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.
"You've all of you here so much visual sense that you've somehow
all 'run' to it. There are moments when it strikes one that you
haven't any other."
"Any moral," little Bilham explained, watching serenely, across
the garden, the several femmes du monde. "But Miss Barrace has a
moral distinction," he kindly continued; speaking as if for Strether's
benefit not less than for her own.
"HAVE you?" Strether, scarce knowing what he was about, asked of
her almost eagerly.
"Oh not a distinction"--she was mightily amused at his tone--"Mr. Bilham's
too good. But I think I may say a sufficiency. Yes, a sufficiency.
Have you supposed strange things of me?"--and she fixed him again,
through all her tortoise-shell, with the droll interest of it.
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