Her tortoise-shell, on its long chain, rattled down.
"I help you with Sitting Bull.
That's a good deal."
"Oh that, yes."
But Strether hesitated. "Do you mean he talks of me?"
"So that I have to defend you?
No, never.'
"I see," Strether mused.
"It's too deep."
"That's his only fault," she returned—"that everything, with him, is too deep.
He has depths of silence—which he breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark.
And when the remark comes it's always something he has seen or felt for himself—never a bit banal THAT would be what one might have feared and what would kill me But never."
She smoked again as she thus, with amused complacency, appreciated her acquisition.
"And never about you.
We keep clear of you.
We're wonderful.
But I'll tell you what he does do," she continued: "he tries to make me presents."
"Presents?" poor Strether echoed, conscious with a pang that HE hadn't yet tried that in any quarter.
"Why you see," she explained, "he's as fine as ever in the victoria; so that when I leave him, as I often do almost for hours—he likes it so—at the doors of shops, the sight of him there helps me, when I come out, to know my carriage away off in the rank.
But sometimes, for a change, he goes with me into the shops, and then I've all I can do to prevent his buying me things."
"He wants to 'treat' you?" Strether almost gasped at all he himself hadn't thought of.
He had a sense of admiration.
"Oh he's much more in the real tradition than I.
Yes," he mused, "it's the sacred rage."
"The sacred rage, exactly!"—and Miss Barrace, who hadn't before heard this term applied, recognised its bearing with a clap of her gemmed hands.
"Now I do know why he's not banal.
But I do prevent him all the same—and if you saw what he sometimes selects—from buying.
I save him hundreds and hundreds.
I only take flowers."
"Flowers?" Strether echoed again with a rueful reflexion. How many nosegays had her present converser sent?
"Innocent flowers," she pursued, "as much as he likes.
And he sends me splendours; he knows all the best places—he has found them for himself; he's wonderful."
"He hasn't told them to me," her friend smiled, "he has a life of his own."
But Strether had swung back to the consciousness that for himself after all it never would have done.
Waymarsh hadn't Mrs. Waymarsh in the least to consider, whereas Lambert Strether had constantly, in the inmost honour of his thoughts, to consider Mrs. Newsome.
He liked moreover to feel how much his friend was in the real tradition.
Yet he had his conclusion. "WHAT a rage it is!"
He had worked it out.
"It's an opposition."
She followed, but at a distance.
"That's what I feel.
Yet to what?"
"Well, he thinks, you know, that I'VE a life of my own.
And I haven't!"
"You haven't?" She showed doubt, and her laugh confirmed it. "Oh, oh, oh!"
"No—not for myself.
I seem to have a life only for other people."
"Ah for them and WITH them!
Just now for instance with—"
"Well, with whom?" he asked before she had had time to say.