"
"Well," she said, taking that menace bravely and
philosophically enough, "the only thing that really matters is that
you shall get on with me."
"Ah but I don't!" he immediately returned.
It gave her another pause; which, however, she happily enough shook
off. "Will you consent to go on with me a little--provisionally--
as if you did?"
Then it was that he saw how she had decidedly come all the way; and
there accompanied it an extraordinary sense of her raising from
somewhere below him her beautiful suppliant eyes. He might have
been perched at his door-step or at his window and she standing in
the road. For a moment he let her stand and couldn't moreover have
spoken. It had been sad, of a sudden, with a sadness that was like
a cold breath in his face. "What can I do," he finally asked, "but
listen to you as I promised Chadwick?"
"Ah but what I'm asking you," she quickly said, "isn't what Mr.
Newsome had in mind." She spoke at present, he saw, as if to take
courageously ALL her risk. "This is my own idea and a different
thing."
It gave poor Strether in truth--uneasy as it made him too--
something of the thrill of a bold perception justified. "Well," he
answered kindly enough, "I was sure a moment since that some idea
of your own had come to you.
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