“So that it’s really as if you had nailed him?”
“Quite really as if—! I told him I should curse him.”
“Oh,” she smiled, “you have done it.” And then having thought again: “You can’t after that propose—!” Yet she scanned his face.
“Propose again to Mrs. Newsome?”
She hesitated afresh, but she brought it out. “I’ve never believed, you know, that you did propose. I always believed it was really she—and, so far as that goes, I can understand it. What I mean is,” she explained, “that with such a spirit—the spirit of curses!—your breach is past mending. She has only to know what you’ve done to him never again to raise a finger.”
“I’ve done,” said Strether, “what I could—one can’t do more. He protests his devotion and his horror. But I’m not sure I’ve saved him. He protests too much. He asks how one can dream of his being tired. But he has all life before him.”
Maria saw what he meant. “He’s formed to please.”
“And it’s our friend who has formed him.” Strether felt in it the strange irony.
“So it’s scarcely his fault!”
“It’s at any rate his danger. I mean,” said Strether, “it’s hers. But she knows it.”