"
"But you can't," his companion suggested, "stay here always. I wish
you could."
"By no means. Still, I want to see him a little further. He's not
in the least the case I supposed, he's quite another case. And it's
as such that he interests me." It was almost as if for his own
intelligence that, deliberate and lucid, our friend thus expressed
the matter. "I don't want to give him up."
Miss Gostrey but desired to help his lucidity. She had however to
be light and tactful. "Up, you mean--a--to his mother?"
"Well, I'm not thinking of his mother now. I'm thinking of the plan
of which I was the mouthpiece, which, as soon as we met, I put
before him as persuasively as I knew how, and which was drawn up,
as it were, in complete ignorance of all that, in this last long
period, has been happening to him. It took no account whatever of
the impression I was here on the spot immediately to begin to
receive from him--impressions of which I feel sure I'm far from
having had the last."
Miss Gostrey had a smile of the most genial criticism. "So your
idea is--more or less--to stay out of curiosity?"
"Call it what you like! I don't care what it's called--"
"So long as you do stay? Certainly not then. I call it, all the
same, immense fun," Maria Gostrey declared; "and to see you work it
out will be one of the sensations of my life.
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