"I'll do anything in the world for you!"
"Well," Strether smiled, "anything in the world is all I want. I
don't know anything that pleased me in her more," he went on, "than
the way that, on my finding her up there all alone, coming on her
unawares and feeling greatly for her being so out of it, she
knocked down my tall house of cards with her instant and cheerful
allusion to the next young man. It was somehow so the note I
needed--her staying at home to receive him."
"It was Chad of course," said little Bilham, "who asked the next
young man--I like your name for me!--to call."
"So I supposed--all of which, thank God, is in our innocent and
natural manners. But do you know," Strether asked, "if Chad
knows--?" And then as this interlocutor seemed at a loss:
"Why where she has come out."
Little Bilham, at this, met his face with a conscious look--it was
as if, more than anything yet, the allusion had penetrated. "Do
you know yourself?"
Strether lightly shook his head. "There I stop. Oh, odd as it may
appear to you, there ARE things I don't know. I only got the sense
from her of something very sharp, and yet very deep down, that she
was keeping all to herself. That is I had begun with the belief
that she HAD kept it to herself; but face to face with her there
I soon made out that there was a person with whom she would have
shared it.
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