to think. "Is it really an 'order' from you?--that I
shall take the job? WILL you give yourself up?"

Poor Strether heaved his sigh. "If I only could! But that's the deuce
of it--that I never can. No--I can't."

She wasn't, however, discouraged. "But you want to at least?"

"Oh unspeakably!"

"Ah then, if you'll try!"--and she took over the job, as she had called
it, on the spot. "Trust me!" she exclaimed, and the action of this, as
they retraced their steps, was presently to make him pass his hand into
her arm in the manner of a benign dependent paternal old person who
wishes to be "nice" to a younger one. If he drew it out again indeed
as they approached the inn this may have been because, after more talk
had passed between them, the relation of age, or at least of
experience--which, for that matter, had already played to and fro with
some freedom--affected him as incurring a readjustment. It was at all
events perhaps lucky that they arrived in sufficiently separate fashion
within range of the hotel-door. The young lady they had left in the
glass cage watched as if she had come to await them on the threshold.
At her side stood a person equally interested, by his attitude, in
their return, and the effect of the sight of whom was instantly to
determine for Strether another of those responsive arrests that we have
had so repeatedly to note. He left it to Miss Gostrey to name, with
the fine full bravado as it almost struck him, of her "Mr. Waymarsh!"
what was to have been, what--he more than ever felt as his short stare
of suspended welcome took things in--would have been, but for herself,
his doom. It was already upon him even at that distance--Mr. Waymarsh
was for HIS part joyless.

II

He had none the less to confess to this friend that evening that he
knew almost nothing about her, and it was a deficiency that Waymarsh,
even with his memory refreshed by contact, by her own prompt and lucid
allusions and enquiries, by their having publicly partaken of dinner in
her company, and by another stroll, to which she was not a stranger,
out into the town to look at the cathedral by moonlight--it was a blank
that the resident of Milrose, though admitting acquaintance with the
Munsters, professed himself unable to fill. He had no recollection of
Miss Gostrey, and two or three questions that she put to him about
those members of his circle had, to Strether's observation, the same
effect he himself had alre