Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/17

Rh your clinging to it—don't you put it away? Or if it's an inconvenience to you to carry it, one is often glad to have one's card back. The fortune one spends in them!"

Then he saw both that his way of marching with his own prepared tribute had affected her as a deviation in one of those directions he couldn't yet measure, and that she supposed this emblem to be still the one he had received from her. He handed her, accordingly, the card, as if in restitution, but as soon as she had it she felt the difference and, with her eyes on it, stopped short for apology. "I like," she observed, "your name."

"Oh," he answered, "you won't have heard of it!" Yet he had his reasons for not being sure but that she perhaps might.

Ah, it was but too visible! She read it over again as one who had never seen it. "'Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether'"—she sounded it almost as freely as if a stranger were in question. She repeated, however, that she liked it—"particularly the Lewis Lambert. It's the name of a novel of Balzac's."

"Oh, I know that!" said Strether.

"But the novel's an awfully bad one."

"I know that too," Strether smiled. To which he added with an irrelevance that was only superficial: "I come from Woollett Massachusetts." It made her for some reason—the irrelevance or whatever—laugh. Balzac had described many cities, but he had not described Woollett Massachusetts.

"You say that," she returned, "as if you wanted one immediately to know the worst."

"Oh, I think it's a thing," he said, "that you must already have made out. I feel it so that I certainly must look it, speak it, and, as people say there, 'act' it. It sticks out of me, and you knew, surely, for yourself, as soon as you looked at me."

"The worst, you mean?"

"Well, the fact of where I come from. There, at any rate, it is; so that you won't be able, if anything happens, to say that I've not been straight with you."

"I see"—and Miss Gostrey looked really interested in