returned; on which he was further sure that
she was practically in possession of what he himself hadn't yet told her. He was
even sure she was in possession of things he himself couldn't have told; for the
consciousness of them was now all in her face and accompanied there with a shade
of sadness that marked in her the close of all uncertainties. It came out for
him more than ever yet that she had had from the first a knowledge she believed
him not to have had, a knowledge the sharp acquisition of which might be
destined to make a difference for him. The difference for him might not
inconceivably be an arrest of his independence and a change in his attitude - in
other words a revulsion in favour of the principles of Woollett. She had really
prefigured the possibility of a shock that would send him swinging back to Mrs.
Newsome. He hadn't, it was true, week after week, shown signs of receiving it,
but the possibility had been none the less in the air. What Maria accordingly
had had now to take in was that the shock had descended and that he hadn't, all
the same, swung back. He had grown clear, in a flash, on a point long since
settled for herself; but no reapproximation to Mrs. Newsome had occurred in
consequence. Madame de Vionnet had by her visit held up the torch to these
truths, and what now lingered in poor Maria's face was the somewhat smoky light
of the scene between them. If the light however wasn't, as we have hinted, the
glow of joy, the reasons for this also were perhaps discernible to Strether even
through the blur cast over them by his natural modesty. She had held herself for
months with a firm hand; she hadn't interfered on any chance - and chances were
specious enough - that she might interfere to her profit. She had turned her
back on the dream that Mrs. Newsome's rupture, their friend's forfeiture - the
engagement, the relation itself, broken beyond all mending - might furnish forth
her advantage; and, to stay her hand from promoting these things, she had, on
private, difficult, but rigid, lines, played strictly fair. She couldn't
therefore but feel that, though, as the end of all, the facts in question had
been stoutly confirmed, her ground for personal, for what might have been called
interested, elation remained rather vague. Strether might easily have made out
that she had been asking herself, in the hours she had just sat