The fire, under the low white marble, undraped and academic, had burnt down to the silver ashes of light wood, one of the windows, at a distance, stood open to the mildness and stillness, out of which, in the short pauses, came the faint sound, pleasant and homely, almost rustic, of a plash and a clatter of sabots from some coach-house on the other side of the court.
Madame de Vionnet, while Strether sat there, wasn't to shift her posture by an inch.

"I don't think you seriously believe in what you're doing," she said; "but all the same, you know, I'm going to treat you quite as if I did." "By which you mean," Strether directly replied, "quite as if you didn't! I assure you it won't make the least difference with me how you treat me." "Well," she said, taking that menace bravely and philosophically enough, "the only thing that really matters is that you shall get on with me." "Ah but I don't!" he immediately returned.
It gave her another pause; which, however, she happily enough shook off.

"Will you consent to go on with me a little--provisionally--as if you did ?" Then it was that he saw how she had decidedly come all the way; and there accompanied it an extraordinary sense of her raising from somewhere below him her beautiful suppliant eyes.

He might have been perched at his door-step or at his window and she standing in the road.
For a moment he let her stand and couldn't moreover have spoken.

It had been sad, of a sudden, with a sadness that was like a cold breath in his face.