"And the way he sits, too, in the corner of my room, only looking at my visitors very hard and as if he wanted to start something! They wonder what he does want to start.

But he's wonderful," Miss Barrace once more insisted.

"He has never started anything yet." It presented him none the less, in truth, to her actual friends, who looked at each other in intelligence, with frank amusement on Bilham's part and a shade of sadness on Strether's.

Strether's sadness sprang--for the image had its grandeur--from his thinking how little he himself was wrapt in his blanket, how little, in marble halls, all too oblivious of the Great Father, he resembled a really majestic aboriginal.

But he had also another reflexion.