Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/398

392 But, on the other hand, I've gone much further to meet her. She, on her side, hasn't budged an inch."

"So that you're now at last"—Maria pointed the moral—"in the sad stage of recriminations."

"No—it's only to you I speak. I've been like a lamb to Sarah. I've only put my back to the wall. It's to that one naturally staggers when one has been indignantly pushed there."

She watched him a moment. "Thrown over?"

"Well, I feel so that I've violently landed somewhere, that I think I must have been thrown."

She turned it round, but as hoping to clarify much rather than to harmonise. "The thing is that I suppose you've been disappointing"

"Quite from the very first of my arrival? I daresay. I admit I was surprising even to myself."

"And then, of course," Maria went on, "I had much to do with it."

"With my being surprising?"

"That will do," she laughed, "if you're too delicate to call it my being! Naturally," she added, "you came over more or less for surprises."

"Naturally!"—he valued the reminder.

"But they were to have been all for you"—she continued to piece it out—"and none of them for her."

Once more he stopped before her as if she had touched the point. "That's just her difficulty—that she doesn't admit surprises. It's a fact that, I think, describes and represents her; and it falls in with what I tell you—that she's all, as I've called it, fine cold thought. She had, to her own mind, worked the whole thing out in advance, and worked it out for me as well as for herself. Whenever she has done that, you see, there's no room left; no margin, as it were, for any alteration. She's filled as full, packed as tight, as she'll hold, and if you wish to get anything more or different either out or in"

"You've got to make over, altogether, the woman herself?"

"What it comes to," said Strether, "is that you've got, morally and intellectually, to get rid of her."