They were neither more nor less, she and the child's mother, than old school-friends--friends who had scarcely met for years but whom this unlooked-for chance had brought together with a rush.

It was a relief, Miss Gostrey hinted, to feel herself no longer groping; she was unaccustomed to grope and as a general thing, he might well have seen, made straight enough for her clue.

With the one she had now picked up in her hands there need be at least no waste of wonder.

"She's coming to see me--that's for YOU," Strether's counsellor continued; "but I don't require it to know where I am." The waste of wonder might be proscribed; but Strether, characteristically, was even by this time in the immensity of space.
"By which you mean that you know where SHE is ?" She just hesitated.

"I mean that if she comes to see me I shall--now that I've pulled myself round a bit after the shock--not be at home." Strether hung poised.