"
Her friend considered. "I had phases. I had flights."
"Yes, but things must have a basis."
"A basis seemed to me just what her beauty supplied."
"Her beauty of person?"
"Well, her beauty of everything. The impression she makes. She
has such variety and yet such harmony."
She considered him with one of her deep returns of indulgence--
returns out of all proportion to the irritations they flooded over.
"You're complete."
"You're always too personal," he good-humouredly said; "but that's
precisely how I wondered and wandered."
"If you mean," she went on, "that she was from the first for you
the most charming woman in the world, nothing's more simple. Only
that was an odd foundation."
"For what I reared on it?"
"For what you didn't!"
"Well, it was all not a fixed quantity. And it had for me--it has
still--such elements of strangeness. Her greater age than his, her
different world, traditions, association; her other opportunities,
liabilities, standards."
His friend listened with respect to his enumeration of these
disparities; then she disposed of them at a stroke. "Those things
are nothing when a woman's hit. It's very awful. She was hit."
Strether, on his side, did justice to that plea.
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