nd reported on him. It was strange, though it
might well be less so than his own behaviour appeared at Woollett. It
was at any rate significant, and what WAS remarkable was the way his
friend's nature and manner put on for him, through this very drop of
demonstration, a greater intensity. It struck him really that he had
never so lived with her as during this period of her silence; the
silence was a sacred hush, a finer clearer medium, in which her
idiosyncrasies showed. He walked about with her, sat with her, drove
with her and dined face-to-face with her--a rare treat "in his life,"
as he could perhaps have scarce escaped phrasing it; and if he had
never seen her so soundless he had never, on the other hand, felt her
so highly, so almost austerely, herself: pure and by the vulgar
estimate "cold," but deep devoted delicate sensitive noble. Her
vividness in these respects became for him, in the special conditions,
almost an obsession; and though the obsession sharpened his pulses,
adding really to the excitement of life, there were hours at which, to
be less on the stretch, he directly sought forgetfulness. He knew it
for the queerest of adventures--a circumstance capable of playing such
a part only for Lambert Strether--that in Paris itself, of all places,
he should find this ghost of the lady of Woollett more importunate than
any other presence.

When he went back to Maria Gostrey it was for the change to something
else. And yet after all the change scarcely operated for he talked to
her of Mrs. Newsome in these days as he had never talked before. He
had hitherto observed in that particular a discretion and a law;
considerations that at present broke down quite as if relations had
altered. They hadn't REALLY altered, he said to himself, so much as
that came to; for if what had occurred was of course that Mrs. Newsome
had ceased to trust him, there was nothing on the other hand to prove
that he shouldn't win back her confidence. It was quite his present
theory that he would leave no stone unturned to do so; and in fact if
he now told Maria things about her that he had never told before this
was largely because it kept before him the idea of the honour of such a
woman's esteem. His relation with Maria as well was, strangely enough,
no longer quite the same; this truth--though not too
disconcertingly--had come up between them on the renewal of their
meetings. It was all contained in what she had then almost imm