to himself
surprisingly ready--"my dear lady, his mother has paid HIM a visit.
Mrs. Newsome has been with him, this month, with an intensity that I'm
sure he has thoroughly felt; he has lavishly entertained her, and she
has let him have her thanks. Do you suggest he shall go back for more
of them?"

Well, she succeeded after a little in shaking it off. "I see. It's
what you don't suggest--what you haven't suggested. And you know."

"So would you, my dear," he kindly said, "if you had so much as seen
her."

"As seen Mrs. Newsome?"

"No, Sarah--which, both for Chad and for myself, has served all the
purpose."

"And served it in a manner," she responsively mused, "so extraordinary!"

"Well, you see," he partly explained, "what it comes to is that she's
all cold thought--which Sarah could serve to us cold without its really
losing anything. So it is that we know what she thinks of us."

Maria had followed, but she had an arrest. "What I've never made out,
if you come to that, is what you think--I mean you personally--of HER.
Don't you so much, when all's said, as care a little?"

"That," he answered with no loss of promptness, "is what even Chad
himself asked me last night. He asked me if I don't mind the
loss--well, the loss of an opulent future. Which moreover," he
hastened to add, "was a perfectly natural question."

"I call your attention, all the same," said Miss Gostrey, "to the fact
that I don't ask it. What I venture to ask is whether it's to Mrs.
Newsome herself that you're indifferent."

"I haven't been so"--he spoke with all assurance. "I've been the very
opposite. I've been, from the first moment, preoccupied with the
impression everything might be making on her--quite oppressed, haunted,
tormented by it. I've been interested ONLY in her seeing what I've
seen. And I've been as disappointed in her refusal to see it as she
has been in what has appeared to her the perversity of my insistence."

"Do you mean that she has shocked you as you've shocked her?"

Strether weighed it. "I'm probably not so shockable. But on the other
hand I've gone much further to meet her. She, on her side, hasn't
budged an inch."

"So that you're now at last"--Maria pointed the moral--"in the sad
stage of recriminations."

"No--it's only to you I speak. I've been like a lamb to Sarah. I've
only put my back to the wall. It's to THAT one naturally staggers when
one has been violently pushed there."

She w