THE   AMBASSADORS
unseeing, lingering eyes as he followed some of the implications
of his act, asking himself if he really felt admonished to qualify
it as disloyal.   It was prompt, it was possibly even premature, and
there was little doubt of the expression of face the sight of it
would have produced in a certain person.   But if it were    wrong  -
why then he had better not have come out at all.   At this, poor man,
had he already-and even before meeting Waymarsh-arnved.   He
had believed he had a limit, but the limit had been transcended
within thirty-six hours.   By how long a space on the plane of man-
ners or even of morals, moreover, he felt still more sharply after
Maria Gostrey had come back to him and with a gay, decisive
" So now—!" led him forth into the world.   This counted, it struck
him as he walked beside her with his overcoat on an arm, his um-
brella under another   and his personal pasteboard a little stiffly
retained between forefinger and thumb-this struck him as really,
in comparison, his introduction to things.   It hadn't been    Europe
at Liverpool, no-not even in the dreadful, delightful, impressive
streets the night before-to the extent his present companion made
it so.    She had not yet done that so much so as when, after their
walk had lasted a few minutes and he had had time to wonder if
a couple of sidelong glances from her meant that he had best have
put on gloves, she almost pulled him up with an amused challenge.
" But why—fondly as it's so easy to imagine 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 pre-
pared tribute had affected her as a deviation in one of those direc-
tions he couldn't yet measure, and that she supposed this emblem
to be still the one he had received from her. He handed her, ac-
cordingly, 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,
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