" 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,
on the return, in lonely four-wheelers.
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