but
that, in view of some of the features of the effect produced, was just
what made the danger of insistence on it. Strether wondered if he by
this time thought Miss Gostrey less fashionable or Lambert Strether
more so; and it appeared probable that most of the remarks exchanged
between this latter pair about passers, figures, faces, personal types,
exemplified in their degree the disposition to talk as "society" talked.

Was what was happening to himself then, was what already HAD happened,
really that a woman of fashion was floating him into society and that
an old friend deserted on the brink was watching the force of the
current? When the woman of fashion permitted Strether--as she
permitted him at the most--the purchase of a pair of gloves, the terms
she made about it, the prohibition of neckties and other items till she
should be able to guide him through the Burlington Arcade, were such as
to fall upon a sensitive ear as a challenge to just imputations. Miss
Gostrey was such a woman of fashion as could make without a symptom of
vulgar blinking an appointment for the Burlington Arcade. Mere
discriminations about a pair of gloves could thus at any rate
represent--always for such sensitive ears as were in
question--possibilities of something that Strether could make a mark
against only as the peril of apparent wantonness. He had quite the
consciousness of his new friend, for their companion, that he might
have had of a Jesuit in petticoats, a representative of the recruiting
interests of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, for
Waymarsh-that was to say the enemy, the monster of bulging eyes and
far-reaching quivering groping tentacles--was exactly society, exactly
the multiplication of shibboleths, exactly the discrimination of types
and tones, exactly the wicked old Rows of Chester, rank with feudalism;
exactly in short Europe.

There was light for observation, however, in an incident that occurred
just before they turned back to luncheon. Waymarsh had been for a
quarter of an hour exceptionally mute and distant, and something, or
other--Strether was never to make out exactly what--proved, as it were,
too much for him after his comrades had stood for three minutes taking
in, while they leaned on an old balustrade that guarded the edge of the
Row, a particularly crooked and huddled street-view. "He thinks us
sophisticated, he thinks us worldly, he thinks us wicked, he thinks us
all sorts of queer thi