Strether wondered, desiring justice. “They seem—all the women—very harmonious.”
“Oh in closer quarters they come out!” And then, while Strether was aware of fearing closer quarters, though giving himself again to the harmonies, “Well,” little Bilham went on, “it is at the worst rather good, you know. If you like it, you feel it, this way, that shows you’re not in the least out. But you always know things,” he handsomely added, “immediately.”
Strether liked it and felt it only too much; so “I say, don’t lay traps for me!” he rather helplessly murmured.
“Well,” his companion returned, “he’s wonderfully kind to us.”
“To us Americans you mean?”
“Oh no—he doesn’t know anything about that. That’s half the battle here—that you can never hear politics. We don’t talk them. I mean to poor young wretches of all sorts. And yet it’s always as charming as this; it’s as if, by something in the air, our squalor didn’t show. It puts us all back—into the last century.”
“I’m afraid,” Strether said, amused, “that it puts me rather forward: oh ever so far!”
“Into the next? But isn’t that only,” little Bilham asked, “because you’re really of the century before?”
“The century before the last? Thank you!” Strether laughed. “If I ask you about some of the ladies it can’t be then that I may hope, as such a specimen of the rococo, to please them.”
“On the contrary they adore—we all adore here—the rococo, and where is there a better setting for it than the whole thing, the pavilion and the garden, together? There are lots of people with collections,” little Bilham smiled as he glanced round. “You’ll be secured!”