“Well, you see,” he partly explained, “what it comes to is that she’s all cold thought—which Sarah could serve to us cold without its really losing anything. So it is that we know what she thinks of us.” Maria had followed, but she had an arrest. “What I’ve never made out, if you come to that, is what you think—I mean you personally—of _her_. Don’t you so much, when all’s said, as care a little?” “That,” he answered with no loss of promptness, “is what even Chad himself asked me last night. He asked me if I don’t mind the loss—well, the loss of an opulent future. Which moreover,” he hastened to add, “was a perfectly natural question.” “I call your attention, all the same,” said Miss Gostrey, “to the fact that I don’t ask it. What I venture to ask is whether it’s to Mrs. Newsome herself that you’re indifferent.” “I haven’t been so”—he spoke with all assurance. “I’ve been the very opposite. I’ve been, from the first moment, preoccupied with the impression everything might be making on her—quite oppressed, haunted, tormented by it. I’ve been interested _only_ in her seeing what I’ve seen. And I’ve been as disappointed in her refusal to see it as she has been in what has appeared to her the perversity of my insistence.” “Do you mean that she has shocked you as you’ve shocked her?” Strether weighed it. “I’m probably not so shockable. But on the other hand I’ve gone much further to meet her. She, on her side, hasn’t budged an inch.” “So that you’re now at last”—Maria pointed the moral—“in the sad stage of recriminations.” “No—it’s only to you I speak. I’ve been like a lamb to Sarah. I’ve only put my back to the wall. It’s to _that_ one naturally staggers when one has been violently pushed there.” She watched him a moment. “Thrown over?” “Well, as I feel I’ve landed somewhere I think I must have been thrown.” She turned it over, but as hoping to clarify much rather than to harmonise. “The thing is that I suppose you’ve been disappointing—” “Quite from the very first of my arrival? I dare say. I admit I was surprising even to myself.” “And then of course,” Maria went on, “I had much to do with it.” “With my being surprising—?” “That will do,” she laughed, “if you’re too delicate to call it _my_ being! Naturally,” she added, “you came over more or less for surprises.” “Naturally!”—he valued the reminder. “But they were to have been all for you”—she continued to piece it out—“and none of them for _her_.”