layed his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms, sufficiently rapt in
reverence; but what his thought had finally bumped against was the
question of where, among packed accumulations, so multiform a wedge
would be able to enter. Were seventy volumes in red-and-gold to be
perhaps what he should most substantially have to show at Woollett as
the fruit of his mission? It was a possibility that held him a
minute--held him till he happened to feel that some one, unnoticed, had
approached him and paused. Turning, he saw that a lady stood there as
for a greeting, and he sprang up as he next took her, securely, for
Madame de Vionnet, who appeared to have recognised him as she passed
near him on her way to the door. She checked, quickly and gaily, a
certain confusion in him, came to meet it, turned it back, by an art of
her own; the confusion having threatened him as he knew her for the
person he had lately been observing. She was the lurking figure of the
dim chapel; she had occupied him more than she guessed; but it came to
him in time, luckily, that he needn't tell her and that no harm, after
all, had been done. She herself, for that matter, straightway showing
she felt their encounter as the happiest of accidents, had for him a
"You come here too?" that despoiled surprise of every awkwardness.

"I come often," she said. "I love this place, but I'm terrible, in
general, for churches. The old women who live in them all know me; in
fact I'm already myself one of the old women. It's like that, at all
events, that I foresee I shall end." Looking about for a chair, so
that he instantly pulled one nearer, she sat down with him again to the
sound of an "Oh, I like so much your also being fond--!"

He confessed the extent of his feeling, though she left the object
vague; and he was struck with the tact, the taste of her vagueness,
which simply took for granted in him a sense of beautiful things. He
was conscious of how much it was affected, this sense, by something
subdued and discreet in the way she had arranged herself for her
special object and her morning walk--he believed her to have come on
foot; the way her slightly thicker veil was drawn--a mere touch, but
everything; the composed gravity of her dress, in which, here and
there, a dull wine-colour seemed to gleam faintly through black; the
charming discretion of her small compact head; the quiet note, as she
sat, of her folded, grey-gloved hands. It was, to Strether's