He easily enough felt that it gave him away, but what in truth had everything done but that?
It had been all very well to think at moments that he was holding her nose down and that he had coerced her: what had he by this time done but let her practically see that he accepted their relation?
What was their relation moreover--though light and brief enough in form as yet--but whatever she might choose to make it?
Nothing could prevent her--certainly he couldn't--from making it pleasant.

At the back of his head, behind everything, was the sense that she was--there, before him, close to him, in vivid imperative form--one of the rare women he had so often heard of, read of, thought of, but never met, whose very presence, look, voice, the mere contemporaneous FACT of whom, from the moment it was at all presented, made a relation of mere recognition.

That was not the kind of woman he had ever found Mrs.Newsome, a contemporaneous fact who had been distinctly slow to establish herself; and at present, confronted with Madame de Vionnet, he felt the simplicity of his original impression of Miss Gostrey.

She certainly had been a fact of rapid growth; but the world was wide, each day was more and more a new lesson.

There were at any rate even among the stranger ones relations and relations.