That's one of my reasons," she went on
"for admiring her so."
"Let it pass then," said Strether, "for one of mine as well. But
what would have been her temptation?"
"What are ever the temptations of women?"
He thought--but hadn't, naturally, to think too long. "Men?"
"She would have had you, with it, more for herself. But she saw
she could have you without it."
"Oh 'have' me!" Strether a trifle ambiguously sighed. "YOU," he
handsomely declared, "would have had me at any rate WITH it."
"Oh 'have' you!"--she echoed it as he had done. "I do have you,
however," she less ironically said, "from the moment you express a
wish."
He stopped before her, full of the disposition. "I'll express fifty."
Which indeed begot in her, with a certain inconsequence, a return
of her small wail. "Ah there you are!"
There, if it were so, he continued for the rest of the time to be,
and it was as if to show her how she could still serve him that,
coming back to the departure of the Pococks, he gave her the view,
vivid with a hundred more touches than we can reproduce, of what
had happened for him that morning. He had had ten minutes with
Sarah at her hotel, ten minutes reconquered, by irresistible pressure,
from the time over which he had already described her to Miss Gostrey
as having, at the end of their interview on his own premises, passed
the great sponge of the future.
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