e stillness, in
the shade of one of the chapels, he had two or three times noticed as
he made, and made once more, his slow circuit. She wasn't
prostrate--not in any degree bowed, but she was strangely fixed, and
her prolonged immobility showed her, while he passed and paused, as
wholly given up to the need, whatever it was, that had brought her
there. She only sat and gazed before her, as he himself often sat; but
she had placed herself, as he never did, within the focus of the
shrine, and she had lost herself, he could easily see, as he would only
have liked to do. She was not a wandering alien, keeping back more than
she gave, but one of the familiar, the intimate, the fortunate, for
whom these dealings had a method and a meaning. She reminded our
friend--since it was the way of nine tenths of his current impressions
to act as recalls of things imagined--of some fine firm concentrated
heroine of an old story, something he had heard, read, something that,
had he had a hand for drama, he might himself have written, renewing
her courage, renewing her clearness, in splendidly-protected
meditation. Her back, as she sat, was turned to him, but his
impression absolutely required that she should be young and
interesting, and she carried her head moreover, even in the sacred
shade, with a discernible faith in herself, a kind of implied
conviction of consistency, security, impunity. But what had such a
woman come for if she hadn't come to pray? Strether's reading of such
matters was, it must be owned, confused; but he wondered if her
attitude were some congruous fruit of absolution, of "indulgence." He
knew but dimly what indulgence, in such a place, might mean; yet he
had, as with a soft sweep, a vision of how it might indeed add to the
zest of active rites. All this was a good deal to have been denoted by
a mere lurking figure who was nothing to him; but, the last thing
before leaving the church, he had the surprise of a still deeper
quickening.

He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in the
museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft, to
reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms of
Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once in a way
to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes, a
miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the shopman, at
the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked, doubtless, while he
p