Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/56

50 "Oh, we're not loved. We're not even hated. We're only just sweetly ignored."

She had another pause. "You don't trust me!" she repeated.

"Don't I when I lift the last veil?—tell you the very secret of the prison-house?"

Again she met his eyes, but with the result that, after an instant, her own turned away with impatience. "You don't sell? Oh, I'm glad of that!" After which, however, and before he could protest, she was off again. "She's just a moral swell."

He accepted gaily enough the definition. "Yes—I really think that describes her."

But it had for his friend the oddest connection. "How does she do her hair?"

He laughed out. "Beautifully!"

"Ah, that doesn't tell me. However, it doesn't matter—I know. It's tremendously neat—a real reproach; quite remarkably thick and without, as yet, a single strand of white. There!"

He blushed for her realism, but he gaped at her truth. "You're the very deuce."

"What else should I be? It was as the very deuce I pounced upon you. But don't let it trouble you, for everything but the very deuce—at our age—is a bore and a delusion, and even he himself, after all, but half a joy." With which, on a single sweep of her wing, she resumed. "You assist her to expiate—which is rather hard when you've yourself not sinned."

"It's she who has not sinned," Strether returned. "I've sinned the most."

"Ah," Miss Gostrey cynically laughed, "what a picture of her! Have you robbed the widow and the orphan?"

"I've sinned enough," said Strether.

"Enough for whom? Enough for what?"

"Well, to be where I am."

"Thank you!" They were disturbed at this moment by the passage between their knees and the back of the seats before them of a gentleman who had been absent during a part of the performance and who now returned for the close; but the interruption left Miss Gostrey time,