Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/15

Rh an opposition between them which he might well have shrunk from submitting to if he had fully suspected it. So far as he did suspect it he was, on the contrary, after a momentary shake of his consciousness, as pleasantly passive as might be. He really had a sort of sense of what she knew. He had quite the sense that she knew things he didn't, and though this was a concession that, in general, he found not easy to make to women, he made it now as good-humouredly as if it lifted a burden. His eyes were so quiet behind his eternal nippers that they might almost have been absent without changing his face, which took its expression mainly, and not least its stamp of sensibility, from other sources, surface and grain and form. He joined his guide in an instant, and he then felt that she had profited still better than he by his having been, for the moments just mentioned, so at the disposal of her intelligence. She knew even intimate things about him that he had not yet told her and perhaps never would. He was not unaware that he had told her rather remarkably many for the time, but these were not the real ones. Some of the real ones, however, precisely, were what she knew.

They were to pass again through the hall of the inn to get into the street, and it was here, presently, that she checked him with a question. "Have you looked up my name?"

He could only stop with a laugh. "Have you looked up mine?"

"Oh dear, yes—as soon as you left me. I went to the office and asked. Hadn't you better do the same?"

He wondered. "Find out who you are, after the uplifted young woman there has seen us thus scrape acquaintance?"

She laughed on her side now at the shade of alarm in his amusement. "Isn't it a reason the more? If what you're afraid of is the injury for me—my being seen to walk off with a gentleman who has to ask who I am—I assure you I don't in the least mind. Here, however," she continued, "is my card, and as I find there is something else again I have to say at the office, you can just study it during the moment I leave you."

She left him after he had taken from her the small