 as showing so much here as sudden unnatural
goodness.«
    »Ah then you're speaking now,« Strether said, »of people who are not nice.«
    »I delight,« she replied, »in your classifications. But do you want me,« she
asked, »to give you in the matter, on this ground, the wisest advice I'm capable
of? Don't consider her, don't judge her at all in herself. Consider her and
judge her only in Chad.«
    He had the courage at least of his companion's logic. »Because then I shall
like her?« He almost looked, with his quick imagination, as if he already did,
though seeing at once also the full extent of how little it would suit his book.
»But is that what I came out for?«
    She had to confess indeed that it wasn't. But there was something else.
»Don't make up your mind. There are all sorts of things. You haven't seen him
all.«
    This on his side Strether recognised; but his acuteness none the less showed
him the danger. »Yes, but if the more I see the better he seems?«
    Well, she found something. »That may be - but his disavowal of her isn't,
all the same, pure consideration. There's a hitch.« She made it out. »It's the
effort to sink her.«
    Strether winced at the image. »To sink -?«
    »Well, I mean there's a struggle, and a part of it is just what he hides.
Take time - that's the only way not to make some mistake that you'll regret.
Then you'll see. He does really want to shake her off.«
    Our friend had by this time so got into the vision that he almost gasped.
»After all she has done for him?«
    Miss Gostrey gave him a look which broke the next moment into a wonderful
smile. »He's not so good as you think!«
    They remained with him, these words, promising him, in their character of
warning, considerable help; but the support he tried to draw from them found
itself on each renewal of contact with Chad defeated by something else. What
could it be, this disconcerting force, he asked himself, but the sense,
constantly renewed, that Chad was - quite in fact insisted on being - as good as
he thought? It seemed somehow
