people?"
"Other countries. Other people—yes. I want to encourage our
own."
Strether wondered. "Not to come? Why then do you 'meet'
them—since it doesn't appear to be to stop them?"
"Oh that they shouldn't come is as yet too much to ask. What I
attend to is that they come quickly and return still more so. I
meet them to help it to be over as soon as possible, and though I
don't stop them I've my way of putting them through. That's my
little system; and, if you want to know," said Maria Gostrey, "it's
my real secret, my innermost mission and use. I only seem, you see,
to beguile and approve; but I've thought it all out and I'm working
all the while underground. I can't perhaps quite give you my
formula, but I think that practically I succeed. I send you back
spent. So you stay back. Passed through my hands—"
"We don't turn up again?" The further she went the further he
always saw himself able to follow. "I don't want your formula—I
feel quite enough, as I hinted yesterday, your abysses. Spent!" he
echoed. "If that's how you're arranging so subtly to send me I
thank you for the warning."
For a minute, amid the pleasantness—poetry in tariffed items,
but all the more, for guests already convicted, a challenge to
consumption—they smiled at each other in confirmed fellowship. "Do
you call it subtly? It's a plain poor tale. Besides, you're a
special case."
"Oh special cases—that's weak!" She was weak enough, further
still, to defer her journey and agree to accompany the gentlemen on
their own, might a separate carriage mark her independence; though
it was in spite of this to befall after luncheon that she went off
alone and that, with a tryst taken for a day of her company in
London, they lingered another night. She had, during the
morning—spent in a way that he was to remember later on as the very
climax of his foretaste, as warm with presentiments, with what he
would have called collapses—had all sorts of things out with
Strether; and among them the fact that though there was never a
moment of her life when she wasn't "due" somewhere, there was yet
scarce a perfidy to others of which she wasn't capable for his
sake. She explained moreover that wherever she happened to be she
found a dropped thread to pick up, a ragged edge to repair, some
familiar appetite in ambush, jumping out as she approached, yet
appeasable with a temporary biscuit. It became, on her taking the
risk of the deviation imposed on him by her insidious arrangement
of his morning meal, a point of honour for her not to fail with
Waymarsh of the larger success too; and her subsequent boast to
Strether was that she had made their friend fare—and quite without
his knowing what was the matter—as Major Pendennis would have fared
at the Megatherium. She had made him breakfast like a gentleman,
and it was nothing, she forcibly asserted, to what she would yet
make him do. She made him participate in the slow reiterated ramble
with which, for Strether, the new day amply filled itself; and it
was by her art that he somehow had the air, on the ramparts and in
the Rows, of carrying a point of his own.
The three strolled and stared and gossiped, or at least the two
did; the case really yielding for their comrade, if analysed, but
the element of stricken silence. This element indeed affected
Strether as charged with audible rumblings, but he was conscious of
the care of taking it explicitly as a sign of pleasant peace. He
wouldn't appeal too much, for that provoked stiffness; yet he
wouldn't be too freely tacit, for that suggested giving up.
Waymarsh himself adhered to an ambiguous dumbness that might have
represented either the growth of a perception or the despair of
one; and at times and in places—where the low-browed galleries were
darkest, the opposite gables queerest, the solicitations of every
kind densest—the others caught him fixing hard some object of minor
interest, fixing even at moments nothing discernible, as if he were
indulging it
"Other countries. Other people—yes. I want to encourage our
own."
Strether wondered. "Not to come? Why then do you 'meet'
them—since it doesn't appear to be to stop them?"
"Oh that they shouldn't come is as yet too much to ask. What I
attend to is that they come quickly and return still more so. I
meet them to help it to be over as soon as possible, and though I
don't stop them I've my way of putting them through. That's my
little system; and, if you want to know," said Maria Gostrey, "it's
my real secret, my innermost mission and use. I only seem, you see,
to beguile and approve; but I've thought it all out and I'm working
all the while underground. I can't perhaps quite give you my
formula, but I think that practically I succeed. I send you back
spent. So you stay back. Passed through my hands—"
"We don't turn up again?" The further she went the further he
always saw himself able to follow. "I don't want your formula—I
feel quite enough, as I hinted yesterday, your abysses. Spent!" he
echoed. "If that's how you're arranging so subtly to send me I
thank you for the warning."
For a minute, amid the pleasantness—poetry in tariffed items,
but all the more, for guests already convicted, a challenge to
consumption—they smiled at each other in confirmed fellowship. "Do
you call it subtly? It's a plain poor tale. Besides, you're a
special case."
"Oh special cases—that's weak!" She was weak enough, further
still, to defer her journey and agree to accompany the gentlemen on
their own, might a separate carriage mark her independence; though
it was in spite of this to befall after luncheon that she went off
alone and that, with a tryst taken for a day of her company in
London, they lingered another night. She had, during the
morning—spent in a way that he was to remember later on as the very
climax of his foretaste, as warm with presentiments, with what he
would have called collapses—had all sorts of things out with
Strether; and among them the fact that though there was never a
moment of her life when she wasn't "due" somewhere, there was yet
scarce a perfidy to others of which she wasn't capable for his
sake. She explained moreover that wherever she happened to be she
found a dropped thread to pick up, a ragged edge to repair, some
familiar appetite in ambush, jumping out as she approached, yet
appeasable with a temporary biscuit. It became, on her taking the
risk of the deviation imposed on him by her insidious arrangement
of his morning meal, a point of honour for her not to fail with
Waymarsh of the larger success too; and her subsequent boast to
Strether was that she had made their friend fare—and quite without
his knowing what was the matter—as Major Pendennis would have fared
at the Megatherium. She had made him breakfast like a gentleman,
and it was nothing, she forcibly asserted, to what she would yet
make him do. She made him participate in the slow reiterated ramble
with which, for Strether, the new day amply filled itself; and it
was by her art that he somehow had the air, on the ramparts and in
the Rows, of carrying a point of his own.
The three strolled and stared and gossiped, or at least the two
did; the case really yielding for their comrade, if analysed, but
the element of stricken silence. This element indeed affected
Strether as charged with audible rumblings, but he was conscious of
the care of taking it explicitly as a sign of pleasant peace. He
wouldn't appeal too much, for that provoked stiffness; yet he
wouldn't be too freely tacit, for that suggested giving up.
Waymarsh himself adhered to an ambiguous dumbness that might have
represented either the growth of a perception or the despair of
one; and at times and in places—where the low-browed galleries were
darkest, the opposite gables queerest, the solicitations of every
kind densest—the others caught him fixing hard some object of minor
interest, fixing even at moments nothing discernible, as if he were
indulging it
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