 Madame de Vionnet herself?«
    »As a probability - not quite a certainty: a good cause in which Chad has
been working. So I've waited.«
    »You need wait no longer,« she returned. »It reached me yesterday -
roundabout and accidental, but by a person who had had it from one of the young
man's own people - as a thing quite settled. I was only keeping it for you.«
    »You thought Chad wouldn't have told me?«
    She hesitated. »Well, if he hasn't -«
    »He hasn't. And yet the thing appears to have been practically his doing. So
there we are.«
    »There we are!« Maria candidly echoed.
    »That's why I jumped, I jumped,« he continued to explain, »because it means,
this disposition of the daughter, that there's now nothing else: nothing else
but him and the mother.«
    »Still - it simplifies.«
    »It simplifies« - he fully concurred. »But that's precisely where we are. It
marks a stage in his relation. The act is his answer to Mrs. Newsome's
demonstration.«
    »It tells,« Maria asked, »the worst?«
    »The worst.«
    »But is the worst what he wants Sarah to know?«
    »He doesn't care for Sarah.«
    At which Miss Gostrey's eyebrows went up. »You mean she has already dished
herself?«
    Strether took a turn about; he had thought it out again and again before
this, to the end; but the vista seemed each time longer. »He wants his good
friend to know the best. I mean the measure of his attachment. She asked for a
sign, and he thought of that one. There it is.«
    »A concession to her jealousy?«
    Strether pulled up. »Yes - call it that. Make it lurid - for that makes my
problem richer.«
    »Certainly, let us have it lurid - for I quite agree with you that we want
none of our problems poor. But let us also have it clear. Can he, in the midst
of such a preoccupation, or on the heels of it, have seriously cared for Jeanne?
- cared, I mean, as a young man at liberty would have cared?«
    Well, Strether had mastered it. »I think he can have thought it would be
charming if he could care. It would be nicer.«
