“But you mean then at least a good one.”
“A good woman?” She threw up her arms with a laugh. “I should call her excellent!”
“Then why does he deny her?”
Miss Gostrey thought a moment. “Because she’s too good to admit! Don’t you see,” she went on, “how she accounts for him?”
Strether clearly, more and more, did see; yet it made him also see other things. “But isn’t what we want that he shall account for her?”
“Well, he does. What you have before you is his way. You must forgive him if it isn’t quite outspoken. In Paris such debts are tacit.”
Strether could imagine; but still—! “Even when the woman’s good?”
Again she laughed out. “Yes, and even when the man is! There’s always a caution in such cases,” she more seriously explained—“for what it may seem to show. There’s nothing that’s taken as showing so much here as sudden unnatural goodness.”
“Ah then you’re speaking now,” Strether said, “of people who are not nice.”
“I delight,” she replied, “in your classifications. But do you want me,” she asked, “to give you in the matter, on this ground, the wisest advice I’m capable of? Don’t consider her, don’t judge her at all in herself. Consider her and judge her only in Chad.”