He thought again; then with a laugh: “Well, your daughter will help you.” And now at last he took leave of her, as he had been intending for five minutes. But she went part of the way with him, accompanying him out of the room and into the next and the next. Her noble old apartment offered a succession of three, the first two of which indeed, on entering, smaller than the last, but each with its faded and formal air, enlarged the office of the antechamber and enriched the sense of approach. Strether fancied them, liked them, and, passing through them with her more slowly now, met a sharp renewal of his original impression. He stopped, he looked back; the whole thing made a vista, which he found high melancholy and sweet—full, once more, of dim historic shades, of the faint faraway cannon-roar of the great Empire. It was doubtless half the projection of his mind, but his mind was a thing that, among old waxed parquets, pale shades of pink and green, pseudo-classic candelabra, he had always needfully to reckon with. They could easily make him irrelevant. The oddity, the originality, the poetry—he didn’t know what to call it—of Chad’s connexion reaffirmed for him its romantic side. “They ought to see this, you know. They _must_.” “The Pococks?”—she looked about in deprecation; she seemed to see gaps he didn’t. “Mamie and Sarah—Mamie in particular.” “My shabby old place? But _their_ things—!” “Oh their things! You were talking of what will do something for you—” “So that it strikes you,” she broke in, “that my poor place may? Oh,” she ruefully mused, “that _would_ be desperate!” “Do you know what I wish?” he went on. “I wish Mrs. Newsome herself could have a look.” She stared, missing a little his logic. “It would make a difference?” Her tone was so earnest that as he continued to look about he laughed. “It might!” “But you’ve told her, you tell me—” “All about you? Yes, a wonderful story. But there’s all the indescribable—what one gets only on the spot.” “Thank you!” she charmingly and sadly smiled. “It’s all about me here,” he freely continued. “Mrs. Newsome feels things.” But she seemed doomed always to come back to doubt. “No one feels so much as _you_. No—not any one.” “So much the worse then for every one. It’s very easy.” They were by this time in the antechamber, still alone together, as she hadn’t rung for a servant. The antechamber was high and square, grave and suggestive too, a little cold and slippery even in summer, and with a few old prints that were precious, Strether divined, on the walls. He stood in the middle, slightly lingering, vaguely directing his glasses, while, leaning against the door-post of the room, she gently pressed her cheek to the side of the recess. “_You_ would have been a friend.” “I?”—it startled him a little. “For the reason you say. You’re not stupid.” And then abruptly, as if bringing it out were somehow founded on that fact: “We’re marrying Jeanne.”