He had caught her by not announcing
himself, had found her in her sitting-room with a dressmaker and a
lingere whose accounts she appeared to have been more or less
ingenuously settling and who soon withdrew. Then he had explained
to her how he had succeeded, late the night before, in keeping
his promise of seeing Chad. "I told her I'd take it all."
"You'd 'take' it?"
"Why if he doesn't go."
Maria waited. "And who takes it if he does?" she enquired with a
certain grimness of gaiety.
"Well," said Strether, "I think I take, in any event, everything."
"By which I suppose you mean," his companion brought out after a
moment, "that you definitely understand you now lose everything."
He stood before her again. "It does come perhaps to the same
thing. But Chad, now that he has seen, doesn't really want it."
She could believe that, but she made, as always, for clearness.
"Still, what, after all, HAS he seen?"
"What they want of him. And it's enough."
"It contrasts so unfavourably with what Madame de Vionnet wants?"
"It contrasts--just so; all round, and tremendously."
"Therefore, perhaps, most of all with what YOU want?"
"Oh," said Strether, "what I want is a thing I've ceased to measure
or even to understand.
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