you are!" he laughed. "It's the failure of Woollett. THAT'S
general."

"The failure to enjoy," Miss Gostrey explained, "is what I mean."

"Precisely. Woollett isn't sure it ought to enjoy. If it were it
would. But it hasn't, poor thing," Strether continued, "any one to
show it how. It's not like me. I have somebody."

They had stopped, in the afternoon sunshine--constantly pausing, in
their stroll, for the sharper sense of what they saw--and Strether
rested on one of the high sides of the old stony groove of the little
rampart. He leaned back on this support with his face to the tower of
the cathedral, now admirably commanded by their station, the high
red-brown mass, square and subordinately spired and crocketed,
retouched and restored, but charming to his long-sealed eyes and with
the first swallows of the year weaving their flight all round it. Miss
Gostrey lingered near him, full of an air, to which she more and more
justified her right, of understanding the effect of things. She quite
concurred. "You've indeed somebody." And she added: "I wish you WOULD
let me show you how!"

"Oh I'm afraid of you!" he cheerfully pleaded.

She kept on him a moment, through her glasses and through his own, a
certain pleasant pointedness. "Ah no, you're not! You're not in the
least, thank goodness! If you had been we shouldn't so soon have found
ourselves here together. I think," she comfortably concluded, "you
trust me."

"I think I do!--but that's exactly what I'm afraid of. I shouldn't
mind if I didn't. It's falling thus in twenty minutes so utterly into
your hands. I dare say," Strether continued, "it's a sort of thing
you're thoroughly familiar with; but nothing more extraordinary has
ever happened to me."

She watched him with all her kindness. "That means simply that you've
recognised me--which IS rather beautiful and rare. You see what I am."
As on this, however, he protested, with a good-humoured headshake, a
resignation of any such claim, she had a moment of explanation. "If
you'll only come on further as you HAVE come you'll at any rate make
out. My own fate has been too many for me, and I've succumbed to it.
I'm a general guide--to 'Europe,' don't you know? I wait for people--I
put them through. I pick them up--I set them down. I'm a sort of
superior 'courier-maid.' I'm a companion at large. I take people, as
I've told you, about. I never sought it--it has come to me. It has
been my fa