"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 for any stranger.

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.