She took in the proposal as if it were almost too charming to be true; and there had perhaps never yet been for her companion so unexpected a moment of pride--so fine, so odd a case, at any rate, as his finding himself thus able to offer to a person in such universal possession a new, a rare amusement.

She had heard of the happy spot, but she asked him in reply to a further question how in the world he could suppose her to have been there.

He supposed himself to have supposed that Chad might have taken her, and she guessed this the next moment to his no small discomfort.
"Ah, let me explain," she smiled, "that I don't go about with him in public; I never have such chances--not having them otherwise--and it's just the sort of thing that, as a quiet creature living in my hole, I adore." It was more than kind of him to have thought of it--though, frankly, if he asked whether she had time she hadn't a single minute.
That however made no difference--she'd throw everything over.

Every duty at home, domestic, maternal, social, awaited her; but it was a case for a high line.

Her affairs would go to smash, but hadn't one a right to one's snatch of scandal when one was prepared to pay?
It was on this pleasant basis of costly disorder, consequently, that they eventually seated themselves, on either side of a small table, at a window adjusted to the busy quay and the shining barge-burdened Seine; where, for an hour, in the matter of letting himself go, of diving deep, Strether was to feel he had touched bottom.