"Of course she hasn't.
For what do you suggest that I suppose her to take you?
But you've been with her every day, you've seen her freely, you've liked her greatly—I stick to that—and you've made your profit of it.
You know what she has been through as well as you know that she has dined here to-night—which must have put her, by the way, 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 here difficile."
Little Bilham tossed up his chin. "Of course she's difficile—on any lines!
What else in the world ARE our Mamies—the real, the right ones?"
"I see, I see," our friend repeated, charmed by the responsive wisdom he had ended by so richly extracting.
"Mamie is one of the real and the right."
"The very thing itself."
"And what it comes to then," Strether went on, "is that poor awful Chad is simply too good for her."
"Ah too good was what he was after all to be; but it was she herself, and she herself only, who was to have made him so."