 it together. »I owe her thanks. Whatever her temptation she
didn't separate us. That's one of my reasons,« she went on, »for admiring her
so.«
    »Let it pass then,« said Strether, »for one of mine as well. But what would
have been her temptation?«
    »What are ever the temptations of women?«
    He thought - but hadn't, naturally, to think too long. »Men?«
    »She would have had you, with it, more for herself. But she saw she could
have you without it.«
    »Oh have me!« Strether a trifle ambiguously sighed. »You,« he handsomely
declared, »would have had me at any rate with it.«
    »Oh have you!« - she echoed it as he had done. »I do have you, however,« she
less ironically said, »from the moment you express a wish.«
    He stopped before her, full of the disposition. »I'll express fifty.«
    Which indeed begot in her, with a certain inconsequence, a return of her
small wail. »Ah there you are!«
    There, if it were so, he continued for the rest of the time to be, and it
was as if to show her how she could still serve him that, coming back to the
departure of the Pococks, he gave her the view, vivid with a hundred more
touches than we can reproduce, of what had happened for him that morning. He had
had ten minutes with Sarah at her hotel, ten minutes reconquered, by
irresistible pressure, from the time over which he had already described her to
Miss Gostrey as having, at the end of their interview on his own premises,
passed the great sponge of the future. He had caught her by not announcing
himself, had found her in her sitting-room with a dressmaker and a lingère whose
accounts she appeared to have been more or less ingenuously settling and who
soon withdrew. Then he had explained to her how he had succeeded, late the night
before, in keeping his promise of seeing Chad. »I told her I'd take it all.«
    »You'd take it?«
    »Why if he doesn't go.«
    Maria waited. »And who takes it if he does?« she enquired with a certain
grimness of gaiety.
    »Well,« said Strether, »I think I take, in any event, everything.«
    »By which I suppose you mean
