Liverpool no—not even in the dreadful delightful impressive streets the night before—to the extent his present companion made it so. She hadn’t yet done that so much as when, after their walk had lasted a few minutes and he had had time to wonder if a couple of sidelong glances from her meant that he had best have put on gloves she almost pulled him up with an amused challenge. “But why—fondly as it’s so easy to imagine your clinging to it—don’t you put it away? Or if it’s an inconvenience to you to carry it, one’s often glad to have one’s card back. The fortune one spends in them!” Then he saw both that his way of marching with his own prepared tribute had affected her as a deviation in one of those directions he couldn’t yet measure, and that she supposed this emblem to be still the one he had received from her. He accordingly handed her the card as if in restitution, but as soon as she had it she felt the difference and, with her eyes on it, stopped short for apology. “I like,” she observed, “your name.” “Oh,” he answered, “you won’t have heard of it!” Yet he had his reasons for not being sure but that she perhaps might. Ah it was but too visible! She read it over again as one who had never seen it. “‘Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether’”—she sounded it almost as freely as for any stranger. She repeated however that she liked it—“particularly the Lewis Lambert. It’s the name of a novel of Balzac’s.” “Oh I know that!” said Strether. “But the novel’s an awfully bad one.” “I know that too,” Strether smiled. To which he added with an irrelevance that was only superficial: “I come from Woollett Massachusetts.” It made her for some reason—the irrelevance or whatever—laugh. Balzac had described many cities, but hadn’t described Woollett Massachusetts. “You say that,” she returned, “as if you wanted one immediately to know the worst.” “Oh I think it’s a thing,” he said, “that you must already have made out. I feel it so that I certainly must look it, speak it, and, as people say there, ‘act’ it. It sticks out of me, and you knew surely for yourself as soon as you looked at me.” “The worst, you mean?” “Well, the fact of where I come from. There at any rate it _is_; so that you won’t be able, if anything happens, to say I’ve not been straight with you.” “I see”—and Miss Gostrey looked really interested in the point he had made. “But what do you think of as happening?”