Henry James

“ Oh, I'm not a little girl. I'm a big, battered, blowsy one. I don't care," Mamie laughed, "what happens."
Strether had a pause while he wondered if it mightn't happen that he should give her the pleasure of hearing from him that he found her nicer than he had really dreamed—a pause that ended when he had said to himself that, so far as it at all mattered for her, she had in fact perhaps already made this out. He risked accordingly a different question, though conscious, as soon as he had spoken, that he seemed to place it in relation to her last speech. ”

“ Newsome's original ambassador. She was in his interest, and not in Sarah's; and some sign of that was precisely what he had been feeling in her, these last days, as imminent. Finally placed, in Paris, in immediate presence of the situation and of the hero of it—by whom Strether was incapable of meaning anyone but Chad—she had accomplished, and really in a manner all unexpected to herself, a change of base; deep, still things had come to pass within her, and by the time she had grown sure of them Strether had become aware of the little drama. ”

“ The child had given sharpness, above all, to his sense of the flight of time: it was but the day before yesterday that he had tripped up on her hoop, yet his experience of remarkable women—destined, it would seem, remarkably to grow—felt itself ready, this afternoon, quite braced itself, to include her. ”

“ If quiet dignity, almost more than matronly, with voluminous, too voluminous clothes, was the effect she proposed to produce, that was an ideal one could like in her when once one had got into relation. ”

“ It was as near as they came to saying that she was probably in love with Chad; but it was quite near enough for what Strether wanted, which was to be confirmed in his certitude that, whether in love or not, she appealed to something large and easy in the girl before him. Mamie would be fat, too fat, at thirty; but she would always be the person who, at the present sharp hour, had been disinterestedly tender. ”

“ It was moreover something in which they all took an interest; the strength of their interest was in truth just the reason of her prudence. All this then, for five minutes, was vivid to Strether, and it put before him that, poor child, she had now but her prudence to amuse her. That, for a pretty girl in Paris, struck him with a rush as a sorry state ”