er how it has told on you."

Strether took this more lightly. "Oh I jam down the pedal too!"

"Well," she lucidly returned, "we must from this moment bear on it
together with all our might." And she forged ahead. "Have they money?"

But it was as if, while her energetic image still held him, her enquiry
fell short. "Mrs. Newsome," he wished further to explain, "hasn't
moreover your courage on the question of contact. If she had come it
would have been to see the person herself."

"The woman? Ah but that's courage."

"No--it's exaltation, which is a very different thing. Courage," he,
however, accommodatingly threw out, "is what YOU have."

She shook her head. "You say that only to patch me up--to cover the
nudity of my want of exaltation. I've neither the one nor the other.
I've mere battered indifference. I see that what you mean," Miss
Gostrey pursued, "is that if your friend HAD come she would take great
views, and the great views, to put it simply, would be too much for
her."

Strether looked amused at her notion of the simple, but he adopted her
formula. "Everything's too much for her."

"Ah then such a service as this of yours--"

"Is more for her than anything else? Yes--far more. But so long as it
isn't too much for ME--!"

"Her condition doesn't matter? Surely not; we leave her condition out;
we take it, that is, for granted. I see it, her condition, as behind
and beneath you; yet at the same time I see it as bearing you up."

"Oh it does bear me up!" Strether laughed.

"Well then as yours bears ME nothing more's needed." With which she
put again her question. "Has Mrs. Newsome money?"

This time he heeded. "Oh plenty. That's the root of the evil. There's
money, to very large amounts, in the concern. Chad has had the free
use of a great deal. But if he'll pull himself together and come home,
all the same, he'll find his account in it."

She had listened with all her interest. "And I hope to goodness you'll
find yours!"

"He'll take up his definite material reward," said Strether without
acknowledgement of this. "He's at the parting of the ways. He can
come into the business now--he can't come later."

"Is there a business?"

"Lord, yes--a big brave bouncing business. A roaring trade."

"A great shop?"

"Yes--a workshop; a great production, a great industry. The concern's
a manufacture--and a manufacture that, if it's only properly looked
after, may well be on th