“About everything.”
“But you admire her?”
He gave his friend a glance as to show how he could bear this “I’m perhaps a little afraid of her.”
“Oh,” said Miss Gostrey, “I see her from here! You may say then I see very fast and very far, but I’ve already shown you I do. The young man and the two ladies,” she went on, “are at any rate all the family?”
“Quite all. His father has been dead ten years, and there’s no brother, nor any other sister. They’d do,” said Strether, “anything in the world for him.”
“And you’d do anything in the world for them?”
He shifted again; she had made it perhaps just a shade too affirmative for his nerves. “Oh I don’t know!”
“You’d do at any rate this, and the ‘anything’ they’d do is represented by their making you do it.”
“Ah they couldn’t have come—either of them. They’re very busy people and Mrs. Newsome in particular has a large full life. She’s moreover highly nervous—and not at all strong.”
“You mean she’s an American invalid?”