easant and homely, almost rustic, of a plash and a
clatter of sabots from some coach-house on the other side of the court.
Madame de Vionnet, while Strether sat there, wasn't to shift her
posture by an inch. "I don't think you seriously believe in what you're
doing," she said; "but all the same, you know, I'm going to treat you
quite as if I did."

"By which you mean," Strether directly replied, "quite as if you
didn't! I assure you it won't make the least difference with me how
you treat me."

"Well," she said, taking that menace bravely and philosophically
enough, "the only thing that really matters is that you shall get on
with me."

"Ah but I don't!" he immediately returned.

It gave her another pause; which, however, she happily enough shook
off. "Will you consent to go on with me a little--provisionally--as if
you did?"

Then it was that he saw how she had decidedly come all the way; and
there accompanied it an extraordinary sense of her raising from
somewhere below him her beautiful suppliant eyes. He might have been
perched at his door-step or at his window and she standing in the road.
For a moment he let her stand and couldn't moreover have spoken. It
had been sad, of a sudden, with a sadness that was like a cold breath
in his face. "What can I do," he finally asked, "but listen to you as
I promised Chadwick?"

"Ah but what I'm asking you," she quickly said, "isn't what Mr. Newsome
had in mind." She spoke at present, he saw, as if to take courageously
ALL her risk. "This is my own idea and a different thing."

It gave poor Strether in truth--uneasy as it made him too--something of
the thrill of a bold perception justified. "Well," he answered kindly
enough, "I was sure a moment since that some idea of your own had come
to you."

She seemed still to look up at him, but now more serenely. "I made out
you were sure--and that helped it to come. So you see," she continued,
"we do get on."

"Oh but it appears to me I don't at all meet your request. How can I
when I don't understand it?"

"It isn't at all necessary you should understand; it will do quite well
enough if you simply remember it. Only feel I trust you--and for
nothing so tremendous after all. Just," she said with a wonderful
smile, "for common civility."

Strether had a long pause while they sat again face to face, as they
had sat, scarce less conscious, before the poor lady had crossed the
stream. She was the poor lady for S