arah."

At which Miss Gostrey's eyebrows went up. "You mean she has already
dished herself?"

Strether took a turn about; he had thought it out again and again
before this, to the end; but the vista seemed each time longer. "He
wants his good friend to know the best. I mean the measure of his
attachment. She asked for a sign, and he thought of that one. There
it is."

"A concession to her jealousy?"

Strether pulled up. "Yes--call it that. Make it lurid--for that makes
my problem richer."

"Certainly, let us have it lurid--for I quite agree with you that we
want none of our problems poor. But let us also have it clear. Can he,
in the midst of such a preoccupation, or on the heels of it, have
seriously cared for Jeanne?--cared, I mean, as a young man at liberty
would have cared?"

Well, Strether had mastered it. "I think he can have thought it would
be charming if he COULD care. It would be nicer."

"Nicer than being tied up to Marie?"

"Yes--than the discomfort of an attachment to a person he can never
hope, short of a catastrophe, to marry. And he was quite right," said
Strether. "It would certainly have been nicer. Even when a thing's
already nice there mostly is some other thing that would have been
nicer--or as to which we wonder if it wouldn't. But his question was
all the same a dream. He COULDn't care in that way. He IS tied up to
Marie. The relation is too special and has gone too far. It's the
very basis, and his recent lively contribution toward establishing
Jeanne in life has been his definite and final acknowledgement to
Madame de Vionnet that he has ceased squirming. I doubt meanwhile," he
went on, "if Sarah has at all directly attacked him."

His companion brooded. "But won't he wish for his own satisfaction to
make his ground good to her?"

"No--he'll leave it to me, he'll leave everything to me. I 'sort of'
feel"--he worked it out--"that the whole thing will come upon me. Yes,
I shall have every inch and every ounce of it. I shall be USED for
it--!" And Strether lost himself in the prospect. Then he fancifully
expressed the issue. "To the last drop of my blood."

Maria, however, roundly protested. "Ah you'll please keep a drop for
ME. I shall have a use for it!"--which she didn't however follow up.
She had come back the next moment to another matter. "Mrs. Pocock, with
her brother, is trusting only to her general charm?"

"So it would seem."

"And the charm's