He carefully distinguished. “There’s nothing she likes less than to be called one, but she would consent to be one of those things, I think,” he laughed, “if it were the only way to be the other.”
“Consent to be an American in order to be an invalid?”
“No,” said Strether, “the other way round. She’s at any rate delicate sensitive high-strung. She puts so much of herself into everything—”
Ah Maria knew these things! “That she has nothing left for anything else? Of course she hasn’t. To whom do you say it? High-strung? Don’t I spend my life, for them, jamming down the pedal? I see moreover how it has told on you.”
Strether took this more lightly. “Oh I jam down the pedal too!”
“Well,” she lucidly returned, “we must from this moment bear on it together with all our might.” And she forged ahead. “Have they money?”
But it was as if, while her energetic image still held him, her enquiry fell short. “Mrs. Newsome,” he wished further to explain, “hasn’t moreover your courage on the question of contact. If she had come it would have been to see the person herself.”
“The woman? Ah but that’s courage.”
“No—it’s exaltation, which is a very different thing. Courage,” he, however, accommodatingly threw out, “is what you have.”
She shook her head. “You say that only to patch me up—to cover the nudity of my want of exaltation. I’ve neither the one nor the other. I’ve mere battered indifference. I see that what you mean,” Miss Gostrey pursued, “is that if your friend had come she would take great views, and the great views, to put it simply, would be too much for her.”