 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
