e
sword as by famine.

"Maria's still away?"--that was the first thing she had asked him; and
when he had found the frankness to be cheerful about it in spite of the
meaning he knew her to attach to Miss Gostrey's absence, she had gone
on to enquire if he didn't tremendously miss her. There were reasons
that made him by no means sure, yet he nevertheless answered
"Tremendously"; which she took in as if it were all she had wished to
prove. Then, "A man in trouble MUST be possessed somehow of a woman,"
she said; "if she doesn't come in one way she comes in another."

"Why do you call me a man in trouble?"

"Ah because that's the way you strike me." She spoke ever so gently
and as if with all fear of wounding him while she sat partaking of his
bounty. "AREn't you in trouble?"

He felt himself colour at the question, and then hated that--hated to
pass for anything so idiotic as woundable. Woundable by Chad's lady,
in respect to whom he had come out with such a fund of
indifference--was he already at that point? Perversely, none the less,
his pause gave a strange air of truth to her supposition; and what was
he in fact but disconcerted at having struck her just in the way he had
most dreamed of not doing? "I'm not in trouble yet," he at last
smiled. "I'm not in trouble now."

"Well, I'm always so. But that you sufficiently know." She was a
woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the
table. It was a posture unknown to Mrs. Newsome, but it was easy for a
femme du monde. "Yes--I am 'now'!"

"There was a question you put to me," he presently returned, "the night
of Chad's dinner. I didn't answer it then, and it has been very
handsome of you not to have sought an occasion for pressing me about it
since."

She was instantly all there. "Of course I know what you allude to. I
asked you what you had meant by saying, the day you came to see me,
just before you left me, that you'd save me. And you then said--at our
friend's--that you'd have really to wait to see, for yourself, what you
did mean."

"Yes, I asked for time," said Strether. "And it sounds now, as you put
it, like a very ridiculous speech."

"Oh!" she murmured--she was full of attenuation. But she had another
thought. "If it does sound ridiculous why do you deny that you're in
trouble?"

"Ah if I were," he replied, "it wouldn't be the trouble of fearing
ridicule. I don't fear it."

"What then do you?"

"Nothing--