He had spoken in the tone of talk for talk’s sake, and yet with an obscure truth lurking in the loose folds; a circumstance presently not without its effect on his young friend. Little Bilham’s eyes rested on him a moment with some intensity; then suddenly, as if everything had cleared up, he gave a happy laugh. It seemed to say that if pretending, or even trying, or still even hoping, to be able to care for Mamie would be of use, he was all there for the job. “I’ll do anything in the world for you!” “Well,” Strether smiled, “anything in the world is all I want. I don’t know anything that pleased me in her more,” he went on, “than the way that, on my finding her up there all alone, coming on her unawares and feeling greatly for her being so out of it, she knocked down my tall house of cards with her instant and cheerful allusion to the next young man. It was somehow so the note I needed—her staying at home to receive him.” “It was Chad of course,” said little Bilham, “who asked the next young man—I like your name for me!—to call.” “So I supposed—all of which, thank God, is in our innocent and natural manners. But do you know,” Strether asked, “if Chad knows—?” And then as this interlocutor seemed at a loss: “Why where she has come out.” Little Bilham, at this, met his face with a conscious look—it was as if, more than anything yet, the allusion had penetrated. “Do you know yourself?” Strether lightly shook his head. “There I stop. Oh, odd as it may appear to you, there _are_ things I don’t know. I only got the sense from her of something very sharp, and yet very deep down, that she was keeping all to herself. That is I had begun with the belief that she _had_ kept it to herself; but face to face with her there I soon made out that there was a person with whom she would have shared it. I had thought she possibly might with _me_—but I saw then that I was only half in her confidence. When, turning to me to greet me—for she was on the balcony and I had come in without her knowing it—she showed me she had been expecting _you_ and was proportionately disappointed, I got hold of the tail of my conviction. Half an hour later I was in possession of all the rest of it. You know what has happened.” He looked at his young friend hard—then he felt sure. “For all you say, you’re up to your eyes. So there you are.” Little Bilham after an instant pulled half round. “I assure you she hasn’t told me anything.” “Of course she hasn’t. For what do you suggest that I suppose her to take you? But you’ve been with her every day, you’ve seen her freely, you’ve liked her greatly—I stick to that—and you’ve made your profit of it. You know what she has been through as well as you know that she has dined here to-night—which must have put her, by the way, through a good deal more.” The young man faced this blast; after which he pulled round the rest of the way. “I haven’t in the least said she hasn’t been nice to me. But she’s proud.”