adn't in the least however the desire to
irritate that Sarah imputed to him, and he could only at last
temporise, for the moment, with her indignant view. She was altogether
more inflamed than he had expected, and he would probably understand
this better when he should learn what had occurred for her with Chad.
Till then her view of his particular blackness, her clear surprise at
his not clutching the pole she held out, must pass as extravagant. "I
leave you to flatter yourself," she returned, "that what you speak of
is what YOU'VE beautifully done. When a thing has been already
described in such a lovely way--!" But she caught herself up, and her
comment on his description rang out sufficiently loud. "Do you
consider her even an apology for a decent woman?"

Ah there it was at last! She put the matter more crudely than, for his
own mixed purposes, he had yet had to do; but essentially it was all
one matter. It was so much--so much; and she treated it, poor lady, as
so little. He grew conscious, as he was now apt to do, of a strange
smile, and the next moment he found himself talking like Miss Barrace.
"She has struck me from the first as wonderful. I've been thinking too
moreover that, after all, she would probably have represented even for
yourself something rather new and rather good."

He was to have given Mrs. Pocock with this, however, but her best
opportunity for a sound of derision. "Rather new? I hope so with all
my heart!"

"I mean," he explained, "that she might have affected you by her
exquisite amiability--a real revelation, it has seemed to myself; her
high rarity, her distinction of every sort."

He had been, with these words, consciously a little "precious"; but he
had had to be--he couldn't give her the truth of the case without them;
and it seemed to him moreover now that he didn't care. He had at all
events not served his cause, for she sprang at its exposed side. "A
'revelation'--to ME: I've come to such a woman for a revelation? You
talk to me about 'distinction'--YOU, you who've had your
privilege?--when the most distinguished woman we shall either of us
have seen in this world sits there insulted, in her loneliness, by your
incredible comparison!"

Strether forbore, with an effort, from straying; but he looked all
about him. "Does your mother herself make the point that she sits
insulted?"

Sarah's answer came so straight, so "pat," as might have been said,
that he felt on t