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known for years; such a deep taste of change
and of having above all for the moment nobody and nothing to
consider, as promised already, if headlong hope were not too
foolish, to colour his adventure with cool success. There were
people on the ship with whom he had easily consorted—so far as ease
could up to now be imputed to him—and who for the most part plunged
straight into the current that set from the landing-stage to
London; there were others who had invited him to a tryst at the inn
and had even invoked his aid for a "look round" at the beauties of
Liverpool; but he had stolen away from every one alike, had kept no
appointment and renewed no acquaintance, had been indifferently
aware of the number of persons who esteemed themselves fortunate in
being, unlike himself, "met," and had even independently,
unsociably, alone, without encounter or relapse and by mere quiet
evasion, given his afternoon and evening to the immediate and the
sensible. They formed a qualified draught of Europe, an afternoon
and an evening on the banks of the Mersey, but such as it was he
took his potion at least undiluted. He winced a little, truly, at
the thought that Waymarsh might be already at Chester; he reflected
that, should he have to describe himself there as having "got in"
so early, it would be difficult to make the interval look
particularly eager; but he was like a man who, elatedly finding in
his pocket more money than usual, handles it a while and idly and
pleasantly chinks it before addressing himself to the business of
spending. That he was prepared to be vague to Waymarsh about the
hour of the ship's touching, and that he both wanted extremely to
see him and enjoyed extremely the duration of delay—these things,
it is to be conceived, were early signs in him that his relation to
his actual errand might prove none of the simplest. He was
burdened, poor Strether—it had better be confessed at the
outset—with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was
detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.
    After the young woman in the glass cage had held up to him
across her counter the pale-pink leaflet bearing his friend's name,
which she neatly pronounced, he turned away to find himself, in the
hall, facing a lady who met his eyes as with an intention suddenly
determined, and whose features—not freshly young, not markedly
fine, but on happy terms with each other—came back to him as from a
recent vision. For a moment they stood confronted; then the moment
placed her: he had noticed her the day before, noticed her at his
previous inn, where—again in the hall—she had been briefly engaged
with some people of his own ship's company. Nothing had actually
passed between them, and he would as little have been able to say
what had been the sign of her face for him on the first occasion as
to name the ground of his present recognition. Recognition at any
rate appeared to prevail on her own side as well—which would only
have added to the mystery. All she now began by saying to him
nevertheless was that, having chanced to catch his enquiry, she was
moved to ask, by his leave, if it were possibly a question of Mr.
Waymarsh of Milrose Connecticut—Mr. Waymarsh the American
lawyer.
    "Oh yes," he replied, "my very well-known friend. He's to meet
me here, coming up from Malvern, and I supposed he'd already have
arrived. But he doesn't come till later, and I'm relieved not to
have kept him. Do you know him?" Strether wound up.
    It wasn't till after he had spoken that he became aware of how
much there had been in him of response; when the tone of her own
rejoinder, as well as the play of something more in her
face—something more, that is, than its apparently usual restless
light—seemed to notify him. "I've met him at Milrose—where I used
sometimes, a good while ago, to stay; I had friends there who were
friends of his, and I've been at his house. I won't answer for it
that he would know me," Strether's new