"Our hostess moreover at this moment came out of the house, bearing a coffee-pot and three cups on a neat little tray. I took from her eyes, as she approached us, a brief but intense appeal--the mute expression, as I felt, conveyed in the hardest little look she had yet addressed me, of her longing to know what as a man of the world in general and of the French world in particular, I thought of these allied forces now so encamped on the stricken field of her life. I could only 'act,' however, as they said at North Verona, quite impenetrably--only make no answering sign. I couldn't intimate, much less could I frankly utter, my inward sense of the Countess's probable past, with its measure of her virtue, value and accomplishments, and of the limits of consideration to which she could properly pretend. I couldn't give my friend a hint of how I myself personally 'saw' her interesting pensioner--whether as the runaway wife of a too-jealous hairdresser or of a too-morose pastry-cook, say; whether as a very small bourgeoise, in fine, who had vitiated her case beyond patching up, or even some character of the nomadic sort, less edifying still. I couldn't let in, by the jog of a shutter, as it were, a hard informing ray and then, washing my hands of the business, turn my back for ever. I could on the contrary but save the situation, my own at least, for the moment, by pulling myself together with a master hand and appearing to ignore everything but that the dreadful person between us _was_ a 'grande dame.'" Anyone genuinely interested in "the how and the whence and the why these intenser lights of experience come into being and insist on shining," will find it a profitable exercise to read and compare the old and the new versions of any of the novels or tales first published during the 'seventies or 'eighties. Such a reader will be qualified to decide for himself between the opinion of a bold young critic that "all the works have been subjected to a revision which in several cases, notably _Daisy Miller_ and _Four Meetings_, amounts to their ruin," and their writer's confidence that "I shouldn't have breathed upon the old catastrophes and accidents, the old wounds and mutilations and disfigurements wholly in vain. . . . I have prayed that the finer air of the better form may sufficiently seem to hang about them and gild them over--at least for readers, however few, at all _curious_ of questions of air and form." VI