The waste of wonder might be proscribed; but Strether, characteristically, was even by this time in the immensity of space. “By which you mean that you know where _she_ is?” She just hesitated. “I mean that if she comes to see me I shall—now that I’ve pulled myself round a bit after the shock—not be at home.” Strether hung poised. “You call it—your recognition—a shock?” She gave one of her rare flickers of impatience. “It was a surprise, an emotion. Don’t be so literal. I wash my hands of her.” Poor Strether’s face lengthened. “She’s impossible—?” “She’s even more charming than I remembered her.” “Then what’s the matter?” She had to think how to put it. “Well, _I’m_ impossible. It’s impossible. Everything’s impossible.” He looked at her an instant. “I see where you’re coming out. Everything’s possible.” Their eyes had on it in fact an exchange of some duration; after which he pursued: “Isn’t it that beautiful child?” Then as she still said nothing: “Why don’t you mean to receive her?” Her answer in an instant rang clear. “Because I wish to keep out of the business.” It provoked in him a weak wail. “You’re going to abandon me _now?_” “No, I’m only going to abandon _her_. She’ll want me to help her with you. And I won’t.” “You’ll only help me with her? Well then—!” Most of the persons previously gathered had, in the interest of tea, passed into the house, and they had the gardens mainly to themselves. The shadows were long, the last call of the birds, who had made a home of their own in the noble interspaced quarter, sounded from the high trees in the other gardens as well, those of the old convent and of the old _hôtels_; it was as if our friends had waited for the full charm to come out. Strether’s impressions were still present; it was as if something had happened that “nailed” them, made them more intense; but he was to ask himself soon afterwards, that evening, what really _had_ happened—conscious as he could after all remain that for a gentleman taken, and taken the first time, into the “great world,” the world of ambassadors and duchesses, the items made a meagre total. It was nothing new to him, however, as we know, that a man might have—at all events such a man as he—an amount of experience out of any proportion to his adventures; so that, though it was doubtless no great adventure to sit on there with Miss Gostrey and hear about Madame de Vionnet, the hour, the picture, the immediate, the recent, the possible—as well as the communication itself, not a note of which failed to reverberate—only gave the moments more of the taste of history.