on the scaffold have worn something like it. This effect
was enhanced by a small black fichu or scarf, of crape or gauze,
disposed quaintly round her bosom and now completing as by a mystic
touch the pathetic, the noble analogy. Poor Strether in fact scarce
knew what analogy was evoked for him as the charming woman, receiving
him and making him, as she could do such things, at once familiarly and
gravely welcome, moved over her great room with her image almost
repeated in its polished floor, which had been fully bared for summer.
The associations of the place, all felt again; the gleam here and
there, in the subdued light, of glass and gilt and parquet, with the
quietness of her own note as the centre--these things were at first as
delicate as if they had been ghostly, and he was sure in a moment that,
whatever he should find he had come for, it wouldn't be for an
impression that had previously failed him. That conviction held him
from the outset, and, seeming singularly to simplify, certified to him
that the objects about would help him, would really help them both. No,
he might never see them again--this was only too probably the last
time; and he should certainly see nothing in the least degree like
them. He should soon be going to where such things were not, and it
would be a small mercy for memory, for fancy, to have, in that stress,
a loaf on the shelf. He knew in advance he should look back on the
perception actually sharpest with him as on the view of something old,
old, old, the oldest thing he had ever personally touched; and he also
knew, even while he took his companion in as the feature among
features, that memory and fancy couldn't help being enlisted for her.
She might intend what she would, but this was beyond anything she could
intend, with things from far back--tyrannies of history, facts of type,
values, as the painters said, of expression--all working for her and
giving her the supreme chance, the chance of the happy, the really
luxurious few, the chance, on a great occasion, to be natural and
simple. She had never, with him, been more so; or if it was the
perfection of art it would never--and that came to the same thing--be
proved against her.

What was truly wonderful was her way of differing so from time to time
without detriment to her simplicity. Caprices, he was sure she felt,
were before anything else bad manners, and that judgement in her was by
itself a thing making more for safety of