: so grand is it not to understand. He's wonderful."

"He is indeed," Strether conceded. "He wouldn't tell me of this
affair--only said he had an engagement; but with such a gloom, you must
let me insist, as if it had been an engagement to be hanged. Then
silently and secretly he turns up here with you. Do you call THAT
'lasting'?"

"Oh I hope it's lasting!" Miss Barrace said. "But he only, at the
best, bears with me. He doesn't understand--not one little scrap. He's
delightful. He's wonderful," she repeated.

"Michelangelesque!"--little Bilham completed her meaning. "He IS a
success. Moses, on the ceiling, brought down to the floor;
overwhelming, colossal, but somehow portable."

"Certainly, if you mean by portable," she returned, "looking so well in
one's carriage. He's too funny beside me in his comer; he looks like
somebody, somebody foreign and famous, en exil; so that people
wonder--it's very amusing--whom I'm taking about. I show him Paris,
show him everything, and he never turns a hair. He's like the Indian
chief one reads about, who, when he comes up to Washington to see the
Great Father, stands wrapt in his blanket and gives no sign. I might
be the Great Father--from the way he takes everything." She was
delighted at this hit of her identity with that personage--it fitted so
her character; she declared it was the title she meant henceforth to
adopt. "And the way he sits, too, in the corner of my room, only
looking at my visitors very hard and as if he wanted to start
something! They wonder what he does want to start. 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 f