r several minutes, quite as with something new
to think of and as if the bearings of the possibility of Sarah had been
superseded. For frankly, yes, it HAD bearings thus to find the girl in
solitary possession. There was something in it that touched him to a
point not to have been reckoned beforehand, something that softly but
quite pressingly spoke to him, and that spoke the more each time he
paused again at the edge of the balcony and saw her still unaware. Her
companions were plainly scattered; Sarah would be off somewhere with
Waymarsh and Chad off somewhere with Jim. Strether didn't at all
mentally impute to Chad that he was with his "good friend"; he gave him
the benefit of supposing him involved in appearances that, had he had
to describe them--for instance to Maria--he would have conveniently
qualified as more subtle. It came to him indeed the next thing that
there was perhaps almost an excess of refinement in having left Mamie
in such weather up there alone; however she might in fact have
extemporised, under the charm of the Rue de Rivoli, a little makeshift
Paris of wonder arid fancy. Our friend in any case now recognised--and
it was as if at the recognition Mrs. Newsome's fixed intensity had
suddenly, with a deep audible gasp, grown thin and vague--that day
after day he had been conscious in respect to his young lady of
something odd and ambiguous, yet something into which he could at last
read a meaning. It had been at the most, this mystery, an
obsession--oh an obsession agreeable; and it had just now fallen into
its place as at the touch of a spring. It had represented the
possibility between them of some communication baffled by accident and
delay--the possibility even of some relation as yet unacknowledged.

There was always their old relation, the fruit of the Woollett years;
but that--and it was what was strangest--had nothing whatever in common
with what was now in the air. As a child, as a "bud," and then again
as a flower of expansion, Mamie had bloomed for him, freely, in the
almost incessantly open doorways of home; where he remembered her as
first very forward, as then very backward--for he had carried on at one
period, in Mrs. Newsome's parlours (oh Mrs. Newsome's phases and his
own!) a course of English Literature re-enforced by exams and teas--and
once more, finally, as very much in advance. But he had kept no great
sense of points of contact; it not being in the nature of things at