t what you called it for him--'infamy'?"

"Oh rather! I described to him in detail the base creature he'd be,
and he quite agrees with me about it."

"So that it's really as if you had nailed him?"

"Quite really as if--! I told him I should curse him."

"Oh," she smiled, "you HAVE done it." And then having thought again:
"You CAN'T after that propose--!" Yet she scanned his face.

"Propose again to Mrs. Newsome?"

She hesitated afresh, but she brought it out. "I've never believed,
you know, that you did propose. I always believed it was really
she--and, so far as that goes, I can understand it. What I mean is,"
she explained, "that with such a spirit--the spirit of curses!--your
breach is past mending. She has only to know what you've done to him
never again to raise a finger."

"I've done," said Strether, "what I could--one can't do more. He
protests his devotion and his horror. But I'm not sure I've saved him.
He protests too much. He asks how one can dream of his being tired.
But he has all life before him."

Maria saw what he meant. "He's formed to please."

"And it's our friend who has formed him." Strether felt in it the
strange irony.

"So it's scarcely his fault!"

"It's at any rate his danger. I mean," said Strether, "it's hers. But
she knows it."

"Yes, she knows it. And is your idea," Miss Gostrey asked, "that there
was some other woman in London?"

"Yes. No. That is I HAVE no ideas. I'm afraid of them. I've done
with them." And he put out his hand to her. "Good-bye."

It brought her back to her unanswered question. "To what do you go
home?"

"I don't know. There will always be something."

"To a great difference," she said as she kept his hand.

"A great difference--no doubt. Yet I shall see what I can make of it."

"Shall you make anything so good--?" But, as if remembering what Mrs.
Newsome had done, it was as far as she went.

He had sufficiently understood. "So good as this place at this moment?
So good as what YOU make of everything you touch?" He took a moment to
say, for, really and truly, what stood about him there in her
offer--which was as the offer of exquisite service, of lightened care,
for the rest of his days--might well have tempted. It built him softly
round, it roofed him warmly over, it rested, all so firm, on selection.
And what ruled selection was beauty and knowledge. It was awkward, it
was almost stupid, not to seem to prize such things; y