 self felt.«
    »Yes, it comes, no doubt, to that. You now -«
    He was benevolently going on, but she wouldn't have it. »Oh I don't make
myself felt; so my quantity needn't be settled. Yours, you know,« she said, »is
monstrous. No one has ever had so much.«
    It struck him for a moment. »That's what Chad also thinks.«
    »There you are then - though it isn't for him to complain of it!«
    »Oh he doesn't complain of it,« said Strether.
    »That's all that would be wanting! But apropos of what,« Maria went on, »did
the question come up?«
    »Well, of his asking me what it is I gain.«
    She had a pause. »Then as I've asked you too it settles my case. Oh you
have,« she repeated, »treasures of imagination.«
    But he had been for an instant thinking away from this, and he came up in
another place. »And yet Mrs. Newsome - it's a thing to remember - has imagined,
did, that is, imagine, and apparently still does, horrors about what I should
have found. I was booked, by her vision - extraordinarily intense, after all -
to find them; and that I didn't, that I couldn't, that, as she evidently felt, I
wouldn't - this evidently didn't at all, as they say, suit her book. It was more
than she could bear. That was her disappointment.«
    »You mean you were to have found Chad himself horrible?«
    »I was to have found the woman.«
    »Horrible?«
    »Found her as she imagined her.« And Strether paused as if for his own
expression of it he could add no touch to that picture.
    His companion had meanwhile thought. »She imagined stupidly - so it comes to
the same thing.«
    »Stupidly? Oh!« said Strether.
    But she insisted. »She imagined meanly.«
    He had it, however, better. »It couldn't but be ignorantly.«
    »Well, intensity with ignorance - what do you want worse?«
    This question might have held him, but he let it pass. »Sarah isn't ignorant
- now; she keeps up the theory of the horrible.«
    »Ah but she's intense - and that
