herself together. The delays caused by the
weather, the struggle for vehicles at the door, gave them occasion to
subside on a divan at the back of the vestibule and just beyond the
reach of the fresh damp gusts from the street. Here Strether's comrade
resumed that free handling of the subject to which his own imagination
of it already owed so much. "Does your young friend in Paris like you?"

It had almost, after the interval, startled him. "Oh I hope not! Why
SHOULD he?"

"Why shouldn't he?" Miss Gostrey asked. "That you're coming down on
him need have nothing to do with it."

"You see more in it," he presently returned, "than I."

"Of course I see you in it."

"Well then you see more in 'me'!"

"Than you see in yourself? Very likely. That's always one's right.
What I was thinking of," she explained, "is the possible particular
effect on him of his milieu."

"Oh his milieu--!" Strether really felt he could imagine it better now
than three hours before.

"Do you mean it can only have been so lowering?"

"Why that's my very starting-point."

"Yes, but you start so far back. What do his letters say?"

"Nothing. He practically ignores us--or spares us. He doesn't write."

"I see. But there are all the same," she went on, "two quite distinct
things that--given the wonderful place he's in--may have happened to
him. One is that he may have got brutalised. The other is that he may
have got refined."

Strether stared--this WAS a novelty. "Refined?"

"Oh," she said quietly, "there ARE refinements."

The way of it made him, after looking at her, break into a laugh. "YOU
have them!"

"As one of the signs," she continued in the same tone, "they constitute
perhaps the worst."

He thought it over and his gravity returned. "Is it a refinement not
to answer his mother's letters?"

She appeared to have a scruple, but she brought it out. "Oh I should
say the greatest of all."

"Well," said Strether, "I'M quite content to let it, as one of the
signs, pass for the worst that I know he believes he can do what he
likes with me."

This appeared to strike her. "How do you know it?"

"Oh I'm sure of it. I feel it in my bones."

"Feel he CAN do it?"

"Feel that he believes he can. It may come to the same thing!"
Strether laughed.

She wouldn't, however, have this. "Nothing for you will ever come to
the same thing as anything else." And she understood what she meant,
it seemed, sufficiently t