s
handsome, though she's not of course, with a son of twenty-eight and a
daughter of thirty, in her very first youth. She married, however,
extremely young."

"And is wonderful," Miss Gostrey asked, "for her age?"

Strether seemed to feel with a certain disquiet the pressure of it. "I
don't say she's wonderful. Or rather," he went on the next moment, "I
do say it. It's exactly what she IS--wonderful. But I wasn't thinking
of her appearance," he explained--"striking as that doubtless is. I
was thinking--well, of many other things." He seemed to look at these
as if to mention some of them; then took, pulling himself up, another
turn. "About Mrs. Pocock people may differ."

"Is that the daughter's name--'Pocock'?"

"That's the daughter's name," Strether sturdily confessed.

"And people may differ, you mean, about HER beauty?"

"About everything."

"But YOU admire her?"

He gave his friend a glance as to show how he could bear this "I'm
perhaps a little afraid of her."

"Oh," said Miss Gostrey, "I see her from here! You may say then I see
very fast and very far, but I've already shown you I do. The young man
and the two ladies," she went on, "are at any rate all the family?"

"Quite all. His father has been dead ten years, and there's no
brother, nor any other sister. They'd do," said Strether, "anything in
the world for him."

"And you'd do anything in the world for THEM?"

He shifted again; she had made it perhaps just a shade too affirmative
for his nerves. "Oh I don't know!"

"You'd do at any rate this, and the 'anything' they'd do is represented
by their MAKING you do it."

"Ah they couldn't have come--either of them. They're very busy people
and Mrs. Newsome in particular has a large full life. She's moreover
highly nervous--and not at all strong."

"You mean she's an American invalid?"

He carefully distinguished. "There's nothing she likes less than to be
called one, but she would consent to be one of those things, I think,"
he laughed, "if it were the only way to be the other."

"Consent to be an American in order to be an invalid?"

"No," said Strether, "the other way round. She's at any rate delicate
sensitive high-strung. She puts so much of herself into everything--"

Ah Maria knew these things! "That she has nothing left for anything
else? Of course she hasn't. To whom do you say it? High-strung?
Don't I spend my life, for them, jamming down the pedal? I see
moreov