never seen it. "'Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether'"--she sounded it
almost as freely as for any stranger. She repeated however that she
liked it--"particularly the Lewis Lambert. It's the name of a novel
of Balzac's."

"Oh I know that!" said Strether.

"But the novel's an awfully bad one."

"I know that too," Strether smiled. To which he added with an
irrelevance that was only superficial: "I come from Woollett
Massachusetts." It made her for some reason--the irrelevance or
whatever--laugh. Balzac had described many cities, but hadn't
described Woollett Massachusetts. "You say that," she returned,
"as if you wanted one immediately to know the worst."

"Oh I think it's a thing," he said, "that you must already have
made out. I feel it so that I certainly must look it, speak it,
and, as people say there, 'act' it. It sticks out of me, and you
knew surely for yourself as soon as you looked at me."

"The worst, you mean?"

"Well, the fact of where I come from. There at any rate it IS; so
that you won't be able, if anything happens, to say I've not been
straight with you."

"I see"--and Miss Gostrey looked really interested in the point he
had made. "But what do you think of as happening?"