ll guess it.«
    »How then can I judge how vulgar it is?«
    »You'll judge when I do tell you« - and he persuaded her to patience. But it
may even now frankly be mentioned that he in the sequel never was to tell her.
He actually never did so, and it moreover oddly occurred that by the law, within
her, of the incalculable, her desire for the information dropped and her
attitude to the question converted itself into a positive cultivation of
ignorance. In ignorance she could humour her fancy, and that proved a useful
freedom. She could treat the little nameless object as indeed un-nameable - she
could make their abstention enormously definite. There might indeed have been
for Strether the portent of this in what she next said.
    »Is it perhaps then because it's so bad - because your industry, as you call
it, is so vulgar - that Mr. Chad won't come back? Does he feel the taint? Is he
staying away not to be mixed up in it?«
    »Oh,« Strether laughed, »it wouldn't appear - would it? - that he feels
taints! He's glad enough of the money from it, and the money's his whole basis.
There's appreciation in that - I mean as to the allowance his mother has
hitherto made him. She has of course the resource of cutting this allowance off;
but even then he has unfortunately, and on no small scale, his independent
supply - money left him by his grandfather, her own father.«
    »Wouldn't the fact you mention then,« Miss Gostrey asked, »make it just more
easy for him to be particular? Isn't he conceivable as fastidious about the
source - the apparent and public source - of his income?«
    Strether was able quite good-humouredly to entertain the proposition. »The
source of his grandfather's wealth - and thereby of his own share in it - was
not particularly noble.«
    »And what source was it?«
    Strether cast about. »Well - practices.«
    »In business? Infamies? He was an old swindler?«
    »Oh,« he said with more emphasis than spirit, »I shan't describe him nor
narrate his exploits.«
    »Lord, what abysses! And the late Mr. Newsome then?«
    »Well, what about him?«
    »Was he like the grandfather?«
    »No - he was on the other side of the house. And he was different