as to have. You've plenty; that's the great
thing; you're, as I say, damn you, so happily and hatefully young.
Don't at any rate miss things out of stupidity. Of course I don't take
you for a fool, or I shouldn't be addressing you thus awfully. Do what
you like so long as you don't make MY mistake. For it was a mistake.
Live!" ... Slowly and sociably, with full pauses and straight
dashes, Strether had so delivered himself; holding little Bilham from
step to step deeply and gravely attentive. The end of all was that the
young man had turned quite solemn, and that this was a contradiction of
the innocent gaiety the speaker had wished to promote. He watched for
a moment the consequence of his words, and then, laying a hand on his
listener's knee and as if to end with the proper joke: "And now for
the eye I shall keep on you!"

"Oh but I don't know that I want to be, at your age, too different from
you!"

"Ah prepare while you're about it," said Strether, "to be more amusing."

Little Bilham continued to think, but at last had a smile. "Well, you
ARE amusing--to ME."

"Impayable, as you say, no doubt. But what am I to myself?" Strether
had risen with this, giving his attention now to an encounter that, in
the middle of the garden, was in the act of taking place between their
host and the lady at whose side Madame de Vionnet had quitted him. This
lady, who appeared within a few minutes to have left her friends,
awaited Gloriani's eager approach with words on her lips that Strether
couldn't catch, but of which her interesting witty face seemed to give
him the echo. He was sure she was prompt and fine, but also that she
had met her match, and he liked--in the light of what he was quite sure
was the Duchess's latent insolence--the good humour with which the
great artist asserted equal resources. Were they, this pair, of the
"great world"?--and was he himself, for the moment and thus related to
them by his observation, IN it? Then there was something in the great
world covertly tigerish, which came to him across the lawn and in the
charming air as a waft from the jungle. Yet it made him admire most of
the two, made him envy, the glossy male tiger, magnificently marked.
These absurdities of the stirred sense, fruits of suggestion ripening
on the instant, were all reflected in his next words to little Bilham.
"I know--if we talk of that--whom I should enjoy being like!"

Little Bilham followed his eyes; but then as