r you more and more till
at last you see it all."

"I see it all," he absently echoed, while his eyes might have been
fixing some particularly large iceberg in a cool blue northern sea.
"It's magnificent!" he then rather oddly exclaimed.

But his friend, who was used to this kind of inconsequence in him, kept
the thread. "There's nothing so magnificent--for making others feel
you--as to have no imagination."

It brought him straight round. "Ah there you are! It's what I said
last night to Chad. That he himself, I mean, has none."

"Then it would appear," Maria suggested, "that he has, after all,
something in common with his mother."

"He has in common that he makes one, as you say, 'feel' him. And yet,"
he added, as if the question were interesting, "one feels others too,
even when they have plenty."

Miss Gostrey continued suggestive. "Madame de Vionnet?"

"SHE has plenty."

"Certainly--she had quantities of old. But there are different ways of
making one's self felt."

"Yes, it comes, no doubt, to that. You now--"

He was benevolently going on, but she wouldn't have it. "Oh I DON'T
make myself felt; so my quantity needn't be settled. Yours, you know,"
she said, "is monstrous. No one has ever had so much."

It struck him for a moment. "That's what Chad also thinks."

"There YOU are then--though it isn't for him to complain of it!"

"Oh he doesn't complain of it," said Strether.

"That's all that would be wanting! But apropos of what," Maria went on,
"did the question come up?"

"Well, of his asking me what it is I gain."

She had a pause. "Then as I've asked you too it settles my case. Oh
you HAVE," she repeated, "treasures of imagination."

But he had been for an instant thinking away from this, and he came up
in another place. "And yet Mrs. Newsome--it's a thing to remember--HAS
imagined, did, that is, imagine, and apparently still does, horrors
about what I should have found. I was booked, by her
vision--extraordinarily intense, after all--to find them; and that I
didn't, that I couldn't, that, as she evidently felt, I wouldn't--this
evidently didn't at all, as they say, 'suit' her book. It was more than
she could bear. That was her disappointment."

"You mean you were to have found Chad himself horrible?"

"I was to have found the woman."

"Horrible?"

"Found her as she imagined her." And Strether paused as if for his own
expression of it he could add no touch to that pictur