The fortune one spends in them!"
Then he saw both that his way of marching with his own prepared
tribute had affected her as a deviation in one of those directions
he couldn't yet measure, and that she supposed this emblem to be
still the one he had received from her. He accordingly handed her
the card as if in restitution, but as soon as she had it she felt
the difference and, with her eyes on it, stopped short for apology.
"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. Balzac had described many cities, but hadn't
described Woollett Massachusetts.
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