Or else indeed you might join them somewhere."
Strether seemed to face it as if it were a happy thought; but the next moment he spoke more critically.
"Do you mean that they'll probably go off together?"
She just considered.
"I think it will be treating you quite without ceremony if they do; though after all," she added, "it would be difficult to see now quite what degree of ceremony properly meets your case."
"Of course," Strether conceded, "my attitude toward them is extraordinary."
"Just so; so that one may ask one's self what style of proceeding on their own part can altogether match it.
The attitude of their own that won't pale in its light they've doubtless still to work out.
The really handsome thing perhaps," she presently threw off, "WOULD be for them to withdraw into more secluded conditions, offering at the same time to share them with you."
He looked at her, on this, as if some generous irritation—all in his interest—had suddenly again flickered in her; and what she next said indeed half-explained it. "Don't really be afraid to tell me if what now holds you IS the pleasant prospect of the empty town, with plenty of seats in the shade, cool drinks, deserted museums, drives to the Bois in the evening, and our wonderful woman all to yourself."
And she kept it up still more. "The handsomest thing of ALL, when one makes it out, would, I dare say, be that Mr. Chad should for a while go off by himself.
It's a pity, from that point of view," she wound up, "that he doesn't pay his mother a visit.
It would at least occupy your interval."
The thought in fact held her a moment.
"Why doesn't he pay his mother a visit?
Even a week, at this good moment, would do."
"My dear lady," Strether replied—and he had it even to himself surprisingly ready—"my dear lady, his mother has paid HIM a visit.
Mrs. Newsome has been with him, this month, with an intensity that I'm sure he has thoroughly felt; he has lavishly entertained her, and she has let him have her thanks.
Do you suggest he shall go back for more of them?"
Well, she succeeded after a little in shaking it off.
"I see.
It's what you don't suggest—what you haven't suggested.
And you know."
"So would you, my dear," he kindly said, "if you had so much as seen her."
"As seen Mrs. Newsome?"
"No, Sarah—which, both for Chad and for myself, has served all the purpose."
"And served it in a manner," she responsively mused, "so extraordinary!"
"Well, you see," he partly explained, "what it comes to is that she's all cold thought—which Sarah could serve to us cold without its really losing anything.
So it is that we know what she thinks of us."
Maria had followed, but she had an arrest.
"What I've never made out, if you come to that, is what you think—I mean you personally—of HER.
Don't you so much, when all's said, as care a little?"
"That," he answered with no loss of promptness, "is what even Chad himself asked me last night.
He asked me if I don't mind the loss—well, the loss of an opulent future.
Which moreover," he hastened to add, "was a perfectly natural question."
"I call your attention, all the same," said Miss Gostrey, "to the fact that I don't ask it.
What I venture to ask is whether it's to Mrs. Newsome herself that you're indifferent."
"I haven't been so"—he spoke with all assurance.
"I've been the very opposite.
I've been, from the first moment, preoccupied with the impression everything might be making on her—quite oppressed, haunted, tormented by it.
I've been interested ONLY in her seeing what I've seen.
And I've been as disappointed in her refusal to see it as she has been in what has appeared to her the perversity of my insistence."
"Do you mean that she has shocked you as you've shocked her?"
Strether weighed it.
"I'm probably not so shockable.
But on the other hand I've gone much further to meet her. She, on her side, hasn't budged an inch."
"So that you're now at last"—Maria pointed the moral—"in the sad stage of recriminations."
"No—it's only to you I speak.
I've been like a lamb to Sarah.
I've only put my back to the wall.