as grandly cynical; there
were others when you struck me as grandly vague."

Her friend considered. "I had phases. I had flights."

"Yes, but things must have a basis."

"A basis seemed to me just what her beauty supplied."

"Her beauty of person?"

"Well, her beauty of everything. The impression she makes. She has
such variety and yet such harmony."

She considered him with one of her deep returns of indulgence--returns
out of all proportion to the irritations they flooded over. "You're
complete."

"You're always too personal," he good-humouredly said; "but that's
precisely how I wondered and wandered."

"If you mean," she went on, "that she was from the first for you the
most charming woman in the world, nothing's more simple. Only that was
an odd foundation."

"For what I reared on it?"

"For what you didn't!"

"Well, it was all not a fixed quantity. And it had for me--it has
still--such elements of strangeness. Her greater age than his, her
different world, traditions, association; her other opportunities,
liabilities, standards."

His friend listened with respect to his enumeration of these
disparities; then she disposed of them at a stroke. "Those things are
nothing when a woman's hit. It's very awful. She was hit."

Strether, on his side, did justice to that plea. "Oh of course I saw
she was hit. That she was hit was what we were busy with; that she was
hit was our great affair. But somehow I couldn't think of her as down
in the dust. And as put there by OUR little Chad!"

"Yet wasn't 'your' little Chad just your miracle?"

Strether admitted it. "Of course I moved among miracles. It was all
phantasmagoric. But the great fact was that so much of it was none of
my business--as I saw my business. It isn't even now."

His companion turned away on this, and it might well have been yet
again with the sharpness of a fear of how little his philosophy could
bring her personally. "I wish SHE could hear you!"

"Mrs. Newsome?"

"No--not Mrs. Newsome; since I understand you that it doesn't matter
now what Mrs. Newsome hears. Hasn't she heard everything?"

"Practically--yes." He had thought a moment, but he went on. "You wish
Madame de Vionnet could hear me?"

"Madame de Vionnet." She had come back to him. "She thinks just the
contrary of what you say. That you distinctly judge her."

He turned over the scene as the two women thus placed together for him
seemed to give it. "