atched him a moment. "Thrown over?"

"Well, as I feel I've landed somewhere I think I must have been thrown."

She turned it over, but as hoping to clarify much rather than to
harmonise. "The thing is that I suppose you've been disappointing--"

"Quite from the very first of my arrival? I dare say. I admit I was
surprising even to myself."

"And then of course," Maria went on, "I had much to do with it."

"With my being surprising--?"

"That will do," she laughed, "if you're too delicate to call it MY
being! Naturally," she added, "you came over more or less for
surprises."

"Naturally!"--he valued the reminder.

"But they were to have been all for you"--she continued to piece it
out--"and none of them for HER."

Once more he stopped before her as if she had touched the point.
"That's just her difficulty--that she doesn't admit surprises. It's a
fact that, I think, describes and represents her; and it falls in with
what I tell you--that she's all, as I've called it, fine cold thought.
She had, to her own mind, worked the whole thing out in advance, and
worked it out for me as well as for herself. Whenever she has done
that, you see, there's no room left; no margin, as it were, for any
alteration. She's filled as full, packed as tight, as she'll hold and
if you wish to get anything more or different either out or in--"

"You've got to make over altogether the woman herself?"

"What it comes to," said Strether, "is that you've got morally and
intellectually to get rid of her."

"Which would appear," Maria returned, "to be practically what you've
done."

But her friend threw back his head. "I haven't touched her. She won't
BE touched. I see it now as I've never done; and she hangs together
with a perfection of her own," he went on, "that does suggest a kind of
wrong in ANY change of her composition. It was at any rate," he wound
up, "the woman herself, as you call her the whole moral and
intellectual being or block, that Sarah brought me over to take or to
leave."

It turned Miss Gostrey to deeper thought. "Fancy having to take at the
point of the bayonet a whole moral and intellectual being or block!"

"It was in fact," said Strether, "what, at home, I HAD done. But
somehow over there I didn't quite know it."

"One never does, I suppose," Miss Gostrey concurred, "realise in
advance, in such a case, the size, as you may say, of the block. Little
by little it looms up. It has been looming fo