his association indeed with the
ruche, but it was rather imperfectly romantic. He had once said to the
wearer--and it was as "free" a remark as he had ever made to her--that
she looked, with her ruff and other matters, like Queen Elizabeth; and
it had after this in truth been his fancy that, as a consequence of
that tenderness and an acceptance of the idea, the form of this special
tribute to the "frill" had grown slightly more marked. The connexion,
as he sat there and let his imagination roam, was to strike him as
vaguely pathetic; but there it all was, and pathetic was doubtless in
the conditions the best thing it could possibly be. It had assuredly
existed at any rate; for it seemed now to come over him that no
gentleman of his age at Woollett could ever, to a lady of Mrs.
Newsome's, which was not much less than his, have embarked on such a
simile.

All sorts of things in fact now seemed to come over him, comparatively
few of which his chronicler can hope for space to mention. It came
over him for instance that Miss Gostrey looked perhaps like Mary
Stuart: Lambert Strether had a candour of fancy which could rest for
an instant gratified in such an antithesis. It came over him that
never before--no, literally never--had a lady dined with him at a
public place before going to the play. The publicity of the place was
just, in the matter, for Strether, the rare strange thing; it affected
him almost as the achievement of privacy might have affected a man of a
different experience. He had married, in the far-away years, so young
as to have missed the time natural in Boston for taking girls to the
Museum; and it was absolutely true of hint that--even after the close
of the period of conscious detachment occupying the centre of his life,
the grey middle desert of the two deaths, that of his wife and that,
ten years later, of his boy--he had never taken any one anywhere. It
came over him in especial--though the monition had, as happened,
already sounded, fitfully gleamed, in other forms--that the business he
had come out on hadn't yet been so brought home to him as by the sight
of the people about him. She gave him the impression, his friend, at
first, more straight than he got it for himself--gave it simply by
saying with off-hand illumination: "Oh yes, they're types!"--but after
he had taken it he made to the full his own use of it; both while he
kept silence for the four acts and while he talked in the interva