No one has ever had so much."
It struck him for a moment. "That's what Chad also thinks."
"There YOU are then--though it isn't for him to complain of it!"
"Oh he doesn't complain of it," said Strether.
"That's all that would be wanting! But apropos of what," Maria went
on, "did the question come up?"
"Well, of his asking me what it is I gain."
She had a pause. "Then as I've asked you too it settles my case.
Oh you HAVE," she repeated, "treasures of imagination."
But he had been for an instant thinking away from this, and he came
up in another place. "And yet Mrs. Newsome--it's a thing to
remember--HAS imagined, did, that is, imagine, and apparently still
does, horrors about what I should have found. I was booked, by her
vision--extraordinarily intense, after all--to find them; and that
I didn't, that I couldn't, that, as she evidently felt, I wouldn't--
this evidently didn't at all, as they say, 'suit' her book.
It was more than she could bear. That was her disappointment."
"You mean you were to have found Chad himself horrible?"
"I was to have found the woman."
"Horrible?"
"Found her as she imagined her." And Strether paused as if for his
own expression of it he could add no touch to that picture.
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