He left it to Miss Gostrey to name,
with the fine full bravado as it almost struck him, of her
"Mr. Waymarsh!" what was to have been, what--he more than ever felt
as his short stare of suspended welcome took things in--would have
been, but for herself, his doom. It was already upon him even at
that distance--Mr. Waymarsh was for HIS part joyless.
II
He had none the less to confess to this friend that evening that he
knew almost nothing about her, and it was a deficiency that
Waymarsh, even with his memory refreshed by contact, by her own
prompt and lucid allusions and enquiries, by their having publicly
partaken of dinner in her company, and by another stroll, to which
she was not a stranger, out into the town to look at the cathedral
by moonlight--it was a blank that the resident of Milrose, though
admitting acquaintance with the Munsters, professed himself unable
to fill. He had no recollection of Miss Gostrey, and two or three
questions that she put to him about those members of his circle
had, to Strether's observation, the same effect he himself had
already more directly felt--the effect of appearing to place all
knowledge, for the time, on this original woman's side. It
interested him indeed to mark the limits of any such relation for
her with his friend as there could possibly be a question of, and
it particularly struck him that they were to be marked altogether
in Waymarsh's quarter.
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