ed
hands. "Now I do know why he's not banal. But I do prevent him all
the same--and if you saw what he sometimes selects--from buying. I
save him hundreds and hundreds. I only take flowers."

"Flowers?" Strether echoed again with a rueful reflexion. How many
nosegays had her present converser sent?

"Innocent flowers," she pursued, "as much as he likes. And he sends me
splendours; he knows all the best places--he has found them for
himself; he's wonderful."

"He hasn't told them to me," her friend smiled, "he has a life of his
own." But Strether had swung back to the consciousness that for
himself after all it never would have done. Waymarsh hadn't Mrs.
Waymarsh in the least to consider, whereas Lambert Strether had
constantly, in the inmost honour of his thoughts, to consider Mrs.
Newsome. He liked moreover to feel how much his friend was in the real
tradition. Yet he had his conclusion. "WHAT a rage it is!" He had
worked it out. "It's an opposition."

She followed, but at a distance. "That's what I feel. Yet to what?"

"Well, he thinks, you know, that I'VE a life of my own. And I haven't!"

"You haven't?" She showed doubt, and her laugh confirmed it. "Oh, oh,
oh!"

"No--not for myself. I seem to have a life only for other people."

"Ah for them and WITH them! Just now for instance with--"

"Well, with whom?" he asked before she had had time to say.

His tone had the effect of making her hesitate and even, as he guessed,
speak with a difference. "Say with Miss Gostrey. What do you do for
HER?" It really made him wonder. "Nothing at all!"

III

Madame de Vionnet, having meanwhile come in, was at present close to
them, and Miss Barrace hereupon, instead of risking a rejoinder, became
again with a look that measured her from top to toe all mere
long-handled appreciative tortoise-shell. She had struck our friend,
from the first of her appearing, as dressed for a great occasion, and
she met still more than on either of the others the conception
reawakened in him at their garden-party, the idea of the femme du monde
in her habit as she lived. Her bare shoulders and arms were white and
beautiful; the materials of her dress, a mixture, as he supposed, of
silk and crape, were of a silvery grey so artfully composed as to give
an impression of warm splendour; and round her neck she wore a collar
of large old emeralds, the green note of which was more dimly repeated,
at other points of h