strether had to confess, »anything about them. Their name for
instance was a thing that, after little Bilham's information, I found it a kind
of refreshment not to feel obliged to follow up.«
    »Oh,« she returned, »if you think you've got off -!«
    Her laugh produced in him a momentary gloom. »I don't think I've got off. I
only think I'm breathing for about five minutes. I dare say I shall have,
