Henry James

“ He was well in port, the outer sea behind him, and it was only a matter of getting ashore; there was a question that came and went for him, however, as he rested against the side of his ship, and it was a little to get rid of the obsession that he prolonged his hours with Miss Gostrey. It was a question about himself, but it could only be settled by seeing Chad again; it was indeed his principal reason for wanting to see Chad. After that it wouldn't signify—it was a ghost that certain words would easily lay to rest. Only the young man must be there to take the words. ”

“ Newsome?"
"No—not Mrs. Newsome; since I understand you that it doesn't matter now what Mrs. Newsome hears. Hasn't she heard everything?"
"Practically—yes." He had thought a moment, but he went on. "You wish Mme. de Vionnet could hear me?"
"Mme. de Vionnet." She had come back to him. "She thinks just the contrary of what you say. That you judge her differently now."
He turned over the scene as the two women thus placed together for him seemed to give it. "She might have known———!"
"Might have known you don't?" Miss Gostrey asked, as he let it drop. ”

“ It amused him to say to himself that he might, for all the world, have been going to die—die resignedly; the scene was filled for him with so deep a death-bed hush, so melancholy a charm. That meant the postponement of everything else—which made so for the quiet lapse of life; and the postponement in especial of the reckoning to come—unless indeed the reckoning to come were to be one and the same thing with extinction. It faced him, the reckoning, over the shoulder of much interposing experience—which also faced him ”

“ He was even sure she was in possession of things he himself couldn't have told; for the consciousness of them was now all in her face and accompanied there with a shade of sadness that marked in her the close of all uncertainties. It came out for him more than ever yet that she had had from the first a knowledge she believed him not to have had, a knowledge the sharp acquisition of which might be destined to make a difference for him. ”

“ His friend listened with respect to his enumeration of these disparities; then she disposed of them at a stroke. "Those things are nothing when a woman is hit. She was hit."
Strether, on his side, did justice to that plea. "Oh, of course I saw she was hit. That she was hit was what we were busy with; that she was hit was our great affair. But somehow I couldn't think of her as down in the dust. And as put there by our little Chad!"
"Yet wasn't your little Chad just your miracle?"
Strether admitted it. " Of course I moved among miracles. It was all phantasmagoric. ”

“ It had been more often natural for him to go there than for Chad to come to the same hotel, the attractions of which were scant; yet it nevertheless, at present, at the eleventh hour, did suggest itself to Strether to begin by giving the young man a chance. It struck him that, in the inevitable course, Chad would be "round," as Waymarsh used to say—Waymarsh who already, somehow, seemed long ago. He hadn't come the day before, because it had been arranged between them that Mme. de Vionnet should see their friend first ”

“ They might have gone back to the country, and gone back but with a long breath drawn; that indeed would best mark Chad's sense that violence had not awaited the presentation of Mme. de Vionnet's plea. At the end of the twenty-four hours, at the end of the forty-eight, there was still no demonstration; so that Strether filled up the time, as he had so often filled it before, by going to see Miss Gostrey. ”

“ A man, of course, is always expected to do it—to do it, I mean, for a woman; but not a woman for another woman; unless perhaps on the tit-for-tat principle, as an indirect way of protecting herself. I don't need protection, so that I was free to 'funk' you—simply to dodge your test. The responsibility was too much for me. I gained time, and when I came back the need of a test had blown over."
Strether serenely recovered it "Yes ”