ing to America diminish the particular strain?
Wouldn't it seem rather to add to it?"

"Out of sight out of mind!" his companion laughed. Then more bravely:
"Wouldn't distance lessen the torment?" But before Strether could
reply, "The thing is, you see, Chad ought to marry!" he wound up.

Strether, for a little, appeared to think of it. "If you talk of
torments you don't diminish mine!" he then broke out. The next moment
he was on his feet with a question. "He ought to marry whom?"

Little Bilham rose more slowly. "Well, some one he CAN--some
thoroughly nice girl."

Strether's eyes, as they stood together, turned again to Jeanne. "Do
you mean HER?"

His friend made a sudden strange face. "After being in love with her
mother? No."

"But isn't it exactly your idea that he ISn't in love with her mother?"

His friend once more had a pause. "Well, he isn't at any rate in love
with Jeanne."

"I dare say not."

"How CAN he be with any other woman?"

"Oh that I admit. But being in love isn't, you know, here"--little
Bilham spoke in friendly reminder--"thought necessary, in strictness,
for marriage."

"And what torment--to call a torment--can there ever possibly be with a
woman like that?" As if from the interest of his own question Strether
had gone on without hearing. "Is it for her to have turned a man out
so wonderfully, too, only for somebody else?" He appeared to make a
point of this, and little Bilham looked at him now. "When it's for
each other that people give things up they don't miss them." Then he
threw off as with an extravagance of which he was conscious: "Let them
face the future together!"

Little Bilham looked at him indeed. "You mean that after all he
shouldn't go back?"

"I mean that if he gives her up--!"

"Yes?"

"Well, he ought to be ashamed of himself." But Strether spoke with a
sound that might have passed for a laugh.

Volume II

Book Seventh

I

It wasn't the first time Strether had sat alone in the great dim
church--still less was it the first of his giving himself up, so far as
conditions permitted, to its beneficent action on his nerves. He had
been to Notre Dame with Waymarsh, he had been there with Miss Gostrey,
he had been there with Chad Newsome, and had found the place, even in
company, such a refuge from the obsession of his problem that, with
renewed pressure from that source, he had not unnaturally recurred to a
remedy meeting the c