Strether took this more lightly. "Oh I jam down the pedal too!"

"Well," she lucidly returned, "we must from this moment bear on it
together with all our might." And she forged ahead. "Have they
money?"

But it was as if, while her energetic image still held him, her
enquiry fell short. "Mrs. Newsome," he wished further to explain,
"hasn't moreover your courage on the question of contact. If she
had come it would have been to see the person herself."

"The woman? Ah but that's courage."

"No--it's exaltation, which is a very different thing. Courage,"
he, however, accommodatingly threw out, "is what YOU have."

She shook her head. "You say that only to patch me up--to cover the
nudity of my want of exaltation. I've neither the one nor the
other. I've mere battered indifference. I see that what you mean,"
Miss Gostrey pursued, "is that if your friend HAD come she would
take great views, and the great views, to put it simply, would be
too much for her."

Strether looked amused at her notion of the simple, but he adopted
her formula. "Everything's too much for her."

"Ah then such a service as this of yours--"

"Is more for her than anything else? Yes--far more. But so long as