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46 her to patience. But it may even now frankly be mentioned that he, in the sequel, never was to tell her. He actually never did so, and it moreover oddly occurred that, by the law, within her, of the incalculable, her desire for the information dropped, and her attitude to the question converted itself into a positive cultivation of ignorance. In ignorance she could humour her fancy, and that proved a useful freedom. She could treat the little nameless object as indeed unnameable—she could make their abstention enormously definite. There might, indeed, have been for Strether the portent of this in what she next said.

"Is it perhaps then because it's so bad—because your industry, as you call it, is so vulgar—that Mr. Chad won't come back? Does he feel the taint? Is he staying away not to be mixed up in it?"

"Oh," Strether laughed, "it wouldn't appear—would it?—that he feels 'taints'! He's glad enough of the money from it, and the money's his whole basis. There's appreciation in that—I mean as to the allowance his mother has hitherto made him. She has, of course, the resource of cutting this allowance off; but even then he has, unfortunately, and on no small scale, in money left him by his grandfather, her own father, his independent supply."

"Wouldn't the fact you mention then," Miss Gostrey asked, "make it, precisely, more easy for him to be particular? Isn't he conceivable as fastidious about the source—the apparent and public source—of his income?"

Strether was able quite good-humouredly to entertain the proposition. "The source of his grandfather's wealth—and thereby of his own share in it—was not particularly noble."

"And what source was it?"

Strether hesitated. "Well—practices."

"In business? Infamies? He was an old swindler?"

"Oh," Strether said with more emphasis than spirit, "I shan't describe him nor narrate his exploits."

"Lord, what abysses! And the late Mr. Newsome then?"

"Well, what about him?"

"Was he like the grandfather?"