es; and the
rose-coloured shades and the small table and the soft fragrance of the
lady--had anything to his mere sense ever been so soft?--were so many
touches in he scarce knew what positive high picture. He had been to
the theatre, even to the opera, in Boston, with Mrs. Newsome, more than
once acting as her only escort; but there had been no little confronted
dinner, no pink lights, no whiff of vague sweetness, as a preliminary:
one of the results of which was that at present, mildly rueful, though
with a sharpish accent, he actually asked himself WHY there hadn't.
There was much the same difference in his impression of the noticed
state of his companion, whose dress was "cut down," as he believed the
term to be, in respect to shoulders and bosom, in a manner quite other
than Mrs. Newsome's, and who wore round her throat a broad red velvet
band with an antique jewel--he was rather complacently sure it was
antique--attached to it in front. Mrs. Newsome's dress was never in
any degree "cut down," and she never wore round her throat a broad red
velvet band: if she had, moreover, would it ever have served so to
carry on and complicate, as he now almost felt, his vision?

It would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the effect
of the ribbon from which Miss Gostrey's trinket depended, had he not
for the hour, at the best, been so given over to uncontrolled
perceptions. What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his
friend's velvet band somehow added, in her appearance, to the value of
every other item--to that of her smile and of the way she carried her
head, to that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her
hair? What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man's work in the
world to do with red velvet bands? He wouldn't for anything have so
exposed himself as to tell Miss Gostrey how much he liked hers, yet he
HAD none the less not only caught himself in the act--frivolous, no
doubt, idiotic, and above all unexpected--of liking it: he had in
addition taken it as a starting-point for fresh backward, fresh
forward, fresh lateral flights. The manner in which Mrs. Newsome's
throat WAS encircled suddenly represented for him, in an alien order,
almost as many things as the manner in which Miss Gostrey's was. Mrs.
Newsome wore, at operatic hours, a black silk dress--very handsome, he
knew it was "handsome"--and an ornament that his memory was able
further to identify as a ruche. He had