y to
say: "Why, if you're going, NEED you, after all? Is it impossible you
should stay on--so that one mayn't lose you?"

"Impossible I should live with you here instead of going home?"

"Not 'with' us, if you object to that, but near enough to us,
somewhere, for us to see you--well," she beautifully brought out, "when
we feel we MUST. How shall we not sometimes feel it? I've wanted to
see you often when I couldn't," she pursued, "all these last weeks. How
shan't I then miss you now, with the sense of your being gone forever?"
Then as if the straightness of this appeal, taking him unprepared, had
visibly left him wondering: "Where IS your 'home' moreover now--what
has become of it? I've made a change in your life, I know I have; I've
upset everything in your mind as well; in your sense of--what shall I
call it?--all the decencies and possibilities. It gives me a kind of
detestation--" She pulled up short.

Oh but he wanted to hear. "Detestation of what?"

"Of everything--of life."

"Ah that's too much," he laughed--"or too little!"

"Too little, precisely"--she was eager. "What I hate is myself--when I
think that one has to take so much, to be happy, out of the lives of
others, and that one isn't happy even then. One does it to cheat one's
self and to stop one's mouth--but that's only at the best for a little.
The wretched self is always there, always making one somehow a fresh
anxiety. What it comes to is that it's not, that it's never, a
happiness, any happiness at all, to TAKE. The only safe thing is to
give. It's what plays you least false." Interesting, touching,
strikingly sincere as she let these things come from her, she yet
puzzled and troubled him--so fine was the quaver of her quietness. He
felt what he had felt before with her, that there was always more
behind what she showed, and more and more again behind that. "You know
so, at least," she added, "where you are!"

"YOU ought to know it indeed then; for isn't what you've been giving
exactly what has brought us together this way? You've been making, as
I've so fully let you know I've felt," Strether said, "the most
precious present I've ever seen made, and if you can't sit down
peacefully on that performance you ARE, no doubt, born to torment
yourself. But you ought," he wound up, "to be easy."

"And not trouble you any more, no doubt--not thrust on you even the
wonder and the beauty of what I've done; only let you regard our
busines