Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/400

394 "Yes, it comes, no doubt, to that. You now!"

He was benevolently going on, but she wouldn't have it. "Oh, I don't make myself felt; so my quantity needn't be settled. Yours, you know," she went on, "is monstrous. No one has ever had so much."

It struck him for a moment. "That's what Chad also said."

"There you are then—though it isn't for him to complain of it!"

"Oh, he doesn't complain of it," said Strether.

"That's all that would be wanting! But in relation to what," Maria went on, "did the question come up?"

"Well, of his asking me what it is I gain."

She had a pause. "Then, as I've asked you too, it settles my case. Oh, you have," she repeated, "treasures!"

But he had been for an instant thinking away from this, and he came up in another place. "And yet Mrs. Newsome—it's a thing to remember—has imagined, did, that is, imagine, and apparently still does, horrors about what I should have found. I was booked, by her vision—extraordinarily intense, after all—to find them; and that I didn't, that I couldn't, that, as she finally felt, I wouldn't—this evidently didn't at all, as they say, 'suit' her book. It was more than she could bear. That was her disappointment."

"You mean you were to have found Chad himself horrible?"

"I was to have found the woman."

"Horrible?"

"Found her as she insistently imagined her." And Strether paused as if for his own expression of it he could add no touch to that picture.

His companion had meanwhile thought. "She imagined stupidly—so it comes to the same thing."

"Stupidly? Oh!" said Strether.

But she insisted. "She imagined meanly."

He had it, however, better. "It couldn't but be ignorantly."

"Well, intensity with ignorance—what do you want worse?"

This question might have held him, but he let it pass.