Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/49

Rh there's no brother, nor any other sister. They'd do," said Strether, "anything in the world for him."

"And you'd do anything in the world for them?"

He shifted again; she had made it perhaps just a shade too affirmative for his nerves.

"Oh, I don't know!"

"You'd do at any rate this, and the 'anything' they'd do is represented by their making you do it."

"Ah, they couldn't have come—either of them. They're very busy people, and Mrs. Newsome, in particular, has a large, full life. She's moreover highly nervous—and she's not strong."

"You mean she's a bad invalid?"

He carefully distinguished. "There's nothing she likes less than to be called one. But she's delicate, sensitive, high-strung. She puts so much of herself into everything"

Ah, Maria knew these things. "That she has nothing left for anything else? Of course she hasn't. To whom do you say it? High-strung? Don't I spend my life for them, jamming down the pedal? I see moreover how it has told on you."

But Strether made nothing of that. "Oh, I jam down the pedal too!"

"Well," she lucidly returned, "we must from this moment bear on it together with all our might." And she took the subject up further on. "Have they money?"

But it was as if, while her energetic image still held him, her inquiry fell short. "Mrs. Newsome," he wished further to explain, "hasn't moreover your courage on the question of contact. If she had come it would have been to see the person herself."

"The woman? Ah, but that's courage."

"No—it's exaltation, which is a very different thing. Courage," he, however, accommodatingly threw out, "is what you have."

She shook her head. "You say that only to patch me up—to cover the nudity of my want of exaltation. I've neither the one nor the other. I've mere battered indifference. I see what you mean," Miss Gostrey pursued, "is that if your friend had come she would take great views,