n her meanwhile the working of this truth. It might
have been simply, as she waited, that they were now in presence
altogether of truth spreading like a flood and not for the moment to be
offered her in the mere cupful; inasmuch as who should ces dames prove
to be but persons about whom--once thus face to face with them--she
found she might from the first have told him almost everything? This
would have freely come had he taken the simple precaution of giving her
their name. There could be no better example--and she appeared to note
it with high amusement--than the way, making things out already so much
for himself, he was at last throwing precautions to the winds. 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. "You call it--your recognition--a shock?"

She gave one of her rare flickers of impatience. "It was a surprise,
an emotion. Don't be so literal. I wash my hands of her."

Poor Strether's face lengthened. "She's impossible--?"

"She's even more charming than I remembered her."

"Then what's the matter?"

She had to think how to put it. "Well, I'M impossible. It's
impossible. Everything's impossible."

He looked at her an instant. "I see where you're coming out.
Everything's possible." Their eyes had on it in fact an exchange of
some duration; after which he pursued: "Isn't it that beautiful
child?" Then as she still said nothing: "Why don't you mean to receive
her?"

Her answer in an instant rang clear. "Because I wish to keep out of
the business."

It provoked in him a weak wail. "You're going to abandon me NOW?"

"