e.

His companion had meanwhile thought. "She imagined stupidly--so it
comes to the same thing."

"Stupidly? Oh!" said Strether.

But she insisted. "She imagined meanly."

He had it, however, better. "It couldn't but be ignorantly."

"Well, intensity with ignorance--what do you want worse?"

This question might have held him, but he let it pass. "Sarah isn't
ignorant--now; she keeps up the theory of the horrible."

"Ah but she's intense--and that by itself will do sometimes as well. If
it doesn't do, in this case, at any rate, to deny that Marie's
charming, it will do at least to deny that she's good."

"What I claim is that she's good for Chad."

"You don't claim"--she seemed to like it clear--"that she's good for
YOU."

But he continued without heeding. "That's what I wanted them to come
out for--to see for themselves if she's bad for him."

"And now that they've done so they won't admit that she's good even for
anything?"

"They do think," Strether presently admitted, "that she's on the whole
about as bad for me. But they're consistent of course, inasmuch as
they've their clear view of what's good for both of us."

"For you, to begin with"--Maria, all responsive, confined the question
for the moment--"to eliminate from your existence and if possible even
from your memory the dreadful creature that I must gruesomely shadow
forth for them, even more than to eliminate the distincter
evil--thereby a little less portentous--of the person whose confederate
you've suffered yourself to become. However, that's comparatively
simple. You can easily, at the worst, after all, give me up."

"I can easily at the worst, after all, give you up." The irony was so
obvious that it needed no care. "I can easily at the worst, after all,
even forget you."

"Call that then workable. But Mr. Newsome has much more to forget. How
can HE do it?"

"Ah there again we are! That's just what I was to have made him do;
just where I was to have worked with him and helped."

She took it in silence and without attenuation--as if perhaps from very
familiarity with the facts; and her thought made a connexion without
showing the links. "Do you remember how we used to talk at Chester and
in London about my seeing you through?" She spoke as of far-off
things and as if they had spent weeks at the places she named.

"It's just what you ARE doing."

"Ah but the worst--since you've left such a margin--may be still to
come.