Miss Gostrey took it all. "I"m sure. She WOULD be. I don"t underrate her. She must be rather a swell."
"Oh yes, she"s rather a swell!"
"A Woollett swell--bon! I like the idea of a Woollett swell. And you must be rather one too, to be so mixed up with her."
"Ah no," said Strether, "that"s not the way it works."
But she had already taken him up. "The way it works--you needn"t tell me!--is of course that you efface yourself."
"With my name on the cover?" he lucidly objected.
"Ah but you don"t put it on for yourself."
"I beg your pardon--that"s exactly what I do put it on for. It"s exactly the thing that I"m reduced to doing for myself. It seems to rescue a little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions, the refuse-heap of disappointments and failures, my one presentable little sc.r.a.p of an ident.i.ty."
On this she looked at him as to say many things, but what she at last simply said was: "She likes to see it there. You"re the bigger swell of the two," she immediately continued, "because you think you"re not one. She thinks she IS one. However," Miss Gostrey added, "she thinks you"re one too. You"re at all events the biggest she can get hold of." She embroidered, she abounded. "I don"t say it to interfere between you, but on the day she gets hold of a bigger one--!" Strether had thrown back his head as in silent mirth over something that struck him in her audacity or felicity, and her flight meanwhile was already higher. "Therefore close with her--!"
"Close with her?" he asked as she seemed to hang poised.
"Before you lose your chance."
Their eyes met over it. "What do you mean by closing?"
"And what do I mean by your chance? I"ll tell you when you tell me all the things YOU don"t. Is it her GREATEST fad?" she briskly pursued.
"The Review?" He seemed to wonder how he could best describe it. This resulted however but in a sketch. "It"s her tribute to the ideal."
"I see. You go in for tremendous things."
"We go in for the unpopular side--that is so far as we dare."
"And how far DO you dare?"
"Well, she very far. I much less. I don"t begin to have her faith.
She provides," said Strether, "three fourths of that. And she provides, as I"ve confided to you, ALL the money."
It evoked somehow a vision of gold that held for a little Miss Gostrey"s eyes, and she looked as if she heard the bright dollars shovelled in. "I hope then you make a good thing--"
"I NEVER made a good thing!" he at once returned.
She just waited. "Don"t you call it a good thing to be loved?"
"Oh we"re not loved. We"re not even hated. We"re only just sweetly ignored."
She had another pause. "You don"t trust me!" she once more repeated.
"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 a.s.sist 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 pa.s.sage 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 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."