produce on me by alluding to her in such terms? It’s as if you had some motive in not recognising all she has done for your brother, and so shut your eyes to each side of the matter, in order, whichever side comes up, to get rid of the other. I don’t, you must allow me to say, see how you can with any pretence to candour get rid of the side nearest you.” “Near me—_that_ sort of thing?” And Sarah gave a jerk back of her head that well might have nullified any active proximity. It kept her friend himself at his distance, and he respected for a moment the interval. Then with a last persuasive effort he bridged it. “You don’t, on your honour, appreciate Chad’s fortunate development?” “Fortunate?” she echoed again. And indeed she was prepared. “I call it hideous.” Her departure had been for some minutes marked as imminent, and she was already at the door that stood open to the court, from the threshold of which she delivered herself of this judgement. It rang out so loud as to produce for the time the hush of everything else. Strether quite, as an effect of it, breathed less bravely; he could acknowledge it, but simply enough. “Oh if you think _that_—!” “Then all’s at an end? So much the better. I do think that!” She passed out as she spoke and took her way straight across the court, beyond which, separated from them by the deep arch of the _porte-cochère_ the low victoria that had conveyed her from her own hotel was drawn up. She made for it with decision, and the manner of her break, the sharp shaft of her rejoinder, had an intensity by which Strether was at first kept in arrest. She had let fly at him as from a stretched cord, and it took him a minute to recover from the sense of being pierced. It was not the penetration of surprise; it was that, much more, of certainty; his case being put for him as he had as yet only put it to himself. She was away at any rate; she had distanced him—with rather a grand spring, an effect of pride and ease, after all; she had got into her carriage before he could overtake her, and the vehicle was already in motion. He stopped halfway; he stood there in the court only seeing her go and noting that she gave him no other look. The way he had put it to himself was that all quite _might_ be at an end. Each of her movements, in this resolute rupture, reaffirmed, re-enforced that idea. Sarah passed out of sight in the sunny street while, planted there in the centre of the comparatively grey court, he continued merely to look before him. It probably _was_ all at an end. Book Eleventh [Note: In the 1909 New York Edition the following two chapters were placed in the reverse of the order appearing below. Since 1950, most scholars have agreed, because of the internal evidence of the two chapters, that an editorial error caused them to be printed in reverse order. This Etext, like other editions of the past four decades, corrects the apparent error.—Richard D. Hathaway, preparer of this electronic text] I