"Do you mean
in order to get away from me?"
Her answer had an abruptness. "Don't find me rude if I say I should
think they'd want to!"
He looked at her hard again--seemed even for an instant to have an
intensity of thought under which his colour changed. But he
smiled. "You mean after what they've done to me?"
"After what SHE has."
At this, however, with a laugh, he was all right again. "Ah but
she hasn't done it yet!"
III
He had taken the train a few days after this from a station--
as well as to a station--selected almost at random; such days,
whatever should happen, were numbered, and he had gone forth under
the impulse--artless enough, no doubt--to give the whole of one of
them to that French ruralism, with its cool special green, into
which he had hitherto looked only through the little oblong window
of the picture-frame. It had been as yet for the most part but a
land of fancy for him--the background of fiction, the medium of
art, the nursery of letters; practically as distant as Greece, but
practically also well-nigh as consecrated. Romance could weave
itself, for Strether's sense, out of elements mild enough; and even
after what he had, as he felt, lately "been through," he could
thrill a little at the chance of seeing something somewhere that
would remind him of a certain small Lambinet that had charmed him,
long years before, at a Boston dealer's and that he had quite
absurdly never forgotten.
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