She had a pause. “Then as I’ve asked you too it settles my case. Oh you have,” she repeated, “treasures of imagination.”
But he had been for an instant thinking away from this, and he came up in another place. “And yet Mrs. Newsome—it’s a thing to remember—has imagined, did, that is, imagine, and apparently still does, horrors about what I should have found. I was booked, by her vision—extraordinarily intense, after all—to find them; and that I didn’t, that I couldn’t, that, as she evidently felt, I wouldn’t—this evidently didn’t at all, as they say, ‘suit’ her book. It was more than she could bear. That was her disappointment.”
“You mean you were to have found Chad himself horrible?”
“I was to have found the woman.”
“Horrible?”
“Found her as she imagined her.” And Strether paused as if for his own expression of it he could add no touch to that picture.
His companion had meanwhile thought. “She imagined stupidly—so it comes to the same thing.”
“Stupidly? Oh!” said Strether.
But she insisted. “She imagined meanly.”
He had it, however, better. “It couldn’t but be ignorantly.”