It turned Miss Gostrey to deeper thought. “Fancy having to take at the point of the bayonet a whole moral and intellectual being or block!”
“ It was in fact,” said Strether, “what, at home, I had done. But somehow over there I didn’t quite know it.”
“ One never does, I suppose,” Miss Gostrey concurred, “realise in advance, in such a case, the size, as you may say, of the block. Little by little it looms up. It has been looming for you more and more till at last you see it all.”
“ I see it all,” he absently echoed, while his eyes might have been fixing some particularly large iceberg in a cool blue northern sea. “It’s magnificent!” he then rather oddly exclaimed.
But his friend, who was used to this kind of inconsequence in him, kept the thread. “There’s nothing so magnifi
