he good-humouredly said; »but that's precisely
how I wondered and wandered.«
    »If you mean,« she went on, »that she was from the first for you the most
charming woman in the world, nothing's more simple. Only that was an odd
foundation.«
    »For what I reared on it?«
    »For what you didn't!«
    »Well, it was all not a fixed quantity. And it had for me - it has still -
such elements of strangeness. Her greater age than his, her different world,
traditions, association; her other opportunities, liabilities, standards.«
    His friend listened with respect to his enumeration of these disparities;
then she disposed of them at a stroke. »Those things are nothing when a woman's
hit. It's very awful. She was hit.«
    Strether, on his side, did justice to that plea. »Oh of course I saw she was
hit. That she was hit was what we were busy with; that she was hit was our great
affair. But somehow I couldn't think of her as down in the dust. And as put
there by our little Chad!«
    »Yet wasn't your little Chad just your miracle?«
    Strether admitted it. »Of course I moved among miracles. It was all
phantasmagoric. But the great fact was that so much of it was none of my
business - as I saw my business. It isn't even now.«
    His companion turned away on this, and it might well have been yet again
with the sharpness of a fear of how little his philosophy could bring her
personally. »I wish she could hear you!«
    »Mrs. Newsome?«
    »No - not Mrs. Newsome; since I understand you that it doesn't matter now
what Mrs. Newsome hears. Hasn't she heard everything?«
    »Practically - yes.« He had thought a moment, but he went on. »You wish
Madame de Vionnet could hear me?«
    »Madame de Vionnet.« She had come back to him. »She thinks just the contrary
of what you say. That you distinctly judge her.«
    He turned over the scene as the two women thus placed together for him
seemed to give it. »She might have known -!«
    »Might have known you don't?« Miss Gostrey asked as he let it drop. »She was
sure of it at first,« she pursued as he said nothing; »