»She's just a moral
swell.«
    He accepted gaily enough the definition. »Yes - I really think that
describes her.«
    But it had for his friend the oddest connexion. »How does she do her hair?«
    He laughed out. »Beautifully!«
    »Ah that doesn't tell me. However, it doesn't matter - I know. It's
tremendously neat - a real reproach; quite remarkably thick and without, as yet,
a single strand of white. There!«
    He blushed for her realism, but gaped at her truth. »You're the very deuce.«
    »What else should I be? It was as the very deuce I pounced on you. But don't
let it trouble you, for everything but the very deuce - at our age - is a bore
and a delusion, and even he himself, after all, but half a joy.« With which, on
a single sweep of her wing, she resumed. »You assist her to expiate - which is
rather hard when you've yourself not sinned.«
    »It's she who hasn't sinned,« Strether replied. »I've sinned the most.«
    »Ah,« Miss Gostrey cynically laughed, »what a picture of her! Have you
robbed the widow and the orphan?«
    »I've sinned enough,« said Strether.
    »Enough for whom? Enough for what?«
    »Well, to be where I am.«
    »Thank you!« They were disturbed at this moment by the passage between their
knees and the back of the seats before them of a gentleman who had been absent
during a part of the performance and who now returned for the close; but the
interruption left Miss Gostrey time, before the subsequent hush, to express as a
sharp finality her sense of the moral of all their talk. »I knew you had
something up your sleeve!« This finality, however, left them in its turn, at the
end of the play, as disposed to hang back as if they had still much to say; so
that they easily agreed to let every one go before them - they found an interest
in waiting. They made out from the lobby that the night had turned to rain; yet
Miss Gostrey let her friend know that he wasn't to see her home. He was simply
to put her, by herself, into a four-wheeler; she liked so in London, of wet
nights after wild pleasures, thinking things over,