But his friend none the less went on. “Do you want Mrs. Newsome—after such a way of treating you?”
It was a straighter mode of dealing with this lady than they had as yet—such was their high form—permitted themselves; but it seemed not wholly for this that he delayed a moment. “I dare say it has been, after all, the only way she could have imagined.”
“And does that make you want her any more?”
“I’ve tremendously disappointed her,” Strether thought it worth while to mention.
“Of course you have. That’s rudimentary; that was plain to us long ago. But isn’t it almost as plain,” Maria went on, “that you’ve even yet your straight remedy? Really drag him away, as I believe you still can, and you’d cease to have to count with her disappointment.”
“Ah then,” he laughed, “I should have to count with yours!”
But this barely struck her now. “What, in that case, should you call counting? You haven’t come out where you are, I think, to please me.”
“Oh,” he insisted, “that too, you know, has been part of it. I can’t separate—it’s all one; and that’s perhaps why, as I say, I don’t understand.” But he was ready to declare again that this didn’t in the least matter; all the more that, as he affirmed, he hadn’t really as yet “come out.” “She gives me after all, on its coming to the pinch, a last mercy, another chance. They don’t sail, you see, for five or six weeks more, and they haven’t—she admits that—expected Chad would take part in their tour. It’s still open to him to join them, at the last, at Liverpool.”
Miss Gostrey considered. “How in the world is it ‘open’ unless you open it? How can he join them at Liverpool if he but sinks deeper into his situation here?”
“He has given her—as I explained to you that she let me know yesterday—his word of honour to do as I say.”