"You assist her to expiate--which is rather hard when you've yourself not sinned." "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.