It's exactly what she IS—wonderful.
But I wasn't thinking of her appearance," he explained—"striking as that doubtless is.
I was thinking—well, of many other things."
He seemed to look at these as if to mention some of them; then took, pulling himself up, another turn. "About Mrs. Pocock people may differ."
"Is that the daughter's name—'Pocock'?"
"That's the daughter's name," Strether sturdily confessed.
"And people may differ, you mean, about HER beauty?"
"About everything."
"But YOU admire her?"
He gave his friend a glance as to show how he could bear this
"I'm perhaps a little afraid of her."
"Oh," said Miss Gostrey,
"I see her from here!
You may say then I see very fast and very far, but I've already shown you I do.
The young man and the two ladies," she went on, "are at any rate all the family?"
"Quite all.
His father has been dead ten years, and there's no brother, nor any other sister.
They'd do," said Strether, "anything in the world for him."
"And you'd do anything in the world for THEM?"
He shifted again; she had made it perhaps just a shade too affirmative for his nerves.
"Oh I don't know!"
"You'd do at any rate this, and the 'anything' they'd do is represented by their MAKING you do it."
"Ah they couldn't have come—either of them.
They're very busy people and Mrs. Newsome in particular has a large full life.
She's moreover highly nervous—and not at all strong."
"You mean she's an American invalid?"
He carefully distinguished.
"There's nothing she likes less than to be called one, but she would consent to be one of those things, I think," he laughed, "if it were the only way to be the other." "Consent to be an American in order to be an invalid?" "No," said Strether, "the other way round. She's at any rate delicate sensitive high-strung.
She puts so much of herself into everything—"
Ah Maria knew these things!
"That she has nothing left for anything else?
Of course she hasn't.
To whom do you say it?
High-strung?
Don't I spend my life, for them, jamming down the pedal?
I see moreover how it has told on you."
Strether took this more lightly.
"Oh I jam down the pedal too!"
"Well," she lucidly returned, "we must from this moment bear on it together with all our might."
And she forged ahead. "Have they money?"
But it was as if, while her energetic image still held him, her enquiry fell short.
"Mrs. Newsome," he wished further to explain, "hasn't moreover your courage on the question of contact.
If she had come it would have been to see the person herself."
"The woman?
Ah but that's courage."
"No—it's exaltation, which is a very different thing.
Courage," he, however, accommodatingly threw out, "is what YOU have." She shook her head.
"You say that only to patch me up—to cover the nudity of my want of exaltation.
I've neither the one nor the other.
I've mere battered indifference.