They're very busy
people and Mrs. Newsome in particular has a large full life. She's
moreover highly nervous--and not at all strong."
"You mean she's an American invalid?"
He carefully distinguished. "There's nothing she likes less than to
be called one, but she would consent to be one of those things, I
think," he laughed, "if it were the only way to be the other."
"Consent to be an American in order to be an invalid?"
"No," said Strether, "the other way round. She's at any rate
delicate sensitive high-strung. She puts so much of herself into
everything--"
Ah Maria knew these things! "That she has nothing left for anything
else? Of course she hasn't. To whom do you say it? High-strung?
Don't I spend my life, for them, jamming down the pedal? I see
moreover how it has told on you."
Strether took this more lightly. "Oh I jam down the pedal too!"
"Well," she lucidly returned, "we must from this moment bear on it
together with all our might." And she forged ahead. "Have they
money?"
But it was as if, while her energetic image still held him, her
enquiry fell short. "Mrs. Newsome," he wished further to explain,
"hasn't moreover your courage on the question of contact. If she
had come it would have been to see the person herself.
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