She was seated, near the fire, on a small stuffed and fringed chair one of the few modern articles in the room, and she leaned back in it with her hands clasped in her lap and no movement, in all her person, but the fine prompt play of her deep young face. The fire, under the low white marble, undraped and academic, had burnt down to the silver ashes of light wood, one of the windows, at a distance, stood open to the mildness and stillness, out of which, in the short pauses, came the faint sound, pleasant and homely, almost rustic, of a plash and a clatter of _sabots_ from some coach-house on the other side of the court. Madame de Vionnet, while Strether sat there, wasn’t to shift her posture by an inch. “I don’t think you seriously believe in what you’re doing,” she said; “but all the same, you know, I’m going to treat you quite as if I did.” “By which you mean,” Strether directly replied, “quite as if you didn’t! I assure you it won’t make the least difference with me how you treat me.” “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.”