Whenever she has done that, you see, there's no room
left; no margin, as it were, for any alteration. She's filled as
full, packed as tight, as she'll hold and if you wish to get
anything more or different either out or in--"
"You've got to make over altogether the woman herself?"
"What it comes to," said Strether, "is that you've got morally and
intellectually to get rid of her."
"Which would appear," Maria returned, "to be practically what
you've done."
But her friend threw back his head. "I haven't touched her. She
won't BE touched. I see it now as I've never done; and she hangs
together with a perfection of her own," he went on, "that does
suggest a kind of wrong in ANY change of her composition. It was
at any rate," he wound up, "the woman herself, as you call her the
whole moral and intellectual being or block, that Sarah brought me
over to take or to leave."
It turned Miss Gostrey to deeper thought. "Fancy having to take at the
point of the bayonet a whole moral and intellectual being or block!"
"It was in fact," said Strether, "what, at home, I HAD done.
But somehow over there I didn't quite know it."
"One never does, I suppose," Miss Gostrey concurred, "realise in
advance, in such a case, the size, as you may say, of the block.
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