
    »Oh,« she smiled, »you have done it.« And then having thought again: »You
can't after that propose -!« Yet she scanned his face.
    »Propose again to Mrs. Newsome?«
    She hesitated afresh, but she brought it out. »I've never believed, you
know, that you did propose. I always believed it was really she - and, so far as
that goes, I can understand it. What I mean is,« she explained, »that with such
a spirit - the spirit of curses! - your breach is past mending. She has only to
know what you've done to him never again to raise a finger.«
    »I've done,« said Strether, »what I could - one can't do more. He protests
his devotion and his horror. But I'm not sure I've saved him. He protests too
much. He asks how one can dream of his being tired. But he has all life before
him.«
    Maria saw what he meant. »He's formed to please.«
    »And it's our friend who has formed him.« Strether felt in it the strange
irony.
    »So it's scarcely his fault!«
    »It's at any rate his danger. I mean,« said Strether, »it's hers. But she
knows it.«
    »Yes, she knows it. And is your idea,« Miss Gostrey asked, »that there was
some other woman in London?«
    »Yes. No. That is I have no ideas. I'm afraid of them. I've done with them.«
And he put out his hand to her. »Good-bye.«
    It brought her back to her unanswered question. »To what do you go home?«
    »I don't know. There will always be something.«
    »To a great difference,« she said as she kept his hand.
    »A great difference - no doubt. Yet I shall see what I can make of it.«
    »Shall you make anything so good -?« But, as if remembering what Mrs.
Newsome had done, it was as far as she went.
    He had sufficiently understood. »So good as this place at this moment? So
good as what you make of everything you touch?« He took a moment to say, for,
really and truly, what stood about him there in her offer - which was
