"Ah but she hasn't done it yet!" III He had taken the train a few days after this from a station--as well as to a station--selected almost at random; such days, whatever should happen, were numbered, and he had gone forth under the impulse--artless enough, no doubt--to give the whole of one of them to that French ruralism, with its cool special green, into which he had hitherto looked only through the little oblong window of the picture-frame.

It had been as yet for the most part but a land of fancy for him--the background of fiction, the medium of art, the nursery of letters; practically as distant as Greece, but practically also well-nigh as consecrated.

Romance could weave itself, for Strether's sense, out of elements mild enough; and even after what he had, as he felt, lately "been through," he could thrill a little at the chance of seeing something somewhere that would remind him of a certain small Lambinet that had charmed him, long years before, at a Boston dealer's and that he had quite absurdly never forgotten.

It had been offered, he remembered, at a price he had been instructed to believe the lowest ever named for a Lambinet, a price he had never felt so poor as on having to recognise, all the same, as beyond a dream of possibility.

He had dreamed--had turned and twisted possibilities for an hour: it had been the only adventure of his life in connexion with the purchase of a work of art.