He had been touched in the hall and on the staircase as by the faint odd brush of a suggestion that what was before his eyes during certain seconds had already been before them and was playing upon his attention, was quite _seeking_ to, even though in the lightest, softest tug at it, by the recall of a similar case or similar conditions. Just so when the door above was opened to him and he heard himself announced the first flush of his impression was that of stepping straight into some chapter of some other story--other than his own of that moment, since he was by the evidence of every felt pulse up to his eyes in a situation, which glimmered upon him in the light, the bright strong light, of an aspect recognised; before failing of that effect indeed under his next full rush of perception. Wasn't it a place known, the great square wainscotted room, like several perhaps in which he had seen a sort of life led at home, only fairer and finer than those; with handsome objects and four or five portraits rather largely interspaced, and a daylight freshness in possession, the air at once of an outer clearness, of an emptier world looking in, and of windows unembarrassed to match, multiplied panes, one would say, but withal a prim spare drapery? It wouldn't have been that the world was emptier than he had known it beyond the sea, but that the scene itself, as it appeared for the ten seconds that challenged memory and comparison, would have worn its other face with a difference, confessing somehow to thicker shadows and heavier presences, the submission to a longer assault. Such matter of record, even on the part of a young man of the highest sensibility, is at the best elusive enough, however, and Ralph's general awareness was at once swallowed up in the particular positive certainty that nobody in all his experience in the least answered to the young lady seated near one of the windows before a piece of fine tense canvas framed and mounted on slim wooden legs, through which she was in the act of drawing a long filament of silk with the finest arm in the world raised as high as her head. He himself so far answered to something in her own intelligence that at sight and sound of him she slowly got up from before her work, with never a hint of interruption or confusion, and smiled across at him as if knowing all about him. She kept in this movement her arm still aloft--she might have been just balancing herself or wishing not to loosen her stitch; he was to remember afterwards how the crook of her little finger, in the raised hand, caught his eye at the distance, and how this helped him in a manner at once to take in that the arm itself, its sleeve shortened to very near the shoulder, was of the most beautiful rounded shape. That light of her knowing all about him doubtless helped to flood his own mind with the assurance immediately needed: he felt at this stage, in the most wonderful way,