But she went part of the way with him, accompanying him out of the room and into the next and the next.

Her noble old apartment offered a succession of three, the first two of which indeed, on entering, smaller than the last, but each with its faded and formal air, enlarged the office of the antechamber and enriched the sense of approach.

Strether fancied them, liked them, and, passing through them with her more slowly now, met a sharp renewal of his original impression.

He stopped, he looked back; the whole thing made a vista, which he found high melancholy and sweet--full, once more, of dim historic shades, of the faint faraway cannon-roar of the great Empire.
It was doubtless half the projection of his mind, but his mind was a thing that, among old waxed parquets, pale shades of pink and green, pseudo-classic candelabra, he had always needfully to reckon with.

They could easily make him irrelevant.