“Well,” Strether presently concluded, “nothing could really hurt you but his marrying.”
She gave a strange light laugh. “Putting aside what may really hurt him.”
But her friend looked at her as if he had thought of that too. “The question will come up, of course, of the future that you yourself offer him.”
She was leaning back now, but she fully faced him. “Well, let it come up!”
“The point is that it’s for Chad to make of it what he can. His being proof against marriage will show what he does make.”
“If he is proof, yes”—she accepted the proposition. “But for myself,” she added, “the question is what you make.”
“Ah I make nothing. It’s not my affair.”
“I beg your pardon. It’s just there that, since you’ve taken it up and are committed to it, it most intensely becomes yours. You’re not saving me, I take it, for your interest in myself, but for your interest in our friend. The one’s at any rate wholly dependent on the other. You can’t in honour not see me through,” she wound up, “because you can’t in honour not see him.”
Strange and beautiful to him was her quiet soft acuteness. The thing that most moved him was really that she was so deeply serious. She had none of the portentous forms of it, but he had never come in contact, it struck him, with a force brought to so fine a head. Mrs. Newsome, goodness knew, was serious; but it was nothing to this. He took it all in, he saw it all together. “No,” he mused, “I can’t in honour not see him.”
Her face affected him as with an exquisite light. “You will then?”