"Oh as for that you must judge if she peeps
out. She's behind the whole thing; but she's of a delicacy and a
discretion--!"
Miss Gostrey took it all. "I'm sure. She WOULD be. I don't
underrate her. She must be rather a swell."
"Oh yes, she's rather a swell!"
"A Woollett swell--bon! I like the idea of a Woollett swell. And
you must be rather one too, to be so mixed up with her."
"Ah no," said Strether, "that's not the way it works."
But she had already taken him up. "The way it works--you needn't
tell me!--is of course that you efface yourself."
"With my name on the cover?" he lucidly objected.
"Ah but you don't put it on for yourself."
"I beg your pardon--that's exactly what I do put it on for. It's
exactly the thing that I'm reduced to doing for myself. It seems
to rescue a little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions,
the refuse-heap of disappointments and failures, my one presentable
little scrap of an identity."
On this she looked at him as to say many things, but what she at
last simply said was: "She likes to see it there. You're the
bigger swell of the two," she immediately continued, "because you
think you're not one. She thinks she IS one. However," Miss
Gostrey added, "she thinks you're one too.
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