" She remained pensive as if with the same compunction.
"It's only up to her chin." Then again for the fun of it: "She
can breathe."
"She can breathe!"--he echoed it in the same spirit. "And do you
know," he went on, "what's really all this time happening to me?--
through the beauty of music, the gaiety of voices, the uproar in
short of our revel and the felicity of your wit? The sound of
Mrs. Pocock's respiration drowns for me, I assure you, every other.
It's literally all I hear."
She focussed him with her clink of chains. "Well--!" she breathed
ever so kindly.
"Well, what?"
"She IS free from her chin up," she mused; "and that WILL be enough
for her."
"It will be enough for me!" Strether ruefully laughed. "Waymarsh
has really," he then asked, "brought her to see you?"
"Yes--but that's the worst of it. I could do you no good. And yet
I tried hard."
Strether wondered. "And how did you try?"
"Why I didn't speak of you."
"I see. That was better."
"Then what would have been worse? For speaking or silent," she
lightly wailed, "I somehow 'compromise.' And it has never been any
one but you."
"That shows"--he was magnanimous--"that it's something not in you,
but in one's self. It's MY fault.
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