re difficile."

Little Bilham tossed up his chin. "Of course she's difficile--on any
lines! What else in the world ARE our Mamies--the real, the right
ones?"

"I see, I see," our friend repeated, charmed by the responsive wisdom
he had ended by so richly extracting. "Mamie is one of the real and
the right."

"The very thing itself."

"And what it comes to then," Strether went on, "is that poor awful Chad
is simply too good for her."

"Ah too good was what he was after all to be; but it was she herself,
and she herself only, who was to have made him so."

It hung beautifully together, but with still a loose end. "Wouldn't he
do for her even if he should after all break--"

"With his actual influence?" Oh little Bilham had for this enquiry the
sharpest of all his controls. "How can he 'do'--on any terms
whatever--when he's flagrantly spoiled?"

Strether could only meet the question with his passive, his receptive
pleasure. "Well, thank goodness, YOU'RE not! You remain for her to
save, and I come back, on so beautiful and full a demonstration, to my
contention of just now--that of your showing distinct signs of her
having already begun."

The most he could further say to himself--as his young friend turned
away--was that the charge encountered for the moment no renewed denial.
Little Bilham, taking his course back to the music, only shook his
good-natured ears an instant, in the manner of a terrier who has got
wet; while Strether relapsed into the sense--which had for him in these
days most of comfort--that he was free to believe in anything that from
hour to hour kept him going. He had positively motions and flutters of
this conscious hour-to-hour kind, temporary surrenders to irony, to
fancy, frequent instinctive snatches at the growing rose of
observation, constantly stronger for him, as he felt, in scent and
colour, and in which he could bury his nose even to wantonness. This
last resource was offered him, for that matter, in the very form of his
next clear perception--the vision of a prompt meeting, in the doorway
of the room, between little Bilham and brilliant Miss Barrace, who was
entering as Bilham withdrew. She had apparently put him a question, to
which he had replied by turning to indicate his late interlocutor;
toward whom, after an interrogation further aided by a resort to that
optical machinery which seemed, like her other ornaments, curious and
archaic, the genial lady, suggesting mo