pped before her, full of the disposition. "I'll express fifty."

Which indeed begot in her, with a certain inconsequence, a return of
her small wail. "Ah there you are!"

There, if it were so, he continued for the rest of the time to be, and
it was as if to show her how she could still serve him that, coming
back to the departure of the Pococks, he gave her the view, vivid with
a hundred more touches than we can reproduce, of what had happened for
him that morning. He had had ten minutes with Sarah at her hotel, ten
minutes reconquered, by irresistible pressure, from the time over which
he had already described her to Miss Gostrey as having, at the end of
their interview on his own premises, passed the great sponge of the
future. He had caught her by not announcing himself, had found her in
her sitting-room with a dressmaker and a lingere whose accounts she
appeared to have been more or less ingenuously settling and who soon
withdrew. Then he had explained to her how he had succeeded, late the
night before, in keeping his promise of seeing Chad. "I told her I'd
take it all."

"You'd 'take' it?"

"Why if he doesn't go."

Maria waited. "And who takes it if he does?" she enquired with a
certain grimness of gaiety.

"Well," said Strether, "I think I take, in any event, everything."

"By which I suppose you mean," his companion brought out after a
moment, "that you definitely understand you now lose everything."

He stood before her again. "It does come perhaps to the same thing.
But Chad, now that he has seen, doesn't really want it."

She could believe that, but she made, as always, for clearness. "Still,
what, after all, HAS he seen?"

"What they want of him. And it's enough."

"It contrasts so unfavourably with what Madame de Vionnet wants?"

"It contrasts--just so; all round, and tremendously."

"Therefore, perhaps, most of all with what YOU want?"

"Oh," said Strether, "what I want is a thing I've ceased to measure or
even to understand."

But his friend none the less went on. "Do you want Mrs. Newsome--after
such a way of treating you?"

It was a straighter mode of dealing with this lady than they had as
yet--such was their high form--permitted themselves; but it seemed not
wholly for this that he delayed a moment. "I dare say it has been,
after all, the only way she could have imagined."

"And does that make you want her any more?"

"I've tremendously disappointed her," Strether thoug