Americans -- France -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Paris (France) -- Fiction; Psychological fiction; Young men -- Fiction
unaware that he had told her rather remarkably many for the time, but
these were not the real ones. Some of the real ones, however,
precisely, were what she knew.
They were to pass again through the hall of the inn to get into the
street, and it was here she presently checked him with a question.
“Have you looked up my name?”
He could only stop with a laugh. “Have you looked up mine?”
“Oh dear, yes—as soon as you left me. I went to the office and asked.
Hadn’t _you_ better do the same?”
He wondered. “Find out who you are?—after the uplifted young woman
there has seen us thus scrape acquaintance!”
She laughed on her side now at the shade of alarm in his amusement.
“Isn’t it a reason the more? If what you’re afraid of is the injury for
me—my being seen to walk off with a gentleman who has to ask who I am—I
assure you I don’t in the least mind. Here, however,” she continued,
“is my card, and as I find there’s something else again I have to say
at the office, you can just study it during the moment I leave you.”
She left him after he had taken from her the small pasteboard she had
extracted from her pocket-book, and he had extracted another from his
own, to exchange with it, before she came back. He read thus the simple
designation “Maria Gostrey,” to which was attached, in a corner of the
card, with a number, the name of a street, presumably in Paris, without
other appreciable identity than its foreignness. He put the card into
his waistcoat pocket, keeping his own meanwhile in evidence; and as he
leaned against the door-post he met with the smile of a straying
thought what the expanse before the hotel offered to his view. It was
positively droll to him that he should already have Maria Gostrey,
whoever she was—of which he hadn’t really the least idea—in a place of
safe keeping. He had somehow an assurance that he should carefully
preserve the little token he had just tucked in. He gazed with unseeing
lingering eyes as he followed some of the implications of his act,
asking himself if he really felt admonished to qualify it as disloyal.
It was prompt, it was possibly even premature, and there was little
doubt of the expression of face the sight of it would have produced in
a certain person. But if it was “wrong”—why then he had better not have
come out at all. At this, poor man, had he already—and even before
meeting Waymarsh—arrived. He had believed he had a limit, but the limit
had been transcended within thirty-six hours. By how long a space on
the plane of manners or even of morals, moreover, he felt still more
sharply after Maria Gostrey had come back to him and with a gay
decisive “So now—!” led him forth into the world. This counted, it
struck him as he walked beside her with his overcoat on an arm, his
umbrella under another and his personal pasteboard a little stiffly
retained between forefinger and thumb, this struck him as really, in
comparison his introduction to things. It hadn’t been “Europe” at
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