Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/397

Rh 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?"

"As seen 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; so that Sarah could serve it to us cold without its really losing anything. So it is that we know what Mrs. Newsome 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 the forfeiture of possession of 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 disconcerted, as disappointed, as disillusioned by her refusal to see it as she has been by what has appeared to her the perversity of my insistence."

"Do you mean that she has shocked you as you've shocked her?"

Strether hesitated. "I'm doubtless not so shockable.