English Literature re-enforced
by exams and teas - and once more, finally, as very much in advance. But he had
kept no great sense of points of contact; it not being in the nature of things
at Woollett that the freshest of the buds should find herself in the same basket
with the most withered of the winter apples. The child had given sharpness,
above all, to his sense of the flight of time; it was but the day before
yesterday that he had tripped up on her hoop, yet his experience of remarkable
women - destined, it would seem, remarkably to grow - felt itself ready this
afternoon, quite braced itself, to include her. She had in fine more to say to
him than he had ever dreamed the pretty girl of the moment could have; and the
proof of the circumstance was that, visibly, unmistakeably, she had been able to
say it to no one else. It was something she could mention neither to her
brother, to her sister-in-law nor to Chad; though he could just imagine that had
she still been at home she might have brought it out, as a supreme tribute to
age, authority and attitude, for Mrs. Newsome. It was moreover something in
which they all took an interest; the strength of their interest was in truth
just the reason of her prudence. All this then, for five minutes, was vivid to
Strether, and it put before him that, poor child, she had now but her prudence
to amuse her. That, for a pretty girl in Paris, struck him, with a rush, as a
sorry state; so that under the impression he went out to her with a step as
hypocritically alert, he was well aware, as if he had just come into the room.
She turned with a start at his voice; preoccupied with him though she might be,
she was just a scrap disappointed. »Oh I thought you were Mr. Bilham!«
    The remark had been at first surprising and our friend's private thought,
under the influence of it, temporarily blighted; yet we are able to add that he
presently recovered his inward tone and that many a fresh flower of fancy was to
bloom in the same air. Little Bilham - since little Bilham was, somewhat
incongruously, expected - appeared behindhand; a circumstance by which Strether
was to profit. They came back into the room together after a little, the couple
on the balcony, and amid its crimson-and-gold elegance, with the others still
absent, Strether passed forty minutes that