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And if you'd like me to tell her that you do still so see her !" Miss Gostrey, in short, offered herself for service to the end. It was an offer he could temporarily entertain; but he decided. "She knows perfectly how I see her." "Not favourably enough, she mentioned to me, to wish ever to see her again. She told me you had taken a final leave of her. She says you've done with her." "So I have."
There was a question that came and went for him, however, as he rested against the side of his ship, and it was a little to get rid of the obsession that he prolonged his hours with Miss Gostrey. It was a question about himself, but it could only be settled by seeing Chad again; it was indeed his principal reason for wanting to see Chad.
Miss Gostrey had in due course been perfect for such a step; she had known exactly what they wanted to go straight somewhere and talk; and Strether had even felt she had known what he wished to say and that he was arranging immediately to begin.
Newsome's, which was not much less than his, have embarked on such a simile. All sorts of things in fact now seemed to come over him, comparatively few of which his chronicler can hope for space to mention. It came over him for instance that Miss Gostrey looked perhaps like Mary Stuart: Lambert Strether had a candour of fancy which could rest for an instant gratified in such an antithesis.
They now took on to his fancy, Miss Gostrey and he, the image of the Babes in the Wood; they could trust the merciful elements to let them continue at peace. He had been great already, as he knew, at postponements; but he had only to get afresh into the rhythm of one to feel its fine attraction.
I remember that he himself, in his critical preface to the book, calls attention to the way in which a conversation between Strether and Maria Gostrey, near the beginning, puts the reader in possession of all the past facts of the situation which it is necessary for him to know; a scene thus takes the place of that "harking back to make up," as he calls it, which is apt to appear as a lump of narrative shortly after the opening of a story.
They don't sail, you see, for five or six weeks more, and they haven't she admits that expected Chad would take part in their tour. It's still open to him to join them, at the last, at Liverpool." Miss Gostrey considered. "How in the world is it 'open' unless you open it? How can he join them at Liverpool if he but sinks deeper into his situation here?"
It turned Miss Gostrey to deeper thought. "Fancy having to take at the point of the bayonet a whole moral and intellectual being or block!" "It was in fact," said Strether, "what, at home, I HAD done. But somehow over there I didn't quite know it." "One never does, I suppose," Miss Gostrey concurred, "realise in advance, in such a case, the size, as you may say, of the block.
"Till death!" said Maria Gostrey. "Good-night." Strether called, his second morning in Paris, on the bankers of the Rue Scribe to whom his letter of credit was addressed, and he made this visit attended by Waymarsh, in whose company he had crossed from London two days before.
His tone had the effect of making her hesitate and even, as he guessed, speak with a difference. "Say with Miss Gostrey. What do you do for HER?" It really made him wonder. "Nothing at all!"
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