.

"Don't I when I lift the last veil?--tell you the very secret of the
prison-house?"

Again she met his eyes, but to the result that after an instant her own
turned away with impatience. "You don't sell? Oh I'm glad of THAT!"
After which however, and before he could protest, she was off again.
"She's just a MORAL swell."

He accepted gaily enough the definition. "Yes--I really think that
describes her."

But it had for his friend the oddest connexion. "How does she do her
hair?"

He laughed out. "Beautifully!"

"Ah that doesn't tell me. However, it doesn't matter--I know. It's
tremendously neat--a real reproach; quite remarkably thick and without,
as yet, a single strand of white. There!"

He blushed for her realism, but gaped at her truth. "You're the very
deuce."

"What else SHOULD I be? It was as the very deuce I pounced on you. But
don't let it trouble you, for everything but the very deuce--at our
age--is a bore and a delusion, and even he himself, after all, but half
a joy." With which, on a single sweep of her wing, she resumed. "You
assist her to expiate--which is rather hard when you've yourself not
sinned."

"It's she who hasn't sinned," Strether replied. "I've sinned the most."

"Ah," Miss Gostrey cynically laughed, "what a picture of HER! Have you
robbed the widow and the orphan?"

"I've sinned enough," said Strether.

"Enough for whom? Enough for what?"

"Well, to be where I am."

"Thank you!" They were disturbed at this moment by the passage between
their knees and the back of the seats before them of a gentleman who
had been absent during a part of the performance and who now returned
for the close; but the interruption left Miss Gostrey time, before the
subsequent hush, to express as a sharp finality her sense of the moral
of all their talk. "I knew you had something up your sleeve!" This
finality, however, left them in its turn, at the end of the play, as
disposed to hang back as if they had still much to say; so that they
easily agreed to let every one go before them--they found an interest
in waiting. They made out from the lobby that the night had turned to
rain; yet Miss Gostrey let her friend know that he wasn't to see her
home. He was simply to put her, by herself, into a four-wheeler; she
liked so in London, of wet nights after wild pleasures, thinking things
over, on the return, in lonely four-wheelers. This was her great time,
she intimated, for pulling