“I dare say, moreover,” she pursued with an interested gravity, “that I do, that we all do here, run too much to mere eye. But how can it be helped? We’re all looking at each other—and in the light of Paris one sees what things resemble. That’s what the light of Paris seems always to show. It’s the fault of the light of Paris—dear old light!”

“Dear Old Paris!” little Bilham echoed.

“Everything, everyone shows,” Miss Barrace went on.

“But for what they really are?” Strether asked.

“Oh, I like your Boston ‘reallys’! But sometimes—yes.”

—The Ambassadors