.
"There are times when to give them their head, you know--!"

They had gone to wait together in the garden for the dressing of the
meal, and Strether found her more suggestive than ever "Well, what?"

"Is to bring about for them such a complexity of relations-unless
indeed we call it a simplicity!--that the situation HAS to wind itself
up. They want to go back."

"And you want them to go!" Strether gaily concluded.

"I always want them to go, and I send them as fast as I can.'

"Oh I know--you take them to Liverpool."

"Any port will serve in a storm. I'm--with all my other functions--an
agent for repatriation. I want to re-people our stricken country. What
will become of it else? I want to discourage others."

The ordered English garden, in the freshness of the day, was
delightful to Strether, who liked the sound, under his feet, of the
tight fine gravel, packed with the chronic damp, and who had the idlest
eye for the deep smoothness of turf and the clean curves of paths.
"Other people?"

"Other countries. Other people--yes. I want to encourage our own."

Strether wondered. "Not to come? Why then do you 'meet' them--since
it doesn't appear to be to stop them?"

"Oh that they shouldn't come is as yet too much to ask. What I attend
to is that they come quickly and return still more so. I meet them to
help it to be over as soon as possible, and though I don't stop them
I've my way of putting them through. That's my little system; and, if
you want to know," said Maria Gostrey, "it's my real secret, my
innermost mission and use. I only seem, you see, to beguile and
approve; but I've thought it all out and I'm working all the while
underground. I can't perhaps quite give you my formula, but I think
that practically I succeed. I send you back spent. So you stay back.
Passed through my hands--"

"We don't turn up again?" The further she went the further he always
saw himself able to follow. "I don't want your formula--I feel quite
enough, as I hinted yesterday, your abysses. Spent!" he echoed. "If
that's how you're arranging so subtly to send me I thank you for the
warning."

For a minute, amid the pleasantness--poetry in tariffed items, but all
the more, for guests already convicted, a challenge to consumption--they
smiled at each other in confirmed fellowship. "Do you call it subtly?
It's a plain poor tale. Besides, you're a special case."

"Oh special cases--that's weak!" She was w