ou very awful?"

"Awful? Why so?" But he called it to himself, even as he spoke, his
biggest insincerity yet.

"Our arrangements are so different from yours."

"Mine?" Oh he could dismiss that too! "I haven't any arrangements."

"Then you must accept mine; all the more that they're excellent.
They're founded on a vieille sagesse. There will be much more, if all
goes well, for you to hear and to know, and everything, believe me, for
you to like. Don't be afraid; you'll be satisfied." Thus she could
talk to him of what, of her innermost life--for that was what it came
to--he must "accept"; thus she could extraordinarily speak as if in
such an affair his being satisfied had an importance. It was all a
wonder and made the whole case larger. He had struck himself at the
hotel, before Sarah and Waymarsh, as being in her boat; but where on
earth was he now? This question was in the air till her own lips
quenched it with another. "And do you suppose HE--who loves her
so--would do anything reckless or cruel?"

He wondered what he supposed. "Do you mean your young man--?"

"I mean yours. I mean Mr. Newsome." It flashed for Strether the next
moment a finer light, and the light deepened as she went on. "He takes,
thank God, the truest tenderest interest in her."

It deepened indeed. "Oh I'm sure of that!"

"You were talking," she said, "about one's trusting him. You see then
how I do."

He waited a moment--it all came. "I see--I see." He felt he really did
see.

"He wouldn't hurt her for the world, nor--assuming she marries at
all--risk anything that might make against her happiness.
And--willingly, at least--he would never hurt ME."

Her face, with what he had by this time grasped, told him more than her
words; whether something had come into it, or whether he only read
clearer, her whole story--what at least he then took for such--reached
out to him from it. With the initiative she now attributed to Chad it
all made a sense, and this sense--a light, a lead, was what had
abruptly risen before him. He wanted, once more, to get off with these
things; which was at last made easy, a servant having, for his
assistance, on hearing voices in the hall, just come forward. All that
Strether had made out was, while the man opened the door and
impersonally waited, summed up in his last word. "I don't think, you
know, Chad will tell me anything."

"No--perhaps not yet."

"And I won't as yet speak to him."