he walked beside her with his
overcoat on an arm, his umbrella under another and his personal
pasteboard a little stiffly retained between forefinger and thumb, this
struck him as really, in comparison his introduction to things. It
hadn't been "Europe" at Liverpool no--not even in the dreadful
delightful impressive streets the night before--to the extent his
present companion made it so. She hadn't yet done that so much as
when, after their walk had lasted a few minutes and he had had time to
wonder if a couple of sidelong glances from her meant that he had best
have put on gloves she almost pulled him up with an amused challenge.
"But why--fondly as it's so easy to imagine your clinging to it--don't
you put it away? Or if it's an inconvenience to you to carry it, one's
often glad to have one's card back. The fortune one spends in them!"

Then he saw both that his way of marching with his own prepared tribute
had affected her as a deviation in one of those directions he couldn't
yet measure, and that she supposed this emblem to be still the one he
had received from her. He accordingly handed her the card as if in
restitution, but as soon as she had it she felt the difference and,
with her eyes on it, stopped short for apology. "I like," she observed,
"your name."

"Oh," he answered, "you won't have heard of it!" Yet he had his reasons
for not being sure but that she perhaps might.

Ah it was but too visible! She read it over again as one who had never
seen it. "'Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether'"--she sounded it almost as
freely as for any stranger. She repeated however that she liked
it--"particularly the Lewis Lambert. It's the name of a novel of
Balzac's."

"Oh I know that!" said Strether.

"But the novel's an awfully bad one."

"I know that too," Strether smiled. To which he added with an
irrelevance that was only superficial: "I come from Woollett
Massachusetts." It made her for some reason--the irrelevance or
whatever--laugh. Balzac had described many cities, but hadn't
described Woollett Massachusetts. "You say that," she returned, "as if
you wanted one immediately to know the worst."

"Oh I think it's a thing," he said, "that you must already have made
out. I feel it so that I certainly must look it, speak it, and, as
people say there, 'act' it. It sticks out of me, and you knew surely
for yourself as soon as you looked at me."

"The worst, you mean?"

"Well, the fact of where I come from