“It’s she who hasn’t sinned,” Strether replied. “I’ve sinned the most.” “Ah,” Miss Gostrey cynically laughed, “what a picture of _her!_ Have you robbed the widow and the orphan?” “I’ve sinned enough,” said Strether. “Enough for whom? Enough for what?” “Well, to be where I am.” “Thank you!” They were disturbed at this moment by the passage between their knees and the back of the seats before them of a gentleman who had been absent during a part of the performance and who now returned for the close; but the interruption left Miss Gostrey time, before the subsequent hush, to express as a sharp finality her sense of the moral of all their talk. “I knew you had something up your sleeve!” This finality, however, left them in its turn, at the end of the play, as disposed to hang back as if they had still much to say; so that they easily agreed to let every one go before them—they found an interest in waiting. They made out from the lobby that the night had turned to rain; yet Miss Gostrey let her friend know that he wasn’t to see her home. He was simply to put her, by herself, into a four-wheeler; she liked so in London, of wet nights after wild pleasures, thinking things over, on the return, in lonely four-wheelers. This was her great time, she intimated, for pulling herself together. The delays caused by the weather, the struggle for vehicles at the door, gave them occasion to subside on a divan at the back of the vestibule and just beyond the reach of the fresh damp gusts from the street. Here Strether’s comrade resumed that free handling of the subject to which his own imagination of it already owed so much. “Does your young friend in Paris like you?” It had almost, after the interval, startled him. “Oh I hope not! Why _should_ he?” “Why shouldn’t he?” Miss Gostrey asked. “That you’re coming down on him need have nothing to do with it.” “You see more in it,” he presently returned, “than I.” “Of course I see _you_ in it.” “Well then you see more in ‘me’!” “Than you see in yourself? Very likely. That’s always one’s right. What I was thinking of,” she explained, “is the possible particular effect on him of his _milieu_.” “Oh his _milieu_—!” Strether really felt he could imagine it better now than three hours before. “Do you mean it can only have been so lowering?” “Why that’s my very starting-point.” “Yes, but you start so far back. What do his letters say?” “Nothing. He practically ignores us—or spares us. He doesn’t write.” “I see. But there are all the same,” she went on, “two quite distinct things that—given the wonderful place he’s in—may have happened to him. One is that he may have got brutalised. The other is that he may have got refined.” Strether stared—this _was_ a novelty. “Refined?” “Oh,” she said quietly, “there _are_ refinements.” The way of it made him, after looking at her, break into a laugh. “_You_ have them!” “As one of the signs,” she continued in the same tone, “they constitute perhaps the worst.”