nd then had named
the place; when he had done this she stopped short as for quick
intensity, and yet deep difficulty, of response. She took in the
proposal as if it were almost too charming to be true; and there had
perhaps never yet been for her companion so unexpected a moment of
pride--so fine, so odd a case, at any rate, as his finding himself thus
able to offer to a person in such universal possession a new, a rare
amusement. She had heard of the happy spot, but she asked him in reply
to a further question how in the world he could suppose her to have
been there. He supposed himself to have supposed that Chad might have
taken her, and she guessed this the next moment to his no small
discomfort.

"Ah, let me explain," she smiled, "that I don't go about with him in
public; I never have such chances--not having them otherwise--and it's
just the sort of thing that, as a quiet creature living in my hole, I
adore." It was more than kind of him to have thought of it--though,
frankly, if he asked whether she had time she hadn't a single minute.
That however made no difference--she'd throw everything over. Every
duty at home, domestic, maternal, social, awaited her; but it was a
case for a high line. Her affairs would go to smash, but hadn't one a
right to one's snatch of scandal when one was prepared to pay? It was
on this pleasant basis of costly disorder, consequently, that they
eventually seated themselves, on either side of a small table, at a
window adjusted to the busy quay and the shining barge-burdened Seine;
where, for an hour, in the matter of letting himself go, of diving
deep, Strether was to feel he had touched bottom. He was to feel many
things on this occasion, and one of the first of them was that he had
travelled far since that evening in London, before the theatre, when
his dinner with Maria Gostrey, between the pink-shaded candles, had
struck him as requiring so many explanations. He had at that time
gathered them in, the explanations--he had stored them up; but it was
at present as if he had either soared above or sunk below them--he
couldn't tell which; he could somehow think of none that didn't seem to
leave the appearance of collapse and cynicism easier for him than
lucidity. How could he wish it to be lucid for others, for any one,
that he, for the hour, saw reasons enough in the mere way the bright
clean ordered water-side life came in at the open window?--the mere way
Madame de Vionnet,