incalculable, her desire for the information dropped and her
attitude to the question converted itself into a positive
cultivation of ignorance. In ignorance she could humour her fancy,
and that proved a useful freedom. She could treat the little
nameless object as indeed unnameable--she could make their
abstention enormously definite. There might indeed have been for
Strether the portent of this in what she next said.

"Is it perhaps then because it's so bad--because your industry as
you call it, IS so vulgar--that Mr. Chad won't come back? Does he
feel the taint? Is he staying away not to be mixed up in it?"

"Oh," Strether laughed, "it wouldn't appear--would it?--that he
feels 'taints'! He's glad enough of the money from it, and the
money's his whole basis. There's appreciation in that--I mean as to
the allowance his mother has hitherto made him. She has of course
the resource of cutting this allowance off; but even then he has
unfortunately, and on no small scale, his independent supply--money
left him by his grandfather, her own father."

"Wouldn't the fact you mention then," Miss Gostrey asked, "make it
just more easy for him to be particular? Isn't he conceivable as
fastidious about the source--the apparent and public source--of his
income?"

Strether was able quite good-humouredly to entertain the
proposition. "The source of his grandfather's wealth--and thereby
of his own share in it--was not particularly noble."

"And what source was it?"