"If that's how you're arranging so subtly to send me I thank you for the warning." For a minute, amid the pleasantness--poetry in tariffed items, but all the more, for guests already convicted, a challenge to consumption--they smiled at each other in confirmed fellowship.

"Do you call it subtly?
It's a plain poor tale.

Besides, you're a special case." "Oh special cases--that's weak!" She was weak enough, further still, to defer her journey and agree to accompany the gentlemen on their own, might a separate carriage mark her independence; though it was in spite of this to befall after luncheon that she went off alone and that, with a tryst taken for a day of her company in London, they lingered another night.

She had, during the morning--spent in a way that he was to remember later on as the very climax of his foretaste, as warm with presentiments, with what he would have called collapses--had all sorts of things out with Strether; and among them the fact that though there was never a moment of her life when she wasn't "due" somewhere, there was yet scarce a perfidy to others of which she wasn't capable for his sake.

She explained moreover that wherever she happened to be she found a dropped thread to pick up, a ragged edge to repair, some familiar appetite in ambush, jumping out as she approached, yet appeasable with a temporary biscuit.