that he would know me," Strether's new acquaintance pursued; "but I
should be delighted to see him. Perhaps," she added, "I shall--for
I'm staying over." She paused while our friend took in these
things, and it was as if a good deal of talk had already passed.
They even vaguely smiled at it, and Strether presently observed
that Mr. Waymarsh would, no doubt, be easily to be seen. This,
however, appeared to affect the lady as if she might have advanced
too far. She appeared to have no reserves about anything. "Oh," she
said, "he won't care!"--and she immediately thereupon remarked that
she believed Strether knew the Munsters; the Munsters being the
people he had seen her with at Liverpool.

But he didn't, it happened, know the Munsters well enough to give
the case much of a lift; so that they were left together as if over
the mere laid table of conversation. Her qualification of the
mentioned connexion had rather removed than placed a dish, and
there seemed nothing else to serve. Their attitude remained, none
the less, that of not forsaking the board; and the effect of this
in turn was to give them the appearance of having accepted each
other with an absence of preliminaries practically complete. They
moved along the hall together, and Strether's companion threw off
that the hotel had the advantage of a garden. He was aware by this
time of his strange inconsequence: he had shirked the intimacies of
the steamer and had muffled the shock of Waymarsh only to find
himself forsaken, in this sudden case, both of avoidance and of
caution. He passed, under this unsought protection and before he
had so much as gone up to his room, into the garden of the hotel,
and at the end of ten minutes had agreed to meet there again, as
soon as he should have made himself tidy, the dispenser of such
good assurances. He wanted to look at the town, and they would