ibly forgotten, in the light overcoat he carried on his
arm; yet the essence of the act was no more than the impulse to gain
time. Nothing could have been odder than Strether's sense of himself
as at that moment launched in something of which the sense would be
quite disconnected from the sense of his past and which was literally
beginning there and then. It had begun in fact already upstairs and
before the dressing glass that struck him as blocking further, so
strangely, the dimness of the window of his dull bedroom; begun with a
sharper survey of the elements of Appearance than he had for a long
time been moved to make. He had during those moments felt these
elements to be not so much to his hand as he should have liked, and
then had fallen back on the thought that they were precisely a matter
as to which help was supposed to come from what he was about to do. He
was about to go up to London, so that hat and necktie might wait. What
had come as straight to him as a ball in a well-played game--and caught
moreover not less neatly--was just the air, in the person of his
friend, of having seen and chosen, the air of achieved possession of
those vague qualities and quantities that collectively figured to him
as the advantage snatched from lucky chances. Without pomp or
circumstance, certainly, as her original address to him, equally with
his own response, had been, he would have sketched to himself his
impression of her as: "Well, she's more thoroughly civilized--!" If
"More thoroughly than WHOM?" would not have been for him a sequel to
this remark, that was just by reason of his deep consciousness of the
bearing of his comparison.

The amusement, at all events, of a civilisation intenser was
what--familiar compatriot as she was, with the full tone of the
compatriot and the rattling link not with mystery but only with dear
dyspeptic Waymarsh--she appeared distinctly to promise. His pause
while he felt in his overcoat was positively the pause of confidence,
and it enabled his eyes to make out as much of a case for her, in
proportion, as her own made out for himself. She affected him as
almost insolently young; but an easily carried five-and-thirty could
still do that. She was, however, like himself marked and wan; only it
naturally couldn't have been known to him how much a spectator looking
from one to the other might have discerned that they had in common. It
wouldn't for such a spectator have been altogether in