"For an opinion THAT'S my opinion.
He makes you out too well not to."
"Not to work for me to-night?" Strether wondered.
"Then I hope he isn't doing anything very bad."
"They've got you," she portentously answered.
"Do you mean he IS—?"
"They've got you," she merely repeated.
Though she disclaimed the prophetic vision she was at this instant the nearest approach he had ever met to the priestess of the oracle.
The light was in her eyes.
"You must face it now."
He faced it on the spot.
"They HAD arranged—?"
"Every move in the game.
And they've been arranging ever since.
He has had every day his little telegram from Cannes."
It made Strether open his eyes.
"Do you KNOW that?"
"I do better.
I see it.
This was, before I met him, what I wondered whether I WAS to see.
But as soon as I met him I ceased to wonder, and our second meeting made me sure.
I took him all in.
He was acting—he is still—on his daily instructions."
"So that Chad has done the whole thing?"
"Oh no—not the whole. WE'VE done some of it.
You and I and
'Europe.'"
"Europe—yes," Strether mused.
"Dear old Paris," she seemed to explain.
But there was more, and, with one of her turns, she risked it.
"And dear old Waymarsh.
You," she declared, "have been a good bit of it."
He sat massive.
"A good bit of what, ma'am?"
"Why of the wonderful consciousness of our friend here.
You've helped too in your way to float him to where he is."
"And where the devil IS he?"
She passed it on with a laugh.
"Where the devil, Strether, are you?"
He spoke as if he had just been thinking it out. "Well, quite already in Chad's hands, it would seem."
And he had had with this another thought. "Will that be—just all through Bilham—the way he's going to work it?
It would be, for him, you know, an idea.
And Chad with an idea—!"
"Well?" she asked while the image held him.
"Well, is Chad—what shall I say?—monstrous?"
"Oh as much as you like!
But the idea you speak of," she said, "won't have been his best.
He'll have a better.
It won't be all through little Bilham that he'll work it."
This already sounded almost like a hope destroyed.