an the last, but each with its faded and formal
air, enlarged the office of the antechamber and enriched the sense of
approach. Strether fancied them, liked them, and, passing through them
with her more slowly now, met a sharp renewal of his original
impression. He stopped, he looked back; the whole thing made a vista,
which he found high melancholy and sweet--full, once more, of dim
historic shades, of the faint faraway cannon-roar of the great Empire.
It was doubtless half the projection of his mind, but his mind was a
thing that, among old waxed parquets, pale shades of pink and green,
pseudo-classic candelabra, he had always needfully to reckon with. They
could easily make him irrelevant. The oddity, the originality, the
poetry--he didn't know what to call it--of Chad's connexion reaffirmed
for him its romantic side. "They ought to see this, you know. They
MUST."

"The Pococks?"--she looked about in deprecation; she seemed to see gaps
he didn't.

"Mamie and Sarah--Mamie in particular."

"My shabby old place? But THEIR things--!"

"Oh their things! You were talking of what will do something for you--"

"So that it strikes you," she broke in, "that my poor place may? Oh,"
she ruefully mused, "that WOULD be desperate!"

"Do you know what I wish?" he went on. "I wish Mrs. Newsome herself
could have a look."

She stared, missing a little his logic. "It would make a difference?"

Her tone was so earnest that as he continued to look about he laughed.
"It might!"

"But you've told her, you tell me--"

"All about you? Yes, a wonderful story. But there's all the
indescribable--what one gets only on the spot."

"Thank you!" she charmingly and sadly smiled.

"It's all about me here," he freely continued. "Mrs. Newsome feels
things."

But she seemed doomed always to come back to doubt. "No one feels so
much as YOU. No--not any one."

"So much the worse then for every one. It's very easy."

They were by this time in the antechamber, still alone together, as she
hadn't rung for a servant. The antechamber was high and square, grave
and suggestive too, a little cold and slippery even in summer, and with
a few old prints that were precious, Strether divined, on the walls. He
stood in the middle, slightly lingering, vaguely directing his glasses,
while, leaning against the door-post of the room, she gently pressed
her cheek to the side of the recess. "YOU would have been a friend."

"I?"--it startle