“Well,” she said, taking that menace bravely and philosophically enough, “the only thing that really matters is that you shall get on with me.”
“Ah but I don’t!” he immediately returned.
It gave her another pause; which, however, she happily enough shook off. “Will you consent to go on with me a little—provisionally—as if you did?”
Then it was that he saw how she had decidedly come all the way; and there accompanied it an extraordinary sense of her raising from somewhere below him her beautiful suppliant eyes. He might have been perched at his door-step or at his window and she standing in the road. For a moment he let her stand and couldn’t moreover have spoken. It had been sad, of a sudden, with a sadness that was like a cold breath in his face. “What can I do,” he finally asked, “but listen to you as I promised Chadwick?”
“Ah but what I’m asking you,” she quickly said, “isn’t what Mr. Newsome had in mind.” She spoke at present, he saw, as if to take courageously all her risk. “This is my own idea and a different thing.”
It gave poor Strether in truth—uneasy as it made him too—something of the thrill of a bold perception justified. “Well,” he answered kindly enough, “I was sure a moment since that some idea of your own had come to you.”
She seemed still to look up at him, but now more serenely. “I made out you were sure—and that helped it to come. So you see,” she continued, “we do get on.”
“Oh but it appears to me I don’t at all meet your request. How can I when I don’t understand it?”
“It isn’t at all necessary you should understand; it will do quite well enough if you simply remember it. Only feel I trust you—and for nothing so tremendous after all. Just,” she said with a wonderful smile, “for common civility.”
Strether had a long pause while they sat again face to face, as they had sat, scarce less conscious, before the poor lady had crossed the stream. She was the poor lady for Strether now because clearly she had some trouble, and her appeal to him could only mean that her trouble was deep. He couldn’t help it; it wasn’t his fault; he had done nothing; but by a turn of the hand she had somehow made their encounter a relation. And the relation profited by a mass of things that were not strictly in it or of it; by the very air in which they sat, by the high cold delicate room, by the world outside and the little plash in the court, by the First Empire and the relics in the stiff cabinets, by matters as far off as those and by others as near as the unbroken clasp of her hands in her lap and the look her expression had of being most natural when her eyes were most fixed. “You count upon me of course for something really much greater than it sounds.”