Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/401

Rh "Sarah isn't ignorant—now; she keeps up the theory of the horrible."

"Ah, but she's intense—and that by itself will do sometimes as well. If it doesn't do, in this case, at any rate, to deny that Marie's charming, it will do at least to deny that she's good."

"What I claim is that she's good for Chad."

"You don't claim"—she seemed to like it clear—"that she's good for you."

But he continued without heeding. "That's what I wanted them to come out for—to see for themselves if she's bad for him."

"And now that they've done so, they won't admit that she's good even for anything?"

"They do think," Strether presently admitted, "that she's on the whole about as bad for me. But they're consistent, of course, inasmuch as they've their clear view of what's good for both of us."

"For you, to begin with"—Maria, all responsive, confined the question for the moment—"to eliminate from your existence, and if possible even from your memory, the dreadful insidious parasite that I must gruesomely shadow forth for them, even more than to eliminate the distincter evil—thereby a little less portentous—of the person whose confederate you've suffered yourself to become. However, that's comparatively simple. You can easily, at the worst, after all, give up the creature that I am."

"I can easily at the worst, after all, give up the creature that you are." The irony was so obvious that it needed no care. "I can easily at the worst, after all, even forget the creature."

"Call that then workable. But Mr. Newsome has much more to forget. How can he do it?"

"Ah, there again we are! That's just what I was to have made him do; just where I was to have worked with him and helped."

She took it in silence and without attenuation—as if perhaps from very familiarity with the facts; and her thought made a connection without showing the links. "Do you remember how we used to talk at Chester and in London about my seeing you through?" She spoke as of