"'Rather ridiculous'? Clothes-pins? Saleratus? Shoe-polish?"
It brought him round. "No--you don't even 'burn.' I don't think,
you know, you'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 unnameable--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.
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