ng really of so close a communion had up to this time passed
between them as the single bright look and the three gay words (all
ostensibly of the last lightness) with which her confessed
consciousness brushed by him.

She was acquitting herself to-night as hostess, he could see, under
some supreme idea, an inspiration which was half her nerves and half an
inevitable harmony; but what he especially recognised was the character
that had already several times broken out in her and that she so oddly
appeared able, by choice or by instinctive affinity, to keep down or to
display. She was the American girl as he had originally found
her--found her at certain moments, it was true, in New York, more than
at certain others; she was the American girl as, still more than then,
he had seen her on the day of her meeting him in London and in Kate's
company. It affected him as a large though queer social resource in
her--such as a man, for instance, to his diminution, would never in the
world be able to command; and he wouldn't have known whether to see it
in an extension or a contraction of "personality," taking it as he did
most directly for a confounding extension of surface. Clearly too it
was the right thing this evening all round: that came out for him in a
word from Kate as she approached him to wreak on him a second
introduction. He had under cover of the music melted away from the lady
toward whom she had first pushed him; and there was something in her to
affect him as telling evasively a tale of their talk in the Piazza. To
what did she want to coerce him as a form of penalty for what he had
done to her there? It was thus in contact uppermost for him that he had
done something; not only caused her perfect intelligence to act in his
interest, but left her unable to get away, by any mere private effort,
from his inattackable logic. With him thus in presence, and near
him--and it had been as unmistakeable through dinner--there was no
getting away for her at all, there was less of it than ever: so she
could only either deal with the question straight, either frankly yield
or ineffectually struggle or insincerely argue, or else merely express
herself by following up the advantage she did possess. It was part of
that advantage for the hour--a brief fallacious makeweight to his
pressure--that there were plenty of things left in which he must feel
her will. They only told him, these indications, how much she was, in
such close qua