It came over him for instance that Miss Gostrey looked perhaps like Mary Stuart: Lambert Strether had a candour of fancy which could rest for an instant gratified in such an antithesis.

It came over him that never before--no, literally never--had a lady dined with him at a public place before going to the play.

The publicity of the place was just, in the matter, for Strether, the rare strange thing; it affected him almost as the achievement of privacy might have affected a man of a different experience.

He had married, in the far-away years, so young as to have missed the time natural in Boston for taking girls to the Museum; and it was absolutely true of hint that--even after the close of the period of conscious detachment occupying the centre of his life, the grey middle desert of the two deaths, that of his wife and that, ten years later, of his boy--he had never taken any one anywhere.

It came over him in especial--though the monition had, as happened, already sounded, fitfully gleamed, in other forms--that the business he had come out on hadn't yet been so brought home to him as by the sight of the people about him.