Strether seemed for a moment to look at it; but it brought him to a sigh. “Oh but she’s not dead! It will take more than this to kill her.” His companion had a pause that might have been for pity. “No, I can’t pretend I think she’s finished—or that it’s for more than to-night.” She remained pensive as if with the same compunction. “It’s only up to her chin.” Then again for the fun of it: “She can breathe.” “She can breathe!”—he echoed it in the same spirit. “And do you know,” he went on, “what’s really all this time happening to me?—through the beauty of music, the gaiety of voices, the uproar in short of our revel and the felicity of your wit? The sound of Mrs. Pocock’s respiration drowns for me, I assure you, every other. It’s literally all I hear.” She focussed him with her clink of chains. “Well—!” she breathed ever so kindly. “Well, what?” “She _is_ free from her chin up,” she mused; “and that _will_ be enough for her.” “It will be enough for me!” Strether ruefully laughed. “Waymarsh has really,” he then asked, “brought her to see you?” “Yes—but that’s the worst of it. I could do you no good. And yet I tried hard.” Strether wondered. “And how did you try?” “Why I didn’t speak of you.” “I see. That was better.” “Then what would have been worse? For speaking or silent,” she lightly wailed, “I somehow ‘compromise.’ And it has never been any one but you.” “That shows”—he was magnanimous—“that it’s something not in you, but in one’s self. It’s _my_ fault.” She was silent a little. “No, it’s Mr. Waymarsh’s. It’s the fault of his having brought her.” “Ah then,” said Strether good-naturedly, “why _did_ he bring her?” “He couldn’t afford not to.” “Oh you were a trophy—one of the spoils of conquest? But why in that case, since you do ‘compromise’—” “Don’t I compromise _him_ as well? I do compromise him as well,” Miss Barrace smiled. “I compromise him as hard as I can. But for Mr. Waymarsh it isn’t fatal. It’s—so far as his wonderful relation with Mrs. Pocock is concerned—favourable.” And then, as he still seemed slightly at sea: “The man who had succeeded with _me_, don’t you see? For her to get him from me was such an added incentive.” Strether saw, but as if his path was still strewn with surprises. “It’s ‘from’ you then that she has got him?” She was amused at his momentary muddle. “You can fancy my fight! She believes in her triumph. I think it has been part of her joy. “Oh her joy!” Strether sceptically murmured. “Well, she thinks she has had her own way. And what’s to-night for her but a kind of apotheosis? Her frock’s really good.” “Good enough to go to heaven in? For after a real apotheosis,” Strether went on, “there’s nothing _but_ heaven. For Sarah there’s only to-morrow.” “And you mean that she won’t find to-morrow heavenly?”