 colossal, but
somehow portable.«
    »Certainly, if you mean by portable,« she returned, »looking so well in
one's carriage. He's too funny beside me in his corner; he looks like somebody,
somebody foreign and famous, en exil; so that people wonder - it's very amusing
- whom I'm taking about. I show him Paris, show him everything, and he never
turns a hair. He's like the Indian chief one reads about, who, when he comes up
to Washington to see the Great Father, stands wrapt in his blanket and gives no
sign. I might be the Great Father - from the way he takes everything.« She was
delighted at this hit of her identity with that personage - it fitted so her
character; she declared it was the title she meant henceforth to adopt. »And the
way he sits, too, in the corner of my room, only looking at my visitors very
hard and as if he wanted to start something! They wonder what he does want to
start. But he's wonderful,« Miss Barrace once more insisted. »He has never
started anything yet«
    It presented him none the less, in truth, to her actual friends, who looked
at each other in intelligence, with frank amusement on Bilham's part and a shade
of sadness on Strether's. Strether's sadness sprang - for the image had its
grandeur - from his thinking how little he himself was wrapt in his blanket, how
little, in marble halls, all too oblivious of the Great Father, he resembled a
really majestic aboriginal. But he had also another reflexion. »You've all of
you here so much visual sense that you've somehow all run to it. There are
moments when it strikes one that you haven't any other.«
    »Any moral,« little Bilham explained, watching serenely, across the garden,
the several femmes du monde. »But Miss Barrace has a moral distinction,« he
kindly continued; speaking as if for Strether's benefit not less than for her
own.
    »Have you?« Strether, scarce knowing what he was about, asked of her almost
eagerly.
    »Oh not a distinction« - she was mightily amused at his tone - »Mr. Bilham's
too good. But I think I may say a sufficiency. Yes, a sufficiency. Have you
supposed strange things of me?« - and she fixed him again, through all her
tortoise-shell, with the droll
