hough indeed finally to deprecate it. "Oh but
don't, in your zeal, go over to her! I need you most and can't, you
know, be left."

But she kept it up. "I wish they'd send her out to me!"

"If they knew you," he returned, "they would."

"Ah but don't they?--after all that, as I've understood you you've told
them about me?"

He had paused before her again, but he continued his course "They
WILL--before, as you say, I've done." Then he came out with the point
he had wished after all most to make. "It seems to give away now his
game. This is what he has been doing--keeping me along for. He has
been waiting for them."

Miss Gostrey drew in her lips. "You see a good deal in it!"

"I doubt if I see as much as you. Do you pretend," he went on, "that
you don't see--?"

"Well, what?"--she pressed him as he paused.

"Why that there must be a lot between them--and that it has been going
on from the first; even from before I came."

She took a minute to answer. "Who are they then--if it's so grave?"

"It mayn't be grave--it may be gay. But at any rate it's marked. Only
I don't know," Strether had to confess, "anything about them. Their
name for instance was a thing that, after little Bilham's information,
I found it a kind of refreshment not to feel obliged to follow up."

"Oh," she returned, "if you think you've got off--!"

Her laugh produced in him a momentary gloom. "I don't think I've got
off. I only think I'm breathing for about five minutes. I dare say I
SHALL have, at the best, still to get on." A look, over it all, passed
between them, and the next minute he had come back to good humour. "I
don't meanwhile take the smallest interest in their name."

"Nor in their nationality?--American, French, English, Polish?"

"I don't care the least little 'hang,'" he smiled, "for their
nationality. It would be nice if they're Polish!" he almost
immediately added.

"Very nice indeed." The transition kept up her spirits. "So you see
you do care."

He did this contention a modified justice. "I think I should if they
WERE Polish. Yes," he thought--"there might be joy in THAT."

"Let us then hope for it." But she came after this nearer to the
question. "If the girl's of the right age of course the mother can't
be. I mean for the virtuous attachment. If the girl's twenty--and she
can't be less--the mother must be at least forty. So it puts the mother
out. SHE'S too old for him."

Strether, arre