nition at any rate appeared to prevail on her
own side as well--which would only have added to the mystery. All she
now began by saying to him nevertheless was that, having chanced to
catch his enquiry, she was moved to ask, by his leave, if it were
possibly a question of Mr. Waymarsh of Milrose Connecticut--Mr.
Waymarsh the American lawyer.

"Oh yes," he replied, "my very well-known friend. He's to meet me
here, coming up from Malvern, and I supposed he'd already have arrived.
But he doesn't come till later, and I'm relieved not to have kept him.
Do you know him?" Strether wound up.

It wasn't till after he had spoken that he became aware of how much
there had been in him of response; when the tone of her own rejoinder,
as well as the play of something more in her face--something more, that
is, than its apparently usual restless light--seemed to notify him.
"I've met him at Milrose--where I used sometimes, a good while ago, to
stay; I had friends there who were friends of his, and I've been at his
house. I won't answer for it that he would know me," Strether's new
acquaintance pursued; "but I should be delighted to see him. Perhaps,"
she added, "I shall--for I'm staying over." She paused while our
friend took in these things, and it was as if a good deal of talk had
already passed. They even vaguely smiled at it, and Strether presently
observed that Mr. Waymarsh would, no doubt, be easily to be seen. This,
however, appeared to affect the lady as if she might have advanced too
far. She appeared to have no reserves about anything. "Oh," she said,
"he won't care!"--and she immediately thereupon remarked that she
believed Strether knew the Munsters; the Munsters being the people he
had seen her with at Liverpool.

But he didn't, it happened, know the Munsters well enough to give the
case much of a lift; so that they were left together as if over the
mere laid table of conversation. Her qualification of the mentioned
connexion had rather removed than placed a dish, and there seemed
nothing else to serve. Their attitude remained, none the less, that of
not forsaking the board; and the effect of this in turn was to give
them the appearance of having accepted each other with an absence of
preliminaries practically complete. They moved along the hall
together, and Strether's companion threw off that the hotel had the
advantage of a garden. He was aware by this time of his strange
inconsequence: he had shirked the