“Nicer than being tied up to Marie?”
“Yes—than the discomfort of an attachment to a person he can never hope, short of a catastrophe, to marry. And he was quite right,” said Strether. “It would certainly have been nicer. Even when a thing’s already nice there mostly is some other thing that would have been nicer—or as to which we wonder if it wouldn’t. But his question was all the same a dream. He couldn’t care in that way. He is tied up to Marie. The relation is too special and has gone too far. It’s the very basis, and his recent lively contribution toward establishing Jeanne in life has been his definite and final acknowledgement to Madame de Vionnet that he has ceased squirming. I doubt meanwhile,” he went on, “if Sarah has at all directly attacked him.”
His companion brooded. “But won’t he wish for his own satisfaction to make his ground good to her?”
“No—he’ll leave it to me, he’ll leave everything to me. I ‘sort of’ feel”—he worked it out—“that the whole thing will come upon me. Yes, I shall have every inch and every ounce of it. I shall be used for it—!” And Strether lost himself in the prospect. Then he fancifully expressed the issue. “To the last drop of my blood.”
Maria, however, roundly protested. “Ah you’ll please keep a drop for me. I shall have a use for it!”—which she didn’t however follow up. She had come back the next moment to another matter. “Mrs. Pocock, with her brother, is trusting only to her general charm?”
“So it would seem.”
“And the charm’s not working?”
Well, Strether put it otherwise, “She’s sounding the note of home—which is the very best thing she can do.”
“The best for Madame de Vionnet?”
“The best for home itself. The natural one; the right one.”