intimacies of the steamer and had
muffled the shock of Waymarsh only to find himself forsaken, in this
sudden case, both of avoidance and of caution. He passed, under this
unsought protection and before he had so much as gone up to his room,
into the garden of the hotel, and at the end of ten minutes had agreed
to meet there again, as soon as he should have made himself tidy, the
dispenser of such good assurances. He wanted to look at the town, and
they would forthwith look together. It was almost as if she had been
in possession and received him as a guest. Her acquaintance with the
place presented her in a manner as a hostess, and Strether had a rueful
glance for the lady in the glass cage. It was as if this personage had
seen herself instantly superseded.

When in a quarter of an hour he came down, what his hostess saw, what
she might have taken in with a vision kindly adjusted, was the lean,
the slightly loose figure of a man of the middle height and something
more perhaps than the middle age--a man of five-and-fifty, whose most
immediate signs were a marked bloodless brownness of face, a thick dark
moustache, of characteristically American cut, growing strong and
falling low, a head of hair still abundant but irregularly streaked
with grey, and a nose of bold free prominence, the even line, the high
finish, as it might have been called, of which, had a certain effect of
mitigation. A perpetual pair of glasses astride of this fine ridge,
and a line, unusually deep and drawn, the prolonged pen-stroke of time,
accompanying the curve of the moustache from nostril to chin, did
something to complete the facial furniture that an attentive observer
would have seen catalogued, on the spot, in the vision of the other
party to Strether's appointment. She waited for him in the garden, the
other party, drawing on a pair of singularly fresh soft and elastic
light gloves and presenting herself with a superficial readiness which,
as he approached her over the small smooth lawn and in the watery
English sunshine, he might, with his rougher preparation, have marked
as the model for such an occasion. She had, this lady, a perfect plain
propriety, an expensive subdued suitability, that her companion was not
free to analyse, but that struck him, so that his consciousness of it
was instantly acute, as a quality quite new to him. Before reaching
her he stopped on the grass and went through the form of feeling for
something, poss