Chad turns out at any rate right and good and disconcerting, while
what she was all prepared for, primed and girded and wound up for,
was to deal with him as the general opposite."
"Yet wasn't her whole point"--Strether weighed it--"that he was to
be, that he COULD be, made better, redeemed?"
Little Bilham fixed it all a moment, and then with a small
headshake that diffused a tenderness: "She's too late. Too late
for the miracle."
"Yes"--his companion saw enough. "Still, if the worst fault of his
condition is that it may be all there for her to profit by--?"
"Oh she doesn't want to 'profit,' in that flat way. She doesn't
want to profit by another woman's work--she wants the miracle to
have been her own miracle. THAT'S what she's too late for."
Strether quite felt how it all fitted, yet there seemed one loose
piece. "I'm bound to say, you know, that she strikes one, on these
lines, as fastidious--what you call here difficile."
Little Bilham tossed up his chin. "Of course she's difficile--on
any lines! What else in the world ARE our Mamies--the real, the
right ones?"
"I see, I see," our friend repeated, charmed by the responsive
wisdom he had ended by so richly extracting. "Mamie is one of the
real and the right.
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