passed, that Chad's host presently
met them while the tall bird-haunted trees, all of a twitter with the
spring and the weather, and the high party-walls, on the other side of
which grave hotels stood off for privacy, spoke of survival,
transmission, association, a strong indifferent persistent order. The
day was so soft that the little party had practically adjourned to the
open air but the open air was in such conditions all a chamber of
state. Strether had presently the sense of a great convent, a convent
of missions, famous for he scarce knew what, a nursery of young
priests, of scattered shade, of straight alleys and chapel-bells, that
spread its mass in one quarter; he had the sense of names in the air,
of ghosts at the windows, of signs and tokens, a whole range of
expression, all about him, too thick for prompt discrimination.

This assault of images became for a moment, in the address of the
distinguished sculptor, almost formidable: Gloriani showed him, in
such perfect confidence, on Chad's introduction of him, a fine worn
handsome face, a face that was like an open letter in a foreign tongue.
With his genius in his eyes, his manners on his lips, his long career
behind him and his honours and rewards all round, the great artist, in
the course of a single sustained look and a few words of delight at
receiving him, affected our friend as a dazzling prodigy of type.
Strether had seen in museums--in the Luxembourg as well as, more
reverently, later on, in the New York of the billionaires--the work of
his hand; knowing too that after an earlier time in his native Rome he
had migrated, in mid-career, to Paris, where, with a personal lustre
almost violent, he shone in a constellation: all of which was more
than enough to crown him, for his guest, with the light, with the
romance, of glory. Strether, in contact with that element as he had
never yet so intimately been, had the consciousness of opening to it,
for the happy instant, all the windows of his mind, of letting this
rather grey interior drink in for once the sun of a clime not marked in
his old geography. He was to remember again repeatedly the medal-like
Italian face, in which every line was an artist's own, in which time
told only as tone and consecration; and he was to recall in especial,
as the penetrating radiance, as the communication of the illustrious
spirit itself, the manner in which, while they stood briefly, in
welcome and response, face to f