You may yet break down."

"Yes, I may yet break down. But will you take me--?"

He had hesitated, and she waited. "Take you?"

"For as long as I can bear it."

She also debated "Mr. Newsome and Madame de Vionnet may, as we were
saying, leave town. How long do you think you can bear it without
them?"

Strether's reply to this was at first another question. "Do you mean
in order to get away from me?"

Her answer had an abruptness. "Don't find me rude if I say I should
think they'd want to!"

He looked at her hard again--seemed even for an instant to have an
intensity of thought under which his colour changed. But he smiled.
"You mean after what they've done to me?"

"After what SHE has."

At this, however, with a laugh, he was all right again. "Ah but she
hasn't done it yet!"

III

He had taken the train a few days after this from a station--as well as
to a station--selected almost at random; such days, whatever should
happen, were numbered, and he had gone forth under the impulse--artless
enough, no doubt--to give the whole of one of them to that French
ruralism, with its cool special green, into which he had hitherto
looked only through the little oblong window of the picture-frame. It
had been as yet for the most part but a land of fancy for him--the
background of fiction, the medium of art, the nursery of letters;
practically as distant as Greece, but practically also well-nigh as
consecrated. Romance could weave itself, for Strether's sense, out of
elements mild enough; and even after what he had, as he felt, lately
"been through," he could thrill a little at the chance of seeing
something somewhere that would remind him of a certain small Lambinet
that had charmed him, long years before, at a Boston dealer's and that
he had quite absurdly never forgotten. It had been offered, he
remembered, at a price he had been instructed to believe the lowest
ever named for a Lambinet, a price he had never felt so poor as on
having to recognise, all the same, as beyond a dream of possibility. He
had dreamed--had turned and twisted possibilities for an hour: it had
been the only adventure of his life in connexion with the purchase of a
work of art. The adventure, it will be perceived, was modest; but the
memory, beyond all reason and by some accident of association, was
sweet. The little Lambinet abode with him as the picture he WOULD have
bought--the particular production that had made him for th