it itself; and his fancy had in fact, before he knew it,
begun so to stray and embroider that he finally found himself, absent
and extravagant, sitting with the child in a friendly silence. Only by
this time he felt her flutter to have fortunately dropped and that she
was more at her ease. She trusted him, liked him, and it was to come
back to him afterwards that she had told him things. She had dipped
into the waiting medium at last and found neither surge nor
chill--nothing but the small splash she could herself make in the
pleasant warmth, nothing but the safety of dipping and dipping again.
At the end of the ten minutes he was to spend with her his
impression--with all it had thrown off and all it had taken in--was
complete. She had been free, as she knew freedom, partly to show him
that, unlike other little persons she knew, she had imbibed that ideal.
She was delightfully quaint about herself, but the vision of what she
had imbibed was what most held him. It really consisted, he was soon
enough to feel, in just one great little matter, the fact that,
whatever her nature, she was thoroughly--he had to cast about for the
word, but it came--bred. He couldn't of course on so short an
acquaintance speak for her nature, but the idea of breeding was what
she had meanwhile dropped into his mind. He had never yet known it so
sharply presented. Her mother gave it, no doubt; but her mother, to
make that less sensible, gave so much else besides, and on neither of
the two previous occasions, extraordinary woman, Strether felt,
anything like what she was giving tonight. Little Jeanne was a case,
an exquisite case of education; whereas the Countess, whom it so amused
him to think of by that denomination, was a case, also exquisite,
of--well, he didn't know what.

"He has wonderful taste, notre jeune homme": this was what Gloriani
said to him on turning away from the inspection of a small picture
suspended near the door of the room. The high celebrity in question
had just come in, apparently in search of Mademoiselle de Vionnet, but
while Strether had got up from beside her their fellow guest, with his
eye sharply caught, had paused for a long look. The thing was a
landscape, of no size, but of the French school, as our friend was glad
to feel he knew, and also of a quality--which he liked to think he
should also have guessed; its frame was large out of proportion to the
canvas, and he had never seen a person look at a