. There at any rate it IS; so that
you won't be able, if anything happens, to say I've not been straight
with you."

"I see"--and Miss Gostrey looked really interested in the point he had
made. "But what do you think of as happening?"

Though he wasn't shy--which was rather anomalous--Strether gazed about
without meeting her eyes; a motion that was frequent with him in talk,
yet of which his words often seemed not at all the effect. "Why that
you should find me too hopeless." With which they walked on again
together while she answered, as they went, that the most "hopeless" of
her countryfolk were in general precisely those she liked best. All
sorts of other pleasant small things-small things that were yet large
for him--flowered in the air of the occasion, but the bearing of the
occasion itself on matters still remote concerns us too closely to
permit us to multiply our illustrations. Two or three, however, in
truth, we should perhaps regret to lose. The tortuous wall--girdle,
long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by
careful civic hands--wanders in narrow file between parapets smoothed
by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate
or a bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer
twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows
of gables, views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled
English town and ordered English country. Too deep almost for words
was the delight of these things to Strether; yet as deeply mixed with
it were certain images of his inward picture. He had trod this walks
in the far-off time, at twenty-five; but that, instead of spoiling it,
only enriched it for present feeling and marked his renewal as a thing
substantial enough to share. It was with Waymarsh he should have
shared it, and he was now accordingly taking from him something that
was his due. He looked repeatedly at his watch, and when he had done
so for the fifth time Miss Gostrey took him up.

"You're doing something that you think not right."

It so touched the place that he quite changed colour and his laugh grew
almost awkward. "Am I enjoying it as much as THAT?"

"You're not enjoying it, I think, so much as you ought."

"I see"--he appeared thoughtfully to agree. "Great is my privilege."

"Oh it's not your privilege! It has nothing to do with me. It has to
do with yourself. Your failure's general."

"Ah there