cked him with a question.
"Have you looked up my name?"

He could only stop with a laugh. "Have you looked up mine?"

"Oh dear, yes--as soon as you left me. I went to the office and asked.
Hadn't YOU better do the same?"

He wondered. "Find out who you are?--after the uplifted young woman
there has seen us thus scrape acquaintance!"

She laughed on her side now at the shade of alarm in his amusement.
"Isn't it a reason the more? If what you're afraid of is the injury
for me--my being seen to walk off with a gentleman who has to ask who I
am--I assure you I don't in the least mind. Here, however," she
continued, "is my card, and as I find there's something else again I
have to say at the office, you can just study it during the moment I
leave you."

She left him after he had taken from her the small pasteboard she had
extracted from her pocket-book, and he had extracted another from his
own, to exchange with it, before she came back. He read thus the
simple designation "Maria Gostrey," to which was attached, in a corner
of the card, with a number, the name of a street, presumably in Paris,
without other appreciable identity than its foreignness. He put the
card into his waistcoat pocket, keeping his own meanwhile in evidence;
and as he leaned against the door-post he met with the smile of a
straying thought what the expanse before the hotel offered to his view.
It was positively droll to him that he should already have Maria
Gostrey, whoever she was--of which he hadn't really the least idea--in
a place of safe keeping. He had somehow an assurance that he should
carefully preserve the little token he had just tucked in. He gazed
with unseeing lingering eyes as he followed some of the implications of
his act, asking himself if he really felt admonished to qualify it as
disloyal. It was prompt, it was possibly even premature, and there was
little doubt of the expression of face the sight of it would have
produced in a certain person. But if it was "wrong"--why then he had
better not have come out at all. At this, poor man, had he
already--and even before meeting Waymarsh--arrived. He had believed he
had a limit, but the limit had been transcended within thirty-six
hours. By how long a space on the plane of manners or even of morals,
moreover, he felt still more sharply after Maria Gostrey had come back
to him and with a gay decisive "So now--!" led him forth into the
world. This counted, it struck him as