"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 assist 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 passage 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.