ful
closeness of the rooms. He had observed that they must go out again to
breathe; and it was as if their common consciousness, while they passed
into another part, was that of persons who, infinitely engaged
together, had been startled and were trying to look natural. It was
probably while they were so occupied--as the young man subsequently
reconceived--that they had stumbled upon his little New York friend. He
thought of her for some reason as little, though she was of about
Kate's height, to which, any more than to any other felicity in his
mistress, he had never applied the diminutive.

What was to be in the retrospect more distinct to him was the process
by which he had become aware that Kate's acquaintance with her was
greater than he had gathered. She had written of it in due course as a
new and amusing one, and he had written back that he had met over
there, and that he much liked, the young person; whereupon she had
answered that he must find out about her at home. Kate, in the event,
however, had not returned to that, and he had of course, with so many
things to find out about, been otherwise taken up. Little Miss Theale's
individual history was not stuff for his newspaper; besides which,
moreover, he was seeing but too many little Miss Theales. They even
went so far as to impose themselves as one of the groups of social
phenomena that fell into the scheme of his public letters. For this
group in especial perhaps--the irrepressible, the supereminent young
persons--his best pen was ready. Thus it was that there could come back
to him in London, an hour or two after their luncheon with the American
pair, the sense of a situation for which Kate hadn't wholly prepared
him. Possibly indeed as marked as this was his recovered perception
that preparations, of more than one kind, had been exactly what, both
yesterday and to-day, he felt her as having in hand. That appearance in
fact, if he dwelt on it, so ministered to apprehension as to require
some brushing away. He shook off the suspicion to some extent, on their
separating first from their hostesses and then from each other, by the
aid of a long and rather aimless walk. He was to go to the office
later, but he had the next two or three hours, and he gave himself as a
pretext that he had eaten much too much. After Kate had asked him to
put her into a cab--which, as an announced, a resumed policy on her
part, he found himself deprecating--he stood a while by a cor