only thought of ridding herself
most quickly of a possible, an actual encumbrance. The father, by her
impression, a Frenchman with a name one knew, had been a different matter,
leaving his child, she clearly recalled, a memory all fondness, as well as an
assured little fortune which was unluckily to make her more or less of a prey
later on. She had been in particular, at school, dazzlingly, though quite
booklessly, clever; as polyglot as a little Jewess (which she wasn't, oh no!)
and chattering French, English, German, Italian, anything one would, in a way
that made a clean sweep, if not of prizes and parchments, at least of every
part, whether memorised or improvised, in the curtained costumed school
repertory, and in especial of all mysteries of race and vagueness of reference,
all swagger about home, among their variegated mates.
    It would doubtless be difficult to-day, as between French and English, to
name her and place her; she would certainly show, on knowledge, Miss Gostrey
felt, as one of those convenient types who don't keep you explaining - minds
with doors as numerous as the many-tongued cluster of confessionals at Saint
Peter's. You might confess to her with confidence in Roumelian, and even
Roumelian sins. Therefore -! But Strether's narrator covered her implication
with a laugh; a laugh by which his betrayal of a sense of the lurid in the
picture was also perhaps sufficiently protected. He had a moment of wondering,
while his friend went on, what sins might be especially Roumelian. She went on
at all events to the mention of her having met the young thing - again by some
Swiss lake - in her first married state, which had appeared for the few
intermediate years not at least violently disturbed. She had been lovely at that
moment, delightful to her, full of responsive emotion, of amused recognitions
and amusing reminders; and then, once more, much later, after a long interval,
equally but differently charming - touching and rather mystifying for the five
minutes of an encounter at a railway-station en province, during which it had
come out that her life was all changed. Miss Gostrey had understood enough to
see, essentially, what had happened, and yet had beautifully dreamed that she
was herself faultless. There were doubtless depths in her, but she was all
right; Strether would see if she wasn't. She was another person however - that
had been promptly marked - from the small child of nature at the Geneva