That"—he gave it to her more vividly—"is where I am."
"I see, I see.
But where's Mr. Newsome?
He was ready," she asked, "to go?"
"All ready."
"And sincerely—believing YOU'D be?"
"Perfectly, I think; so that he was amazed to find the hand I had laid on him to pull him over suddenly converted into an engine for keeping him still."
It was an account of the matter Miss Gostrey could weigh.
"Does he think the conversion sudden?"
"Well," said Strether, "I'm not altogether sure what he thinks.
I'm not sure of anything that concerns him, except that the more I've seen of him the less I've found him what I originally expected. He's obscure, and that's why I'm waiting."
She wondered. "But for what in particular?"
"For the answer to his cable."
"And what was his cable?"
"I don't know," Strether replied; "it was to be, when he left me, according to his own taste.
I simply said to him:
'I want to stay, and the only way for me to do so is for you to.'
That I wanted to stay seemed to interest him, and he acted on that."
Miss Gostrey turned it over.
"He wants then himself to stay."
"He half wants it.
That is he half wants to go.
My original appeal has to that extent worked in him.
Nevertheless," Strether pursued, "he won't go.
Not, at least, so long as I'm here."
"But you can't," his companion suggested, "stay here always.
I wish you could."
"By no means.
Still, I want to see him a little further.
He's not in the least the case I supposed, he's quite another case.
And it's as such that he interests me."
It was almost as if for his own intelligence that, deliberate and lucid, our friend thus expressed the matter.
"I don't want to give him up."
Miss Gostrey but desired to help his lucidity.
She had however to be light and tactful.
"Up, you mean—a—to his mother?"
"Well, I'm not thinking of his mother now.
I'm thinking of the plan of which I was the mouthpiece, which, as soon as we met, I put before him as persuasively as I knew how, and which was drawn up, as it were, in complete ignorance of all that, in this last long period, has been happening to him.
It took no account whatever of the impression I was here on the spot immediately to begin to receive from him—impressions of which I feel sure I'm far from having had the last."
Miss Gostrey had a smile of the most genial criticism. "So your idea is—more or less—to stay out of curiosity?"
"Call it what you like!
I don't care what it's called—"
"So long as you do stay?
Certainly not then.
I call it, all the same, immense fun," Maria Gostrey declared; "and to see you work it out will be one of the sensations of my life.
It IS clear you can toddle alone!"
He received this tribute without elation.
"I shan't be alone when the Pococks have come."
Her eyebrows went up.
"The Pococks are coming?"