Maria stared. “But if you say nothing!”
Well, he as usual walked about on it. “I did say something this morning. I gave her my answer—the word I had promised her after hearing from himself what he had promised. What she demanded of me yesterday, you’ll remember, was the engagement then and there to make him take up this vow.”
“Well then,” Miss Gostrey enquired, “was the purpose of your visit to her only to decline?”
“No; it was to ask, odd as that may seem to you, for another delay.”
“Ah that’s weak!”
“Precisely!” She had spoken with impatience, but, so far as that at least, he knew where he was. “If I am weak I want to find it out. If I don’t find it out I shall have the comfort, the little glory, of thinking I’m strong.”
“It’s all the comfort, I judge,” she returned, “that you will have!”
“At any rate,” he said, “it will have been a month more. Paris may grow, from day to day, hot and dusty, as you say; but there are other things that are hotter and dustier. I’m not afraid to stay on; the summer here must be amusing in a wild—if it isn’t a tame—way of its own; the place at no time more picturesque. I think I shall like it. And then,” he benevolently smiled for her, “there will be always you.”
“Oh,” she objected, “it won’t be as a part of the picturesqueness that I shall stay, for I shall be the plainest thing about you. You may, you see, at any rate,” she pursued, “have nobody else. Madame de Vionnet may very well be going off, mayn’t she?—and Mr. Newsome by the same stroke: unless indeed you’ve had an assurance from them to the contrary. So that if your idea’s to stay for them”—it was her duty to suggest it—“you may be left in the lurch. Of course if they do stay”—she kept it up—“they would be part of the picturesqueness. Or else indeed you might join them somewhere.”
Strether seemed to face it as if it were a happy thought; but the next moment he spoke more critically. “Do you mean that they’ll probably go off together?”