“Oh that they shouldn’t come is as yet too much to ask. What I attend to is that they come quickly and return still more so. I meet them to help it to be over as soon as possible, and though I don’t stop them I’ve my way of putting them through. That’s my little system; and, if you want to know,” said Maria Gostrey, “it’s my real secret, my innermost mission and use. I only seem, you see, to beguile and approve; but I’ve thought it all out and I’m working all the while underground. I can’t perhaps quite give you my formula, but I think that practically I succeed. I send you back spent. So you stay back. Passed through my hands—” “We don’t turn up again?” The further she went the further he always saw himself able to follow. “I don’t want your formula—I feel quite enough, as I hinted yesterday, your abysses. Spent!” he echoed. “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. It became, on her taking the risk of the deviation imposed on him by her insidious arrangement of his morning meal, a point of honour for her not to fail with Waymarsh of the larger success too; and her subsequent boast to Strether was that she had made their friend fare—and quite without his knowing what was the matter—as Major Pendennis would have fared at the Megatherium. She had made him breakfast like a gentleman, and it was nothing, she forcibly asserted, to what she would yet make him do. She made him participate in the slow reiterated ramble with which, for Strether, the new day amply filled itself; and it was by her art that he somehow had the air, on the ramparts and in the Rows, of carrying a point of his own.