 in trouble?«
    »Ah because that's the way you strike me.« She spoke ever so gently and as
if with all fear of wounding him while she sat partaking of his bounty. »Aren't
you in trouble?«
    He felt himself colour at the question, and then hated that - hated to pass
for anything so idiotic as woundable. Woundable by Chad's lady, in respect to
whom he had come out with such a fund of indifference - was he already at that
point? Perversely, none the less, his pause gave a strange air of truth to her
supposition; and what was he in fact but disconcerted at having struck her just
in the way he had most dreamed of not doing? »I'm not in trouble yet,« he at
last smiled. »I'm not in trouble now.«
    »Well, I'm always so. But that you sufficiently know.« She was a woman who,
between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table. It was a
posture unknown to Mrs. Newsome, but it was easy for a femme du monde. »Yes - I
am now!«
    »There was a question you put to me,« he presently returned, »the night of
Chad's dinner. I didn't answer it then, and it has been very handsome of you not
to have sought an occasion for pressing me about it since.«
    She was instantly all there. »Of course I know what you allude to. I asked
you what you had meant by saying, the day you came to see me, just before you
let me, that you'd save me. And you then said - at our friend's - that you'd
have really to wait to see, for yourself, what you did mean.«
    »Yes, I asked for time,« said Strether. »And it sounds now, as you put it,
like a very ridiculous speech.«
    »Oh!« she murmured - she was full of attenuation. But she had another
thought. »If it does sound ridiculous why do you deny that you're in trouble?«
    »Ah if I were,« he replied, »it wouldn't be the trouble of fearing ridicule.
I don't fear it.«
    »What then do you?«
    »Nothing - now.« And he leaned back in his chair.
    »I like your now!« she laughed across at him.
    »Well, it's precisely
