ubtless not to know till afterwards, on
turning them over in thought, of how many elements his impression was
composed; but he none the less felt, as he sat with the charming girl,
the signal growth of a confidence. For she WAS charming, when all was
said--and none the less so for the visible habit and practice of
freedom and fluency. She was charming, he was aware, in spite of the
fact that if he hadn't found her so he would have found her something
he should have been in peril of expressing as "funny." Yes, she was
funny, wonderful Mamie, and without dreaming it; she was bland, she was
bridal--with never, that he could make out as yet, a bridegroom to
support it; she was handsome and portly and easy and chatty, soft and
sweet and almost disconcertingly reassuring. She was dressed, if we
might so far discriminate, less as a young lady than as an old one--had
an old one been supposable to Strether as so committed to vanity; the
complexities of her hair missed moreover also the looseness of youth;
and she had a mature manner of bending a little, as to encourage and
reward, while she held neatly together in front of her a pair of
strikingly polished hands: the combination of all of which kept up
about her the glamour of her "receiving," placed her again perpetually
between the windows and within sound of the ice-cream plates, suggested
the enumeration of all the names, all the Mr. Brookses and Mr.
Snookses, gregarious specimens of a single type, she was happy to
"meet." But if all this was where she was funny, and if what was
funnier than the rest was the contrast between her beautiful benevolent
patronage--such a hint of the polysyllabic as might make her something
of a bore toward middle age--and her rather flat little voice, the
voice, naturally, unaffectedly yet, of a girl of fifteen; so Strether,
none the less, at the end of ten minutes, felt in her a quiet dignity
that pulled things bravely together. If quiet dignity, almost more
than matronly, with voluminous, too voluminous clothes, was the effect
she proposed to produce, that was an ideal one could like in her when
once one had got into relation. The great thing now for her visitor
was that this was exactly what he had done; it made so extraordinary a
mixture of the brief and crowded hour. It was the mark of a relation
that he had begun so quickly to find himself sure she was, of all
people, as might have been said, on the side and of the party of Mrs.
Newso