Yes, I may yet break down. But will you take me -?«
    He had hesitated, and she waited. »Take you?«
    »For as long as I can bear it.«
    She also debated. »Mr. Newsome and Madame de Vionnet may, as we were saying,
leave town. How long do you think you can bear it without them?«
    Strether's reply to this was at first another question. »Do you mean in
order to get away from me?«
    Her answer had an abruptness. »Don't find me rude if I say I should think
they'd want to!«
    He looked at her hard again - seemed even for an instant to have an
intensity of thought under which his colour changed. But he smiled. »You mean
after what they've done to me?«
    »After what she has.«
    At this, however, with a laugh, he was all right again. »Ah but she hasn't
done it yet!«

                                      III

 
He had taken the train a few days after this from a station - as well as to a
station - selected almost at random; such days, whatever should happen, were
numbered, and he had gone forth under the impulse - artless enough, no doubt -
to give the whole of one of them to that French ruralism, with its cool special
green, into which he had hitherto looked only through the little oblong window
of the picture-frame. It had been as yet for the most part but a land of fancy
for him - the background of fiction, the medium of art, the nursery of letters;
practically as distant as Greece, but practically also well-nigh as consecrated.
Romance could weave itself, for Strether's sense, out of elements mild enough;
and even after what he had, as he felt, lately been through, he could thrill a
little at the chance of seeing something somewhere that would remind him of a
certain small Lambinet that had charmed him, long years before, at a Boston
dealer's and that he had quite absurdly never forgotten. It had been offered, he
remembered, at a price he had been instructed to believe the lowest ever named
for a Lambinet, a price he had never felt so poor as on having to recognise, all
the same, as beyond a dream of possibility. He had dreamed - had turned and
twisted possibilities for an hour: it had been the only adventure of his life in
connexion with the purchase of a work of art. The adventure,
