y, through a
good deal more."

The young man faced this blast; after which he pulled round the rest of
the way. "I haven't in the least said she hasn't been nice to me. But
she's proud."

"And quite properly. But not too proud for that."

"It's just her pride that has made her. Chad," little Bilham loyally
went on, "has really been as kind to her as possible. It's awkward for
a man when a girl's in love with him."

"Ah but she isn't--now."

Little Bilham sat staring before him; then he sprang up as if his
friend's penetration, recurrent and insistent, made him really after
all too nervous. "No--she isn't now. It isn't in the least," he went
on, "Chad's fault. He's really all right. I mean he would have been
willing. But she came over with ideas. Those she had got at home.
They had been her motive and support in joining her brother and his
wife. She was to SAVE our friend."

"Ah like me, poor thing?" Strether also got to his feet.

"Exactly--she had a bad moment. It was very soon distinct to her, to
pull her up, to let her down, that, alas, he was, he IS, saved. There's
nothing left for her to do."

"Not even to love him?"

"She would have loved him better as she originally believed him."

Strether wondered "Of course one asks one's self what notion a little
girl forms, where a young man's in question, of such a history and such
a state."

"Well, this little girl saw them, no doubt, as obscure, but she saw
them practically as wrong. The wrong for her WAS the obscure. Chad
turns out at any rate right and good and disconcerting, while what she
was all prepared for, primed and girded and wound up for, was to deal
with him as the general opposite."

"Yet wasn't her whole point"--Strether weighed it--"that he was to be,
that he COULD be, made better, redeemed?"

Little Bilham fixed it all a moment, and then with a small headshake
that diffused a tenderness: "She's too late. Too late for the
miracle."

"Yes"--his companion saw enough. "Still, if the worst fault of his
condition is that it may be all there for her to profit by--?"

"Oh she doesn't want to 'profit,' in that flat way. She doesn't want
to profit by another woman's work--she wants the miracle to have been
her own miracle. THAT'S what she's too late for."

Strether quite felt how it all fitted, yet there seemed one loose
piece. "I'm bound to say, you know, that she strikes one, on these
lines, as fastidious--what you call he