Volume II

Book Seventh

Book Eighth

Book Ninth

Book Tenth

Book Book Eleventh

Book Twelfth

Preface

Nothing is more easy than to state the subject of “The Ambassadors,”

which first appeared in twelve numbers of _The North American Review_

(1903) and was published as a whole the same year. The situation

involved is gathered up betimes, that is in the second chapter of Book

Fifth, for the reader’s benefit, into as few words as possible—planted

or “sunk,” stiffly and saliently, in the centre of the current, almost

perhaps to the obstruction of traffic. Never can a composition of this

sort have sprung straighter from a dropped grain of suggestion, and

never can that grain, developed, overgrown and smothered, have yet

lurked more in the mass as an independent particle. The whole case, in

fine, is in Lambert Strether’s irrepressible outbreak to little Bilham

on the Sunday afternoon in Gloriani’s garden, the candour with which he

yields, for his young friend’s enlightenment, to the charming

admonition of that crisis. The idea of the tale resides indeed in the

very fact that an hour of such unprecedented ease should have been felt

by him _as_ a crisis, and he is at pains to express it for us as neatly

as we could desire. The remarks to which he thus gives utterance

contain the essence of “The Ambassadors,” his fingers close, before he

has done, round the stem of the full-blown flower; which, after that

fashion, he continues officiously to present to us. “Live all you can;

it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in

particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what

_have_ you had? I’m too old—too old at any rate for what I see. What

one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the

illusion of freedom; therefore don’t, like me to-day, be without the

memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or

too intelligent to have it, and now I’m a case of reaction against the

mistake. Do what you like so long as you don’t make it. For it _was_ a

mistake. Live, live!” Such is the gist of Strether’s appeal to the

impressed youth, whom he likes and whom he desires to befriend; the

word “mistake” occurs several times, it will be seen, in the course of

his remarks—which gives the measure of the signal warning he feels

attached to his case. He has accordingly missed too much, though

perhaps after all constitutionally qualified for a better part, and he

wakes up to it in conditions that press the spring of a terrible

question. _Would_ there yet perhaps be time for reparation?—reparation,

that is, for the injury done his character; for the affront, he is

quite ready to say, so stupidly put upon it and in which he has even

himself had so clumsy a hand? The answer to which is that he now at all

events _sees_; so that the business of my tale and the march of my

action, not to say the precious moral of everything, is just my

demonstration of this process of vision.

Nothing can exceed the closeness with which the whole fits again into

its germ. That had been given me bodily, as usual, by the spoken word,

for I was to take the image over exactly as I happened to have met it.

A friend had repeated to me, with great appreciation, a thing or two

said to him by a man of distinction, much his senior, and to which a

sense akin to that of Strether’s melancholy eloquence might be

imputed—said as chance would have, and so easily might, in Paris, and

in a charming old garden attached to a house of art, and on a Sunday

afternoon of summer, many persons of great interest being present. The

observation there listened to and gathered up had contained part of the

“note” that I was to recognise on the spot as to my purpose—had

contained in fact the greater part; the rest was in the place and the

time and the scene they sketched: these constituents clustered and

combined to give me further support, to give me what I may call the

note absolute. There it stands, accordingly, full in the tideway;

driven in, with hard taps, like some strong stake for the noose of a

cable, the swirl of the current roundabout it. What amplified the hint

to more than the bulk of hints in general was the gift with it of the

old Paris garden, for in that token were sealed up values infinitely

precious. There was of course the seal to break and each item of the

packet to count over and handle and estimate; but somehow, in the light

of the hint, all the elements of a situation of the sort most to my

taste were there. I could even remember no occasion on which, so

confronted, I had found it of a livelier interest to take stock, in

this fashion, of suggested wealth. For I think, verily, that there are

degrees of merit in subjects—in spite of the fact that to treat even

one of the most ambiguous with due decency we must for the time, for

the feverish and prejudiced hour, at least figure its merit and its

dignity as _possibly_ absolute. What it comes to, doubtless, is that

even among the supremely good—since with such alone is it one’s theory

of one’s honour to be concerned—there is an ideal _beauty_ of goodness

the invoked action of which is to raise the artistic faith to its

maximum. Then truly, I hold, one’s theme may be said to shine, and that

of “The Ambassadors,” I confess, wore this glow for me from beginning

to end. Fortunately thus I am able to estimate this as, frankly, quite

the best, “all round,” of all my productions; any failure of that

justification would have made such an extreme of complacency publicly

fatuous.

I recall then in this connexion no moment of subjective intermittence,

never one of those alarms as for a suspected hollow beneath one’s feet,

a felt ingratitude in the scheme adopted, under which confidence fails

and opportunity seems but to mock. If the motive of “The Wings of the

Dove,” as I have noted, was to worry me at moments by a sealing-up of

its face—though without prejudice to its again, of a sudden, fairly

grimacing with expression—so in this other business I had absolute

conviction and constant clearness to deal with; it had been a frank

proposition, the whole bunch of data, installed on my premises like a

monotony of fine weather. (The order of composition, in these things, I

may mention, was reversed by the order of publication; the earlier

written of the two books having appeared as the later.) Even under the

weight of my hero’s years I could feel my postulate firm; even under

the strain of the difference between those of Madame de Vionnet and

those of Chad Newsome, a difference liable to be denounced as shocking,

I could still feel it serene. Nothing resisted, nothing betrayed, I

seem to make out, in this full and sound sense of the matter; it shed

from any side I could turn it to the same golden glow. I rejoiced in

the promise of a hero so mature, who would give me thereby the more to

bite into—since it’s only into thickened motive and accumulated

character, I think, that the painter of life bites more than a little.

My poor friend should have accumulated character, certainly; or rather

would be quite naturally and handsomely possessed of it, in the sense

that he would have, and would always have felt he had, imagination

galore, and that this yet wouldn’t have wrecked him. It was

immeasurable, the opportunity to “do” a man of imagination, for if

_there_ mightn’t be a chance to “bite,” where in the world might it be?

This personage of course, so enriched, wouldn’t give me, for his type,

imagination in _predominance_ or as his prime faculty, nor should I, in

view of other matters, have found that convenient. So particular a

luxury—some occasion, that is, for study of the high gift in _supreme_

command of a case or of a career—would still doubtless come on the day

I should be ready to pay for it; and till then might, as from far back,

remain hung up well in view and just out of reach. The comparative case

meanwhile would serve—it was only on the minor scale that I had treated

myself even to comparative cases.

I was to hasten to add however that, happy stopgaps as the minor scale

had thus yielded, the instance in hand should enjoy the advantage of

the full range of the major; since most immediately to the point was

the question of that _supplement_ of situation logically involved in

our gentleman’s impulse to deliver himself in the Paris garden on the

Sunday afternoon—or if not involved by strict logic then all ideally

and enchantingly implied in it. (I say “ideally,” because I need scarce

mention that for development, for expression of its maximum, my

glimmering story was, at the earliest stage, to have nipped the thread

of connexion with the possibilities of the actual reported speaker.

_He_ remains but the happiest of accidents; his actualities, all too

definite, precluded any range of possibilities; it had only been his

charming office to project upon that wide field of the artist’s

vision—which hangs there ever in place like the white sheet suspended

for the figures of a child’s magic-lantern—a more fantastic and more

moveable shadow.) No privilege of the teller of tales and the handler

of puppets is more delightful, or has more of the suspense and the

thrill of a game of difficulty breathlessly played, than just this

business of looking for the unseen and the occult, in a scheme

half-grasped, by the light or, so to speak, by the clinging scent, of

the gage already in hand. No dreadful old pursuit of the hidden slave

with bloodhounds and the rag of association can ever, for “excitement,”

I judge, have bettered it at its best. For the dramatist always, by the

very law of his genius, believes not only in a possible right issue

from the rightly-conceived tight place; he does much more than this—he

believes, irresistibly, in the necessary, the precious “tightness” of

the place (whatever the issue) on the strength of any respectable hint.

It being thus the respectable hint that I had with such avidity picked

up, what would be the story to which it would most inevitably form the

centre? It is part of the charm attendant on such questions that the

“story,” with the omens true, as I say, puts on from this stage the

authenticity of concrete existence. It then is, essentially—it begins

to be, though it may more or less obscurely lurk, so that the point is

not in the least what to make of it, but only, very delightfully and

very damnably, where to put one’s hand on it.

In which truth resides surely much of the interest of that admirable

mixture for salutary application which we know as art. Art deals with

what we see, it must first contribute full-handed that ingredient; it

plucks its material, otherwise expressed, in the garden of life—which

material elsewhere grown is stale and uneatable. But it has no sooner

done this than it has to take account of a _process_—from which only

when it’s the basest of the servants of man, incurring ignominious

dismissal with no “character,” does it, and whether under some muddled

pretext of morality or on any other, pusillanimously edge away. The

process, that of the expression, the literal squeezing-out, of value is

another affair—with which the happy luck of mere finding has little to

do. The joys of finding, at this stage, are pretty well over; that

quest of the subject as a whole by “matching,” as the ladies say at the

shops, the big piece with the snippet, having ended, we assume, with a

capture. The subject is found, and if the problem is then transferred

to the ground of what to do with it the field opens out for any amount

of doing. This is precisely the infusion that, as I submit, completes

the strong mixture. It is on the other hand the part of the business

that can least be likened to the chase with horn and hound. It’s all a

sedentary part—involves as much ciphering, of sorts, as would merit the

highest salary paid to a chief accountant. Not, however, that the chief

accountant hasn’t _his_ gleams of bliss; for the felicity, or at least

the equilibrium of the artist’s state dwells less, surely, in the

further delightful complications he can smuggle in than in those he

succeeds in keeping out. He sows his seed at the risk of too thick a

crop; wherefore yet again, like the gentlemen who audit ledgers, he

must keep his head at any price. In consequence of all which, for the

interest of the matter, I might seem here to have my choice of

narrating my “hunt” for Lambert Strether, of describing the capture of

the shadow projected by my friend’s anecdote, or of reporting on the

occurrences subsequent to that triumph. But I had probably best attempt

a little to glance in each direction; since it comes to me again and

again, over this licentious record, that one’s bag of adventures,

conceived or conceivable, has been only half-emptied by the mere

telling of one’s story. It depends so on what one means by that

equivocal quantity. There is the story of one’s hero, and then, thanks

to the intimate connexion of things, the story of one’s story itself. I

blush to confess it, but if one’s a dramatist one’s a dramatist, and

the latter imbroglio is liable on occasion to strike me as really the

more objective of the two.

The philosophy imputed to him in that beautiful outbreak, the hour

there, amid such happy provision, striking for him, would have been

then, on behalf of my man of imagination, to be logically and, as the

artless craft of comedy has it, “led up” to; the probable course to

such a goal, the goal of so conscious a predicament, would have in

short to be finely calculated. Where has he come from and why has he

come, what is he doing (as we Anglo-Saxons, and we only, say, in our

foredoomed clutch of exotic aids to expression) in that _galère?_ To

answer these questions plausibly, to answer them as under

cross-examination in the witness-box by counsel for the prosecution, in

other words satisfactorily to account for Strether and for his

“peculiar tone,” was to possess myself of the entire fabric. At the

same time the clue to its whereabouts would lie in a certain principle

of probability: he wouldn’t have indulged in his peculiar tone without

a reason; it would take a felt predicament or a false position to give

him so ironic an accent. One hadn’t been noting “tones” all one’s life

without recognising when one heard it the voice of the false position.

The dear man in the Paris garden was then admirably and unmistakeably

_in_ one—which was no small point gained; what next accordingly

concerned us was the determination of _this_ identity. One could only

go by probabilities, but there was the advantage that the most general

of the probabilities were virtual certainties. Possessed of our

friend’s nationality, to start with, there was a general probability in

his narrower localism; which, for that matter, one had really but to

keep under the lens for an hour to see it give up its secrets. He would

have issued, our rueful worthy, from the very heart of New England—at

the heels of which matter of course a perfect train of secrets tumbled

for me into the light. They had to be sifted and sorted, and I shall

not reproduce the detail of that process; but unmistakeably they were

all there, and it was but a question, auspiciously, of picking among

them. What the “position” would infallibly be, and why, on his hands,

it had turned “false”—these inductive steps could only be as rapid as

they were distinct. I accounted for everything—and “everything” had by

this time become the most promising quantity—by the view that he had

come to Paris in some state of mind which was literally undergoing, as

a result of new and unexpected assaults and infusions, a change almost

from hour to hour. He had come with a view that might have been figured

by a clear green liquid, say, in a neat glass phial; and the liquid,

once poured into the open cup of _application_, once exposed to the

action of another air, had begun to turn from green to red, or

whatever, and might, for all he knew, be on its way to purple, to

black, to yellow. At the still wilder extremes represented perhaps, for

all he could say to the contrary, by a variability so violent, he would

at first, naturally, but have gazed in surprise and alarm; whereby the

_situation_ clearly would spring from the play of wildness and the

development of extremes. I saw in a moment that, should this

development proceed both with force and logic, my “story” would leave

nothing to be desired. There is always, of course, for the

story-teller, the irresistible determinant and the incalculable

advantage of his interest in the story _as such_; it is ever,

obviously, overwhelmingly, the prime and precious thing (as other than

this I have never been able to see it); as to which what makes for it,

with whatever headlong energy, may be said to pale before the energy

with which it simply makes for itself. It rejoices, none the less, at

its best, to seem to offer itself in a light, to seem to know, and with

the very last knowledge, what it’s about—liable as it yet is at moments

to be caught by us with its tongue in its cheek and absolutely no

warrant but its splendid impudence. Let us grant then that the

impudence is always there—there, so to speak, for grace and effect and

_allure_; there, above all, because the Story is just the spoiled child

of art, and because, as we are always disappointed when the pampered

don’t “play up,” we like it, to that extent, to look all its character.

It probably does so, in truth, even when we most flatter ourselves that

we negotiate with it by treaty.

All of which, again, is but to say that the _steps_, for my fable,

placed themselves with a prompt and, as it were, functional

assurance—an air quite as of readiness to have dispensed with logic had

I been in fact too stupid for my clue. Never, positively, none the

less, as the links multiplied, had I felt less stupid than for the

determination of poor Strether’s errand and for the apprehension of his

issue. These things continued to fall together, as by the neat action

of their own weight and form, even while their commentator scratched

his head about them; he easily sees now that they were always well in

advance of him. As the case completed itself he had in fact, from a

good way behind, to catch up with them, breathless and a little

flurried, as he best could. _The_ false position, for our belated man

of the world—belated because he had endeavoured so long to escape being

one, and now at last had really to face his doom—the false position for

him, I say, was obviously to have presented himself at the gate of that

boundless menagerie primed with a moral scheme of the most approved

pattern which was yet framed to break down on any approach to vivid

facts; that is to any at all liberal appreciation of them. There would

have been of course the case of the Strether prepared, wherever

presenting himself, only to judge and to feel meanly; but _he_ would

have moved for me, I confess, enveloped in no legend whatever. The

actual man’s note, from the first of our seeing it struck, is the note

of discrimination, just as his drama is to become, under stress, the

drama of discrimination. It would have been his blest imagination, we

have seen, that had already helped him to discriminate; the element

that was for so much of the pleasure of my cutting thick, as I have

intimated, into his intellectual, into his moral substance. Yet here it

was, at the same time, just here, that a shade for a moment fell across

the scene.

There was the dreadful little old tradition, one of the platitudes of

the human comedy, that people’s moral scheme _does_ break down in

Paris; that nothing is more frequently observed; that hundreds of

thousands of more or less hypocritical or more or less cynical persons

annually visit the place for the sake of the probable catastrophe, and

that I came late in the day to work myself up about it. There was in

fine the _trivial_ association, one of the vulgarest in the world; but

which give me pause no longer, I think, simply because its vulgarity is

so advertised. The revolution performed by Strether under the influence

of the most interesting of great cities was to have nothing to do with

any _bêtise_ of the imputably “tempted” state; he was to be thrown

forward, rather, thrown quite with violence, upon his lifelong trick of

intense reflexion: which friendly test indeed was to bring him out,

through winding passages, through alternations of darkness and light,

very much _in_ Paris, but with the surrounding scene itself a minor

matter, a mere symbol for more things than had been dreamt of in the

philosophy of Woollett. Another surrounding scene would have done as

well for our show could it have represented a place in which Strether’s

errand was likely to lie and his crisis to await him. The _likely_

place had the great merit of sparing me preparations; there would have

been too many involved—not at all impossibilities, only rather worrying

and delaying difficulties—in positing elsewhere Chad Newsome’s

interesting relation, his so interesting complexity of relations.

Strether’s appointed stage, in fine, could be but Chad’s most luckily

selected one. The young man had gone in, as they say, for circumjacent

charm; and where he would have found it, by the turn of his mind, most

“authentic,” was where his earnest friend’s analysis would most find

_him_; as well as where, for that matter, the former’s whole analytic

faculty would be led such a wonderful dance.

“The Ambassadors” had been, all conveniently, “arranged for”; its first

appearance was from month to month, in the _North American Review_

during 1903, and I had been open from far back to any pleasant

provocation for ingenuity that might reside in one’s actively

adopting—so as to make it, in its way, a small compositional

law—recurrent breaks and resumptions. I had made up my mind here

regularly to exploit and enjoy these often rather rude jolts—having

found, as I believed an admirable way to it; yet every question of form

and pressure, I easily remember, paled in the light of the major

propriety, recognised as soon as really weighed; that of employing but

one centre and keeping it all within my hero’s compass. The thing was

to be so much this worthy’s intimate adventure that even the projection

of his consciousness upon it from beginning to end without intermission

or deviation would probably still leave a part of its value for him,

and _a fortiori_ for ourselves, unexpressed. I might, however, express

every grain of it that there would be room for—on condition of

contriving a splendid particular economy. Other persons in no small

number were to people the scene, and each with his or her axe to grind,

his or her situation to treat, his or her coherency not to fail of, his

or her relation to my leading motive, in a word, to establish and carry

on. But Strether’s sense of these things, and Strether’s only, should

avail me for showing them; I should know them but through his more or

less groping knowledge of them, since his very gropings would figure

among his most interesting motions, and a full observance of the rich

rigour I speak of would give me more of the effect I should be most

“after” than all other possible observances together. It would give me

a large unity, and that in turn would crown me with the grace to which

the enlightened story-teller will at any time, for his interest,

sacrifice if need be all other graces whatever. I refer of course to

the grace of intensity, which there are ways of signally achieving and

ways of signally missing—as we see it, all round us, helplessly and

woefully missed. Not that it isn’t, on the other hand, a virtue

eminently subject to appreciation—there being no strict, no absolute

measure of it; so that one may hear it acclaimed where it has quite

escaped one’s perception, and see it unnoticed where one has gratefully

hailed it. After all of which I am not sure, either, that the immense

amusement of the whole cluster of difficulties so arrayed may not

operate, for the fond fabulist, when judicious not less than fond, as

his best of determinants. That charming principle is always there, at

all events, to keep interest fresh: it is a principle, we remember,

essentially ravenous, without scruple and without mercy, appeased with

no cheap nor easy nourishment. It enjoys the costly sacrifice and

rejoices thereby in the very odour of difficulty—even as ogres, with

their “Fee-faw-fum!” rejoice in the smell of the blood of Englishmen.

Thus it was, at all events, that the ultimate, though after all so

speedy, definition of my gentleman’s job—his coming out, all solemnly

appointed and deputed, to “save” Chad, and his then finding the young

man so disobligingly and, at first, so bewilderingly not lost that a

new issue altogether, in the connexion, prodigiously faces them, which

has to be dealt with in a new light—promised as many calls on ingenuity

and on the higher branches of the compositional art as one could

possibly desire. Again and yet again, as, from book to book, I proceed

with my survey, I find no source of interest equal to this verification

after the fact, as I may call it, and the more in detail the better, of

the scheme of consistency “gone in” for. As always—since the charm

never fails—the retracing of the process from point to point brings

back the old illusion. The old intentions bloom again and flower—in

spite of all the blossoms they were to have dropped by the way. This is

the charm, as I say, of adventure _transposed_—the thrilling ups and

downs, the intricate ins and outs of the compositional problem, made

after such a fashion admirably objective, becoming the question at

issue and keeping the author’s heart in his mouth. Such an element, for

instance, as his intention that Mrs. Newsome, away off with her finger

on the pulse of Massachusetts, should yet be no less intensely than

circuitously present through the whole thing, should be no less felt as

to be reckoned with than the most direct exhibition, the finest

portrayal at first hand could make her, such a sign of artistic good

faith, I say, once it’s unmistakeably there, takes on again an

actuality not too much impaired by the comparative dimness of the

particular success. Cherished intention too inevitably acts and

operates, in the book, about fifty times as little as I had fondly

dreamt it might; but that scarce spoils for me the pleasure of

recognising the fifty ways in which I had sought to provide for it. The

mere charm of seeing such an idea constituent, in its degree; the

fineness of the measures taken—a real extension, if successful, of the

very terms and possibilities of representation and figuration—such

things alone were, after this fashion, inspiring, such things alone

were a gage of the probable success of that dissimulated calculation

with which the whole effort was to square. But oh the cares begotten,

none the less, of that same “judicious” sacrifice to a particular form

of interest! One’s work should have composition, because composition

alone is positive beauty; but all the while—apart from one’s inevitable

consciousness too of the dire paucity of readers ever recognising or

ever missing positive beauty—how, as to the cheap and easy, at every

turn, how, as to immediacy and facility, and even as to the commoner

vivacity, positive beauty might have to be sweated for and paid for!

Once achieved and installed it may always be trusted to make the poor

seeker feel he would have blushed to the roots of his hair for failing

of it; yet, how, as its virtue can be essentially but the virtue of the

whole, the wayside traps set in the interest of muddlement and pleading

but the cause of the moment, of the particular bit in itself, have to

be kicked out of the path! All the sophistications in life, for

example, might have appeared to muster on behalf of the menace—the

menace to a bright variety—involved in Strether’s having all the

subjective “say,” as it were, to himself.

Had I, meanwhile, made him at once hero and historian, endowed him with

the romantic privilege of the “first person”—the darkest abyss of

romance this, inveterately, when enjoyed on the grand scale—variety,

and many other queer matters as well, might have been smuggled in by a

back door. Suffice it, to be brief, that the first person, in the long

piece, is a form foredoomed to looseness and that looseness, never much

my affair, had never been so little so as on this particular occasion.

All of which reflexions flocked to the standard from the moment—a very

early one—the question of how to keep my form amusing while sticking so

close to my central figure and constantly taking its pattern from him

had to be faced. He arrives (arrives at Chester) as for the dreadful

purpose of giving his creator “no end” to tell about him—before which

rigorous mission the serenest of creators might well have quailed. I

was far from the serenest; I was more than agitated enough to reflect

that, grimly deprived of one alternative or one substitute for

“telling,” I must address myself tooth and nail to another. I couldn’t,

save by implication, make other persons tell _each other_ about

him—blest resource, blest necessity, of the drama, which reaches its

effects of unity, all remarkably, by paths absolutely opposite to the

paths of the novel: with other persons, save as they were primarily

_his_ persons (not he primarily but one of theirs), I had simply

nothing to do. I had relations for him none the less, by the mercy of

Providence, quite as much as if my exhibition was to be a muddle; if I

could only by implication and a show of consequence make other persons

tell each other about him, I could at least make him tell _them_

whatever in the world he must; and could so, by the same token—which

was a further luxury thrown in—see straight into the deep differences

between what that could do for me, or at all events for _him_, and the

large ease of “autobiography.” It may be asked why, if one so keeps to

one’s hero, one shouldn’t make a single mouthful of “method,” shouldn’t

throw the reins on his neck and, letting them flap there as free as in

“Gil Blas” or in “David Copperfield,” equip him with the double

privilege of subject and object—a course that has at least the merit of

brushing away questions at a sweep. The answer to which is, I think,

that one makes that surrender only if one is prepared _not_ to make

certain precious discriminations.

The “first person” then, so employed, is addressed by the author

directly to ourselves, his possible readers, whom he has to reckon

with, at the best, by our English tradition, so loosely and vaguely

after all, so little respectfully, on so scant a presumption of

exposure to criticism. Strether, on the other hand, encaged and

provided for as “The Ambassadors” encages and provides, has to keep in

view proprieties much stiffer and more salutary than any our straight

and credulous gape are likely to bring home to him, has exhibitional

conditions to meet, in a word, that forbid the terrible _fluidity_ of

self-revelation. I may seem not to better the case for my

discrimination if I say that, for my first care, I had thus inevitably

to set him up a confidant or two, to wave away with energy the custom

of the seated mass of explanation after the fact, the inserted block of

merely referential narrative, which flourishes so, to the shame of the

modern impatience, on the serried page of Balzac, but which seems

simply to appal our actual, our general weaker, digestion. “Harking

back to make up” took at any rate more doing, as the phrase is, not

only than the reader of to-day demands, but than he will tolerate at

any price any call upon him either to understand or remotely to

measure; and for the beauty of the thing when done the current

editorial mind in particular appears wholly without sense. It is not,

however, primarily for either of these reasons, whatever their weight,

that Strether’s friend Waymarsh is so keenly clutched at, on the

threshold of the book, or that no less a pounce is made on Maria

Gostrey—without even the pretext, either, of _her_ being, in essence,

Strether’s friend. She is the reader’s friend much rather—in

consequence of dispositions that make him so eminently require one; and

she acts in that capacity, and _really_ in that capacity alone, with

exemplary devotion from beginning to and of the book. She is an

enrolled, a direct, aid to lucidity; she is in fine, to tear off her

mask, the most unmitigated and abandoned of _ficelles_. Half the

dramatist’s art, as we well know—since if we don’t it’s not the fault

of the proofs that lie scattered about us—is in the use of _ficelles_;

by which I mean in a deep dissimulation of his dependence on them.

Waymarsh only to a slighter degree belongs, in the whole business, less

to my subject than to my treatment of it; the interesting proof, in

these connexions, being that one has but to take one’s subject for the

stuff of drama to interweave with enthusiasm as many Gostreys as need

be.

The material of “The Ambassadors,” conforming in this respect exactly

to that of “The Wings of the Dove,” published just before it, is taken

absolutely for the stuff of drama; so that, availing myself of the

opportunity given me by this edition for some prefatory remarks on the

latter work, I had mainly to make on its behalf the point of its scenic

consistency. It disguises that virtue, in the oddest way in the world,

by just _looking_, as we turn its pages, as little scenic as possible;

but it sharply divides itself, just as the composition before us does,

into the parts that prepare, that tend in fact to over-prepare, for

scenes, and the parts, or otherwise into the scenes, that justify and

crown the preparation. It may definitely be said, I think, that

everything in it that is not scene (not, I of course mean, complete and

functional scene, treating _all_ the submitted matter, as by logical

start, logical turn, and logical finish) is discriminated preparation,

is the fusion and synthesis of picture. These alternations propose

themselves all recogniseably, I think, from an early stage, as the very

form and figure of “The Ambassadors”; so that, to repeat, such an agent

as Miss Gostrey pre-engaged at a high salary, but waits in the draughty

wing with her shawl and her smelling-salts. Her function speaks at once

for itself, and by the time she has dined with Strether in London and

gone to a play with him her intervention as a _ficelle_ is, I hold,

expertly justified. Thanks to it we have treated scenically, and

scenically alone, the whole lumpish question of Strether’s “past,”

which has seen us more happily on the way than anything else could have

done; we have strained to a high lucidity and vivacity (or at least we

hope we have) certain indispensable facts; we have seen our two or

three immediate friends all conveniently and profitably in “action”; to

say nothing of our beginning to descry others, of a remoter intensity,

getting into motion, even if a bit vaguely as yet, for our further

enrichment. Let my first point be here that the scene in question, that

in which the whole situation at Woollett and the complex forces that

have propelled my hero to where this lively extractor of his value and

distiller of his essence awaits him, is normal and entire, is really an

excellent _standard_ scene; copious, comprehensive, and accordingly

never short, but with its office as definite as that of the hammer on

the gong of the clock, the office of expressing _all that is in_ the

hour.

The “_ficelle_” character of the subordinate party is as artfully

dissimulated, throughout, as may be, and to that extent that, with the

seams or joints of Maria Gostrey’s ostensible connectedness taken

particular care of, duly smoothed over, that is, and anxiously kept

from showing as “pieced on,” this figure doubtless achieves, after a

fashion, something of the dignity of a prime idea: which circumstance

but shows us afresh how many quite incalculable but none the less clear

sources of enjoyment for the infatuated artist, how many copious

springs of our never-to-be-slighted “fun” for the reader and critic

susceptible of contagion, may sound their incidental plash as soon as

an artistic process begins to enjoy free development. Exquisite—in

illustration of this—the mere interest and amusement of such at once

“creative” and critical questions as how and where and why to make Miss

Gostrey’s false connexion carry itself, under a due high polish, as a

real one. Nowhere is it more of an artful expedient for mere

consistency of form, to mention a case, than in the last “scene” of the

book, where its function is to give or to add nothing whatever, but

only to express as vividly as possible certain things quite other than

itself and that are of the already fixed and appointed measure. Since,

however, all art is _expression_, and is thereby vividness, one was to

find the door open here to any amount of delightful dissimulation.

These verily are the refinements and ecstasies of method—amid which, or

certainly under the influence of any exhilarated demonstration of

which, one must keep one’s head and not lose one’s way. To cultivate an

adequate intelligence for them and to make that sense operative is

positively to find a charm in any produced ambiguity of appearance that

is not by the same stroke, and all helplessly, an ambiguity of sense.

To project imaginatively, for my hero, a relation that has nothing to

do with the matter (the matter of my subject) but has everything to do

with the manner (the manner of my presentation of the same) and yet to

treat it, at close quarters and for fully economic expression’s

possible sake, as if it were important and essential—to do that sort of

thing and yet muddle nothing may easily become, as one goes, a signally

attaching proposition; even though it all remains but part and parcel,

I hasten to recognise, of the merely general and related question of

expressional curiosity and expressional decency.

I am moved to add after so much insistence on the scenic side of my

labour that I have found the steps of re-perusal almost as much waylaid

here by quite another style of effort in the same signal interest—or

have in other words not failed to note how, even so associated and so

discriminated, the finest proprieties and charms of the non-scenic may,

under the right hand for them, still keep their intelligibility and

assert their office. Infinitely suggestive such an observation as this

last on the whole delightful head, where representation is concerned,

of possible variety, of effective expressional change and contrast. One

would like, at such an hour as this, for critical licence, to go into

the matter of the noted inevitable deviation (from too fond an original

vision) that the exquisite treachery even of the straightest execution

may ever be trusted to inflict even on the most mature plan—the case

being that, though one’s last reconsidered production always seems to

bristle with that particular evidence, “The Ambassadors” would place a

flood of such light at my service. I must attach to my final remark

here a different import; noting in the other connexion I just glanced

at that such passages as that of my hero’s first encounter with Chad

Newsome, absolute attestations of the non-scenic form though they be,

yet lay the firmest hand too—so far at least as intention goes—on

representational effect. To report at all closely and completely of

what “passes” on a given occasion is inevitably to become more or less

scenic; and yet in the instance I allude to, _with_ the conveyance,

expressional curiosity and expressional decency are sought and arrived

at under quite another law. The true inwardness of this may be at

bottom but that one of the suffered treacheries has consisted

precisely, for Chad’s whole figure and presence, of a direct

presentability diminished and compromised—despoiled, that is, of its

_proportional_ advantage; so that, in a word, the whole economy of his

author’s relation to him has at important points to be redetermined.

The book, however, critically viewed, is touchingly full of these

disguised and repaired losses, these insidious recoveries, these

intensely redemptive consistencies. The pages in which Mamie Pocock

gives her appointed and, I can’t but think, duly felt lift to the whole

action by the so inscrutably-applied side-stroke or short-cut of our

just watching and as quite at an angle of vision as yet untried, her

single hour of suspense in the hotel salon, in our partaking of her

concentrated study of the sense of matters bearing on her own case, all

the bright warm Paris afternoon, from the balcony that overlooks the

Tuileries garden—these are as marked an example of the representational

virtue that insists here and there on being, for the charm of

opposition and renewal, other than the scenic. It wouldn’t take much to

make me further argue that from an equal play of such oppositions the

book gathers an intensity that fairly adds to the dramatic—though the

latter is supposed to be the sum of all intensities; or that has at any

rate nothing to fear from juxtaposition with it. I consciously fail to

shrink in fact from that extravagance—I risk it rather, for the sake of

the moral involved; which is not that the particular production before

us exhausts the interesting questions it raises, but that the Novel

remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most

elastic, most prodigious of literary forms.

HENRY JAMES.

Book First

I

Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his

friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive

till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from him

bespeaking a room “only if not noisy,” reply paid, was produced for the

enquirer at the office, so that the understanding they should meet at

Chester rather than at Liverpool remained to that extent sound. The

same secret principle, however, that had prompted Strether not

absolutely to desire Waymarsh’s presence at the dock, that had led him

thus to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of it, now operated to

make him feel he could still wait without disappointment. They would

dine together at the worst, and, with all respect to dear old

Waymarsh—if not even, for that matter, to himself—there was little fear

that in the sequel they shouldn’t see enough of each other. The

principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most

newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive—the fruit of a

sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking,

after so much separation, into his comrade’s face, his business would

be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to

present itself to the nearing steamer as the first “note,” of Europe.

Mixed with everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether’s

part, that it would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in

quite a sufficient degree.

That note had been meanwhile—since the previous afternoon, thanks to

this happier device—such a consciousness of personal freedom as he

hadn’t known for years; such a deep taste of change and of having above

all for the moment nobody and nothing to consider, as promised already,

if headlong hope were not too foolish, to colour his adventure with

cool success. There were people on the ship with whom he had easily

consorted—so far as ease could up to now be imputed to him—and who for

the most part plunged straight into the current that set from the

landing-stage to London; there were others who had invited him to a

tryst at the inn and had even invoked his aid for a “look round” at the

beauties of Liverpool; but he had stolen away from every one alike, had

kept no appointment and renewed no acquaintance, had been indifferently

aware of the number of persons who esteemed themselves fortunate in

being, unlike himself, “met,” and had even independently, unsociably,

alone, without encounter or relapse and by mere quiet evasion, given

his afternoon and evening to the immediate and the sensible. They

formed a qualified draught of Europe, an afternoon and an evening on

the banks of the Mersey, but such as it was he took his potion at least

undiluted. He winced a little, truly, at the thought that Waymarsh

might be already at Chester; he reflected that, should he have to

describe himself there as having “got in” so early, it would be

difficult to make the interval look particularly eager; but he was like

a man who, elatedly finding in his pocket more money than usual,

handles it a while and idly and pleasantly chinks it before addressing

himself to the business of spending. That he was prepared to be vague

to Waymarsh about the hour of the ship’s touching, and that he both

wanted extremely to see him and enjoyed extremely the duration of

delay—these things, it is to be conceived, were early signs in him that

his relation to his actual errand might prove none of the simplest. He

was burdened, poor Strether—it had better be confessed at the

outset—with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment

in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.

After the young woman in the glass cage had held up to him across her

counter the pale-pink leaflet bearing his friend’s name, which she

neatly pronounced, he turned away to find himself, in the hall, facing

a lady who met his eyes as with an intention suddenly determined, and

whose features—not freshly young, not markedly fine, but on happy terms

with each other—came back to him as from a recent vision. For a moment

they stood confronted; then the moment placed her: he had noticed her

the day before, noticed her at his previous inn, where—again in the

hall—she had been briefly engaged with some people of his own ship’s

company. Nothing had actually passed between them, and he would as

little have been able to say what had been the sign of her face for him

on the first occasion as to name the ground of his present recognition.

Recognition at any rate appeared to prevail on her own side as

well—which would only have added to the mystery. All she now began by

saying to him nevertheless was that, having chanced to catch his

enquiry, she was moved to ask, by his leave, if it were possibly a

question of Mr. Waymarsh of Milrose Connecticut—Mr. Waymarsh the

American lawyer.

“Oh yes,” he replied, “my very well-known friend. He’s to meet me here,

coming up from Malvern, and I supposed he’d already have arrived. But

he doesn’t come till later, and I’m relieved not to have kept him. Do

you know him?” Strether wound up.

It wasn’t till after he had spoken that he became aware of how much

there had been in him of response; when the tone of her own rejoinder,

as well as the play of something more in her face—something more, that

is, than its apparently usual restless light—seemed to notify him.

“I’ve met him at Milrose—where I used sometimes, a good while ago, to

stay; I had friends there who were friends of his, and I’ve been at his

house. I won’t answer for it that he would know me,” Strether’s new

acquaintance pursued; “but I should be delighted to see him. Perhaps,”

she added, “I shall—for I’m staying over.” She paused while our friend

took in these things, and it was as if a good deal of talk had already

passed. They even vaguely smiled at it, and Strether presently observed

that Mr. Waymarsh would, no doubt, be easily to be seen. This, however,

appeared to affect the lady as if she might have advanced too far. She

appeared to have no reserves about anything. “Oh,” she said, “he won’t

care!”—and she immediately thereupon remarked that she believed

Strether knew the Munsters; the Munsters being the people he had seen

her with at Liverpool.

But he didn’t, it happened, know the Munsters well enough to give the

case much of a lift; so that they were left together as if over the

mere laid table of conversation. Her qualification of the mentioned

connexion had rather removed than placed a dish, and there seemed

nothing else to serve. Their attitude remained, none the less, that of

not forsaking the board; and the effect of this in turn was to give

them the appearance of having accepted each other with an absence of

preliminaries practically complete. They moved along the hall together,

and Strether’s companion threw off that the hotel had the advantage of

a garden. He was aware by this time of his strange inconsequence: he

had shirked the intimacies of the steamer and had muffled the shock of

Waymarsh only to find himself forsaken, in this sudden case, both of

avoidance and of caution. He passed, under this unsought protection and

before he had so much as gone up to his room, into the garden of the

hotel, and at the end of ten minutes had agreed to meet there again, as

soon as he should have made himself tidy, the dispenser of such good

assurances. He wanted to look at the town, and they would forthwith

look together. It was almost as if she had been in possession and

received him as a guest. Her acquaintance with the place presented her

in a manner as a hostess, and Strether had a rueful glance for the lady

in the glass cage. It was as if this personage had seen herself

instantly superseded.

When in a quarter of an hour he came down, what his hostess saw, what

she might have taken in with a vision kindly adjusted, was the lean,

the slightly loose figure of a man of the middle height and something

more perhaps than the middle age—a man of five-and-fifty, whose most

immediate signs were a marked bloodless brownness of face, a thick dark

moustache, of characteristically American cut, growing strong and

falling low, a head of hair still abundant but irregularly streaked

with grey, and a nose of bold free prominence, the even line, the high

finish, as it might have been called, of which, had a certain effect of

mitigation. A perpetual pair of glasses astride of this fine ridge, and

a line, unusually deep and drawn, the prolonged pen-stroke of time,

accompanying the curve of the moustache from nostril to chin, did

something to complete the facial furniture that an attentive observer

would have seen catalogued, on the spot, in the vision of the other

party to Strether’s appointment. She waited for him in the garden, the

other party, drawing on a pair of singularly fresh soft and elastic

light gloves and presenting herself with a superficial readiness which,

as he approached her over the small smooth lawn and in the watery

English sunshine, he might, with his rougher preparation, have marked

as the model for such an occasion. She had, this lady, a perfect plain

propriety, an expensive subdued suitability, that her companion was not

free to analyse, but that struck him, so that his consciousness of it

was instantly acute, as a quality quite new to him. Before reaching her

he stopped on the grass and went through the form of feeling for

something, possibly forgotten, in the light overcoat he carried on his

arm; yet the essence of the act was no more than the impulse to gain

time. Nothing could have been odder than Strether’s sense of himself as

at that moment launched in something of which the sense would be quite

disconnected from the sense of his past and which was literally

beginning there and then. It had begun in fact already upstairs and

before the dressing glass that struck him as blocking further, so

strangely, the dimness of the window of his dull bedroom; begun with a

sharper survey of the elements of Appearance than he had for a long

time been moved to make. He had during those moments felt these

elements to be not so much to his hand as he should have liked, and

then had fallen back on the thought that they were precisely a matter

as to which help was supposed to come from what he was about to do. He

was about to go up to London, so that hat and necktie might wait. What

had come as straight to him as a ball in a well-played game—and caught

moreover not less neatly—was just the air, in the person of his friend,

of having seen and chosen, the air of achieved possession of those

vague qualities and quantities that collectively figured to him as the

advantage snatched from lucky chances. Without pomp or circumstance,

certainly, as her original address to him, equally with his own

response, had been, he would have sketched to himself his impression of

her as: “Well, she’s more thoroughly civilized—!” If “More thoroughly

than _whom?_” would not have been for him a sequel to this remark, that

was just by reason of his deep consciousness of the bearing of his

comparison.

The amusement, at all events, of a civilisation intenser was

what—familiar compatriot as she was, with the full tone of the

compatriot and the rattling link not with mystery but only with dear

dyspeptic Waymarsh—she appeared distinctly to promise. His pause while

he felt in his overcoat was positively the pause of confidence, and it

enabled his eyes to make out as much of a case for her, in proportion,

as her own made out for himself. She affected him as almost insolently

young; but an easily carried five-and-thirty could still do that. She

was, however, like himself marked and wan; only it naturally couldn’t

have been known to him how much a spectator looking from one to the

other might have discerned that they had in common. It wouldn’t for

such a spectator have been altogether insupposable that, each so finely

brown and so sharply spare, each confessing so to dents of surface and

aids to sight, to a disproportionate nose and a head delicately or

grossly grizzled, they might have been brother and sister. On this

ground indeed there would have been a residuum of difference; such a

sister having surely known in respect to such a brother the extremity

of separation, and such a brother now feeling in respect to such a

sister the extremity of surprise. Surprise, it was true, was not on the

other hand what the eyes of Strether’s friend most showed him while she

gave him, stroking her gloves smoother, the time he appreciated. They

had taken hold of him straightway measuring him up and down as if they

knew how; as if he were human material they had already in some sort

handled. Their possessor was in truth, it may be communicated, the

mistress of a hundred cases or categories, receptacles of the mind,

subdivisions for convenience, in which, from a full experience, she

pigeon-holed her fellow mortals with a hand as free as that of a

compositor scattering type. She was as equipped in this particular as

Strether was the reverse, and it made an opposition between them which

he might well have shrunk from submitting to if he had fully suspected

it. So far as he did suspect it he was on the contrary, after a short

shake of his consciousness, as pleasantly passive as might be. He

really had a sort of sense of what she knew. He had quite the sense

that she knew things he didn’t, and though this was a concession that

in general he found not easy to make to women, he made it now as

good-humouredly as if it lifted a burden. His eyes were so quiet behind

his eternal nippers that they might almost have been absent without

changing his face, which took its expression mainly, and not least its

stamp of sensibility, from other sources, surface and grain and form.

He joined his guide in an instant, and then felt she had profited still

better than he by his having been for the moments just mentioned, so at

the disposal of her intelligence. She knew even intimate things about

him that he hadn’t yet told her and perhaps never would. He wasn’t

unaware that he had told her rather remarkably many for the time, but

these were not the real ones. Some of the real ones, however,

precisely, were what she knew.

They were to pass again through the hall of the inn to get into the

street, and it was here she presently checked him with a question.

“Have you looked up my name?”

He could only stop with a laugh. “Have you looked up mine?”

“Oh dear, yes—as soon as you left me. I went to the office and asked.

Hadn’t _you_ better do the same?”

He wondered. “Find out who you are?—after the uplifted young woman

there has seen us thus scrape acquaintance!”

She laughed on her side now at the shade of alarm in his amusement.

“Isn’t it a reason the more? If what you’re afraid of is the injury for

me—my being seen to walk off with a gentleman who has to ask who I am—I

assure you I don’t in the least mind. Here, however,” she continued,

“is my card, and as I find there’s something else again I have to say

at the office, you can just study it during the moment I leave you.”

She left him after he had taken from her the small pasteboard she had

extracted from her pocket-book, and he had extracted another from his

own, to exchange with it, before she came back. He read thus the simple

designation “Maria Gostrey,” to which was attached, in a corner of the

card, with a number, the name of a street, presumably in Paris, without

other appreciable identity than its foreignness. He put the card into

his waistcoat pocket, keeping his own meanwhile in evidence; and as he

leaned against the door-post he met with the smile of a straying

thought what the expanse before the hotel offered to his view. It was

positively droll to him that he should already have Maria Gostrey,

whoever she was—of which he hadn’t really the least idea—in a place of

safe keeping. He had somehow an assurance that he should carefully

preserve the little token he had just tucked in. He gazed with unseeing

lingering eyes as he followed some of the implications of his act,

asking himself if he really felt admonished to qualify it as disloyal.

It was prompt, it was possibly even premature, and there was little

doubt of the expression of face the sight of it would have produced in

a certain person. But if it was “wrong”—why then he had better not have

come out at all. At this, poor man, had he already—and even before

meeting Waymarsh—arrived. He had believed he had a limit, but the limit

had been transcended within thirty-six hours. By how long a space on

the plane of manners or even of morals, moreover, he felt still more

sharply after Maria Gostrey had come back to him and with a gay

decisive “So now—!” led him forth into the world. This counted, it

struck him as he walked beside her with his overcoat on an arm, his

umbrella under another and his personal pasteboard a little stiffly

retained between forefinger and thumb, this struck him as really, in

comparison his introduction to things. It hadn’t been “Europe” at

Liverpool no—not even in the dreadful delightful impressive streets the

night before—to the extent his present companion made it so. She hadn’t

yet done that so much as when, after their walk had lasted a few

minutes and he had had time to wonder if a couple of sidelong glances

from her meant that he had best have put on gloves she almost pulled

him up with an amused challenge. “But why—fondly as it’s so easy to

imagine your clinging to it—don’t you put it away? Or if it’s an

inconvenience to you to carry it, one’s often glad to have one’s card

back. The fortune one spends in them!”

Then he saw both that his way of marching with his own prepared tribute

had affected her as a deviation in one of those directions he couldn’t

yet measure, and that she supposed this emblem to be still the one he

had received from her. He accordingly handed her the card as if in

restitution, but as soon as she had it she felt the difference and,

with her eyes on it, stopped short for apology. “I like,” she observed,

“your name.”

“Oh,” he answered, “you won’t have heard of it!” Yet he had his reasons

for not being sure but that she perhaps might.

Ah it was but too visible! She read it over again as one who had never

seen it. “‘Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether’”—she sounded it almost as freely

as for any stranger. She repeated however that she liked

it—“particularly the Lewis Lambert. It’s the name of a novel of

Balzac’s.”

“Oh I know that!” said Strether.

“But the novel’s an awfully bad one.”

“I know that too,” Strether smiled. To which he added with an

irrelevance that was only superficial: “I come from Woollett

Massachusetts.” It made her for some reason—the irrelevance or

whatever—laugh. Balzac had described many cities, but hadn’t described

Woollett Massachusetts. “You say that,” she returned, “as if you wanted

one immediately to know the worst.”

“Oh I think it’s a thing,” he said, “that you must already have made

out. I feel it so that I certainly must look it, speak it, and, as

people say there, ‘act’ it. It sticks out of me, and you knew surely

for yourself as soon as you looked at me.”

“The worst, you mean?”

“Well, the fact of where I come from. There at any rate it _is_; so

that you won’t be able, if anything happens, to say I’ve not been

straight with you.”

“I see”—and Miss Gostrey looked really interested in the point he had

made. “But what do you think of as happening?”

Though he wasn’t shy—which was rather anomalous—Strether gazed about

without meeting her eyes; a motion that was frequent with him in talk,

yet of which his words often seemed not at all the effect. “Why that

you should find me too hopeless.” With which they walked on again

together while she answered, as they went, that the most “hopeless” of

her countryfolk were in general precisely those she liked best. All

sorts of other pleasant small things—small things that were yet large

for him—flowered in the air of the occasion, but the bearing of the

occasion itself on matters still remote concerns us too closely to

permit us to multiply our illustrations. Two or three, however, in

truth, we should perhaps regret to lose. The tortuous wall—girdle, long

since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by

careful civic hands—wanders in narrow file between parapets smoothed by

peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a

bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer

twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows

of gables, views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled

English town and ordered English country. Too deep almost for words was

the delight of these things to Strether; yet as deeply mixed with it

were certain images of his inward picture. He had trod this walks in

the far-off time, at twenty-five; but that, instead of spoiling it,

only enriched it for present feeling and marked his renewal as a thing

substantial enough to share. It was with Waymarsh he should have shared

it, and he was now accordingly taking from him something that was his

due. He looked repeatedly at his watch, and when he had done so for the

fifth time Miss Gostrey took him up.

“You’re doing something that you think not right.”

It so touched the place that he quite changed colour and his laugh grew

almost awkward. “Am I enjoying it as much as _that?_”

“You’re not enjoying it, I think, so much as you ought.”

“I see”—he appeared thoughtfully to agree. “Great is my privilege.”

“Oh it’s not your privilege! It has nothing to do with _me_. It has to

do with yourself. Your failure’s general.”

“Ah there you are!” he laughed. “It’s the failure of Woollett. _That’s_

general.”

“The failure to enjoy,” Miss Gostrey explained, “is what I mean.”

“Precisely. Woollett isn’t sure it ought to enjoy. If it were it would.

But it hasn’t, poor thing,” Strether continued, “any one to show it

how. It’s not like me. I have somebody.”

They had stopped, in the afternoon sunshine—constantly pausing, in

their stroll, for the sharper sense of what they saw—and Strether

rested on one of the high sides of the old stony groove of the little

rampart. He leaned back on this support with his face to the tower of

the cathedral, now admirably commanded by their station, the high

red-brown mass, square and subordinately spired and crocketed,

retouched and restored, but charming to his long-sealed eyes and with

the first swallows of the year weaving their flight all round it. Miss

Gostrey lingered near him, full of an air, to which she more and more

justified her right, of understanding the effect of things. She quite

concurred. “You’ve indeed somebody.” And she added: “I wish you _would_

let me show you how!”

“Oh I’m afraid of you!” he cheerfully pleaded.

She kept on him a moment, through her glasses and through his own, a

certain pleasant pointedness. “Ah no, you’re not! You’re not in the

least, thank goodness! If you had been we shouldn’t so soon have found

ourselves here together. I think,” she comfortably concluded, “you

trust me.”

“I think I do!—but that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. I shouldn’t mind

if I didn’t. It’s falling thus in twenty minutes so utterly into your

hands. I dare say,” Strether continued, “it’s a sort of thing you’re

thoroughly familiar with; but nothing more extraordinary has ever

happened to me.”

She watched him with all her kindness. “That means simply that you’ve

recognised me—which _is_ rather beautiful and rare. You see what I am.”

As on this, however, he protested, with a good-humoured headshake, a

resignation of any such claim, she had a moment of explanation. “If

you’ll only come on further as you _have_ come you’ll at any rate make

out. My own fate has been too many for me, and I’ve succumbed to it.

I’m a general guide—to ‘Europe,’ don’t you know? I wait for people—I

put them through. I pick them up—I set them down. I’m a sort of

superior ‘courier-maid.’ I’m a companion at large. I take people, as

I’ve told you, about. I never sought it—it has come to me. It has been

my fate, and one’s fate one accepts. It’s a dreadful thing to have to

say, in so wicked a world, but I verily believe that, such as you see

me, there’s nothing I don’t know. I know all the shops and the

prices—but I know worse things still. I bear on my back the huge load

of our national consciousness, or, in other words—for it comes to

that—of our nation itself. Of what is our nation composed but of the

men and women individually on my shoulders? I don’t do it, you know,

for any particular advantage. I don’t do it, for instance—some people

do, you know—for money.”

Strether could only listen and wonder and weigh his chance. “And yet,

affected as you are then to so many of your clients, you can scarcely

be said to do it for love.” He waited a moment. “How do we reward you?”

She had her own hesitation, but “You don’t!” she finally returned,

setting him again in motion. They went on, but in a few minutes, though

while still thinking over what she had said, he once more took out his

watch; mechanically, unconsciously and as if made nervous by the mere

exhilaration of what struck him as her strange and cynical wit. He

looked at the hour without seeing it, and then, on something again said

by his companion, had another pause. “You’re really in terror of him.”

He smiled a smile that he almost felt to be sickly. “Now you can see

why I’m afraid of you.”

“Because I’ve such illuminations? Why they’re all for your help! It’s

what I told you,” she added, “just now. You feel as if this were

wrong.”

He fell back once more, settling himself against the parapet as if to

hear more about it. “Then get me out!”

Her face fairly brightened for the joy of the appeal, but, as if it

were a question of immediate action, she visibly considered. “Out of

waiting for him?—of seeing him at all?”

“Oh no—not that,” said poor Strether, looking grave. “I’ve got to wait

for him—and I want very much to see him. But out of the terror. You did

put your finger on it a few minutes ago. It’s general, but it avails

itself of particular occasions. That’s what it’s doing for me now. I’m

always considering something else; something else, I mean, than the

thing of the moment. The obsession of the other thing is the terror.

I’m considering at present for instance something else than _you_.”

She listened with charming earnestness. “Oh you oughtn’t to do that!”

“It’s what I admit. Make it then impossible.”

She continued to think. “Is it really an ‘order’ from you?—that I shall

take the job? _Will_ you give yourself up?”

Poor Strether heaved his sigh. “If I only could! But that’s the deuce

of it—that I never can. No—I can’t.”

She wasn’t, however, discouraged. “But you want to at least?”

“Oh unspeakably!”

“Ah then, if you’ll try!”—and she took over the job, as she had called

it, on the spot. “Trust me!” she exclaimed, and the action of this, as

they retraced their steps, was presently to make him pass his hand into

her arm in the manner of a benign dependent paternal old person who

wishes to be “nice” to a younger one. If he drew it out again indeed as

they approached the inn this may have been because, after more talk had

passed between them, the relation of age, or at least of

experience—which, for that matter, had already played to and fro with

some freedom—affected him as incurring a readjustment. It was at all

events perhaps lucky that they arrived in sufficiently separate fashion

within range of the hotel-door. The young lady they had left in the

glass cage watched as if she had come to await them on the threshold.

At her side stood a person equally interested, by his attitude, in

their return, and the effect of the sight of whom was instantly to

determine for Strether another of those responsive arrests that we have

had so repeatedly to note. He left it to Miss Gostrey to name, with the

fine full bravado as it almost struck him, of her “Mr. Waymarsh!” what

was to have been, what—he more than ever felt as his short stare of

suspended welcome took things in—would have been, but for herself, his

doom. It was already upon him even at that distance—Mr. Waymarsh was

for _his_ part joyless.

II

He had none the less to confess to this friend that evening that he

knew almost nothing about her, and it was a deficiency that Waymarsh,

even with his memory refreshed by contact, by her own prompt and lucid

allusions and enquiries, by their having publicly partaken of dinner in

her company, and by another stroll, to which she was not a stranger,

out into the town to look at the cathedral by moonlight—it was a blank

that the resident of Milrose, though admitting acquaintance with the

Munsters, professed himself unable to fill. He had no recollection of

Miss Gostrey, and two or three questions that she put to him about

those members of his circle had, to Strether’s observation, the same

effect he himself had already more directly felt—the effect of

appearing to place all knowledge, for the time, on this original

woman’s side. It interested him indeed to mark the limits of any such

relation for her with his friend as there could possibly be a question

of, and it particularly struck him that they were to be marked

altogether in Waymarsh’s quarter. This added to his own sense of having

gone far with her—gave him an early illustration of a much shorter

course. There was a certitude he immediately grasped—a conviction that

Waymarsh would quite fail, as it were, and on whatever degree of

acquaintances to profit by her.

There had been after the first interchange among the three a talk of

some five minutes in the hall, and then the two men had adjourned to

the garden, Miss Gostrey for the time disappearing. Strether in due

course accompanied his friend to the room he had bespoken and had,

before going out, scrupulously visited; where at the end of another

half-hour he had no less discreetly left him. On leaving him he

repaired straight to his own room, but with the prompt effect of

feeling the compass of that chamber resented by his condition. There he

enjoyed at once the first consequence of their reunion. A place was too

small for him after it that had seemed large enough before. He had

awaited it with something he would have been sorry, have been almost

ashamed not to recognise as emotion, yet with a tacit assumption at the

same time that emotion would in the event find itself relieved. The

actual oddity was that he was only more excited; and his excitement—to

which indeed he would have found it difficult instantly to give a

name—brought him once more downstairs and caused him for some minutes

vaguely to wander. He went once more to the garden; he looked into the

public room, found Miss Gostrey writing letters and backed out; he

roamed, fidgeted and wasted time; but he was to have his more intimate

session with his friend before the evening closed.

It was late—not till Strether had spent an hour upstairs with him—that

this subject consented to betake himself to doubtful rest. Dinner and

the subsequent stroll by moonlight—a dream, on Strether’s part, of

romantic effects rather prosaically merged in a mere missing of thicker

coats—had measurably intervened, and this midnight conference was the

result of Waymarsh’s having (when they were free, as he put it, of

their fashionable friend) found the smoking-room not quite what he

wanted, and yet bed what he wanted less. His most frequent form of

words was that he knew himself, and they were applied on this occasion

to his certainty of not sleeping. He knew himself well enough to know

that he should have a night of prowling unless he should succeed, as a

preliminary, in getting prodigiously tired. If the effort directed to

this end involved till a late hour the presence of Strether—consisted,

that is, in the detention of the latter for full discourse—there was

yet an impression of minor discipline involved for our friend in the

picture Waymarsh made as he sat in trousers and shirt on the edge of

his couch. With his long legs extended and his large back much bent, he

nursed alternately, for an almost incredible time, his elbows and his

beard. He struck his visitor as extremely, as almost wilfully

uncomfortable; yet what had this been for Strether, from that first

glimpse of him disconcerted in the porch of the hotel, but the

predominant notes. The discomfort was in a manner contagious, as well

as also in a manner inconsequent and unfounded; the visitor felt that

unless he should get used to it—or unless Waymarsh himself should—it

would constitute a menace for his own prepared, his own already

confirmed, consciousness of the agreeable. On their first going up

together to the room Strether had selected for him Waymarsh had looked

it over in silence and with a sigh that represented for his companion,

if not the habit of disapprobation, at least the despair of felicity;

and this look had recurred to Strether as the key of much he had since

observed. “Europe,” he had begun to gather from these things, had up to

now rather failed of its message to him; he hadn’t got into tune with

it and had at the end of three months almost renounced any such

expectation.

He really appeared at present to insist on that by just perching there

with the gas in his eyes. This of itself somehow conveyed the futility

of single rectifications in a multiform failure. He had a large

handsome head and a large sallow seamed face—a striking significant

physiognomic total, the upper range of which, the great political brow,

the thick loose hair, the dark fuliginous eyes, recalled even to a

generation whose standard had dreadfully deviated the impressive image,

familiar by engravings and busts, of some great national worthy of the

earlier part of the mid-century. He was of the personal type—and it was

an element in the power and promise that in their early time Strether

had found in him—of the American statesman, the statesman trained in

“Congressional halls,” of an elder day. The legend had been in later

years that as the lower part of his face, which was weak, and slightly

crooked, spoiled the likeness, this was the real reason for the growth

of his beard, which might have seemed to spoil it for those not in the

secret. He shook his mane; he fixed, with his admirable eyes, his

auditor or his observer; he wore no glasses and had a way, partly

formidable, yet also partly encouraging, as from a representative to a

constituent, of looking very hard at those who approached him. He met

you as if you had knocked and he had bidden you enter. Strether, who

hadn’t seen him for so long an interval, apprehended him now with a

freshness of taste, and had perhaps never done him such ideal justice.

The head was bigger, the eyes finer, than they need have been for the

career; but that only meant, after all, that the career was itself

expressive. What it expressed at midnight in the gas-glaring bedroom at

Chester was that the subject of it had, at the end of years, barely

escaped, by flight in time, a general nervous collapse. But this very

proof of the full life, as the full life was understood at Milrose,

would have made to Strether’s imagination an element in which Waymarsh

could have floated easily had he only consented to float. Alas nothing

so little resembled floating as the rigour with which, on the edge of

his bed, he hugged his posture of prolonged impermanence. It suggested

to his comrade something that always, when kept up, worried him—a

person established in a railway-coach with a forward inclination. It

represented the angle at which poor Waymarsh was to sit through the

ordeal of Europe.

Thanks to the stress of occupation, the strain of professions, the

absorption and embarrassment of each, they had not, at home, during

years before this sudden brief and almost bewildering reign of

comparative ease, found so much as a day for a meeting; a fact that was

in some degree an explanation of the sharpness with which most of his

friend’s features stood out to Strether. Those he had lost sight of

since the early time came back to him; others that it was never

possible to forget struck him now as sitting, clustered and expectant,

like a somewhat defiant family-group, on the doorstep of their

residence. The room was narrow for its length, and the occupant of the

bed thrust so far a pair of slippered feet that the visitor had almost

to step over them in his recurrent rebounds from his chair to fidget

back and forth. There were marks the friends made on things to talk

about, and on things not to, and one of the latter in particular fell

like the tap of chalk on the blackboard. Married at thirty, Waymarsh

had not lived with his wife for fifteen years, and it came up vividly

between them in the glare of the gas that Strether wasn’t to ask about

her. He knew they were still separate and that she lived at hotels,

travelled in Europe, painted her face and wrote her husband abusive

letters, of not one of which, to a certainty, that sufferer spared

himself the perusal; but he respected without difficulty the cold

twilight that had settled on this side of his companion’s life. It was

a province in which mystery reigned and as to which Waymarsh had never

spoken the informing word. Strether, who wanted to do him the highest

justice wherever he _could_ do it, singularly admired him for the

dignity of this reserve, and even counted it as one of the

grounds—grounds all handled and numbered—for ranking him, in the range

of their acquaintance, as a success. He _was_ a success, Waymarsh, in

spite of overwork, or prostration, of sensible shrinkage, of his wife’s

letters and of his not liking Europe. Strether would have reckoned his

own career less futile had he been able to put into it anything so

handsome as so much fine silence. One might one’s self easily have left

Mrs. Waymarsh; and one would assuredly have paid one’s tribute to the

ideal in covering with that attitude the derision of having been left

by her. Her husband had held his tongue and had made a large income;

and these were in especial the achievements as to which Strether envied

him. Our friend had had indeed on his side too a subject for silence,

which he fully appreciated; but it was a matter of a different sort,

and the figure of the income he had arrived at had never been high

enough to look any one in the face.

“I don’t know as I quite see what you require it for. You don’t appear

sick to speak of.” It was of Europe Waymarsh thus finally spoke.

“Well,” said Strether, who fell as much as possible into step, “I guess

I don’t _feel_ sick now that I’ve started. But I had pretty well run

down before I did start.”

Waymarsh raised his melancholy look. “Ain’t you about up to your usual

average?”

It was not quite pointedly sceptical, but it seemed somehow a plea for

the purest veracity, and it thereby affected our friend as the very

voice of Milrose. He had long since made a mental distinction—though

never in truth daring to betray it—between the voice of Milrose and the

voice even of Woollett. It was the former he felt, that was most in the

real tradition. There had been occasions in his past when the sound of

it had reduced him to temporary confusion, and the present, for some

reason, suddenly became such another. It was nevertheless no light

matter that the very effect of his confusion should be to make him

again prevaricate. “That description hardly does justice to a man to

whom it has done such a lot of good to see _you_.”

Waymarsh fixed on his washing-stand the silent detached stare with

which Milrose in person, as it were, might have marked the

unexpectedness of a compliment from Woollett, and Strether for his

part, felt once more like Woollett in person. “I mean,” his friend

presently continued, “that your appearance isn’t as bad as I’ve seen

it: it compares favourably with what it was when I last noticed it.” On

this appearance Waymarsh’s eyes yet failed to rest; it was almost as if

they obeyed an instinct of propriety, and the effect was still stronger

when, always considering the basin and jug, he added: “You’ve filled

out some since then.”

“I’m afraid I have,” Strether laughed: “one does fill out some with all

one takes in, and I’ve taken in, I dare say, more than I’ve natural

room for. I was dog-tired when I sailed.” It had the oddest sound of

cheerfulness.

“_I_ was dog-tired,” his companion returned, “when I arrived, and it’s

this wild hunt for rest that takes all the life out of me. The fact is,

Strether—and it’s a comfort to have you here at last to say it to;

though I don’t know, after all, that I’ve really waited; I’ve told it

to people I’ve met in the cars—the fact is, such a country as this

ain’t my _kind_ of country anyway. There ain’t a country I’ve seen over

here that _does_ seem my kind. Oh I don’t say but what there are plenty

of pretty places and remarkable old things; but the trouble is that I

don’t seem to feel anywhere in tune. That’s one of the reasons why I

suppose I’ve gained so little. I haven’t had the first sign of that

lift I was led to expect.” With this he broke out more earnestly. “Look

here—I want to go back.”

His eyes were all attached to Strether’s now, for he was one of the men

who fully face you when they talk of themselves. This enabled his

friend to look at him hard and immediately to appear to the highest

advantage in his eyes by doing so. “That’s a genial thing to say to a

fellow who has come out on purpose to meet you!”

Nothing could have been finer, on this, than Waymarsh’s sombre glow.

“_Have_ you come out on purpose?”

“Well—very largely.”

“I thought from the way you wrote there was something back of it.”

Strether hesitated. “Back of my desire to be with you?”

“Back of your prostration.”

Strether, with a smile made more dim by a certain consciousness, shook

his head. “There are all the causes of it!”

“And no particular cause that seemed most to drive you?”

Our friend could at last conscientiously answer. “Yes. One. There _is_

a matter that has had much to do with my coming out.”

Waymarsh waited a little. “Too private to mention?”

“No, not too private—for _you_. Only rather complicated.”

“Well,” said Waymarsh, who had waited again, “I _may_ lose my mind over

here, but I don’t know as I’ve done so yet.”

“Oh you shall have the whole thing. But not tonight.”

Waymarsh seemed to sit stiffer and to hold his elbows tighter. “Why

not—if I can’t sleep?”

“Because, my dear man, I _can!_”

“Then where’s your prostration?”

“Just in that—that I can put in eight hours.” And Strether brought it

out that if Waymarsh didn’t “gain” it was because he didn’t go to bed:

the result of which was, in its order, that, to do the latter justice,

he permitted his friend to insist on his really getting settled.

Strether, with a kind coercive hand for it, assisted him to this

consummation, and again found his own part in their relation

auspiciously enlarged by the smaller touches of lowering the lamp and

seeing to a sufficiency of blanket. It somehow ministered for him to

indulgence to feel Waymarsh, who looked unnaturally big and black in

bed, as much tucked in as a patient in a hospital and, with his

covering up to his chin, as much simplified by it. He hovered in vague

pity, to be brief, while his companion challenged him out of the

bedclothes. “Is she really after you? Is that what’s behind?”

Strether felt an uneasiness at the direction taken by his companion’s

insight, but he played a little at uncertainty. “Behind my coming out?”

“Behind your prostration or whatever. It’s generally felt, you know,

that she follows you up pretty close.”

Strether’s candour was never very far off. “Oh it has occurred to you

that I’m literally running away from Mrs. Newsome?”

“Well, I haven’t _known_ but what you are. You’re a very attractive

man, Strether. You’ve seen for yourself,” said Waymarsh “what that lady

downstairs makes of it. Unless indeed,” he rambled on with an effect

between the ironic and the anxious, “it’s you who are after _her_. Is

Mrs. Newsome _over_ here?” He spoke as with a droll dread of her.

It made his friend—though rather dimly—smile. “Dear no; she’s safe,

thank goodness—as I think I more and more feel—at home. She thought of

coming, but she gave it up. I’ve come in a manner instead of her; and

come to that extent—for you’re right in your inference—on her business.

So you see there _is_ plenty of connexion.”

Waymarsh continued to see at least all there was. “Involving

accordingly the particular one I’ve referred to?”

Strether took another turn about the room, giving a twitch to his

companion’s blanket and finally gaining the door. His feeling was that

of a nurse who had earned personal rest by having made everything

straight. “Involving more things than I can think of breaking ground on

now. But don’t be afraid—you shall have them from me: you’ll probably

find yourself having quite as much of them as you can do with. I

shall—if we keep together—very much depend on your impression of some

of them.”

Waymarsh’s acknowledgement of this tribute was characteristically

indirect. “You mean to say you don’t believe we _will_ keep together?”

“I only glance at the danger,” Strether paternally said, “because when

I hear you wail to go back I seem to see you open up such possibilities

of folly.”

Waymarsh took it—silent a little—like a large snubbed child “What are

you going to do with me?”

It was the very question Strether himself had put to Miss Gostrey, and

he wondered if he had sounded like that. But _he_ at least could be

more definite. “I’m going to take you right down to London.”

“Oh I’ve been down to London!” Waymarsh more softly moaned. “I’ve no

use, Strether, for anything down there.”

“Well,” said Strether, good-humouredly, “I guess you’ve some use for

_me_.”

“So I’ve got to go?”

“Oh you’ve got to go further yet.”

“Well,” Waymarsh sighed, “do your damnedest! Only you _will_ tell me

before you lead me on all the way—?”

Our friend had again so lost himself, both for amusement and for

contrition, in the wonder of whether he had made, in his own challenge

that afternoon, such another figure, that he for an instant missed the

thread. “Tell you—?”

“Why what you’ve got on hand.”

Strether hesitated. “Why it’s such a matter as that even if I

positively wanted I shouldn’t be able to keep it from you.”

Waymarsh gloomily gazed. “What does that mean then but that your trip

is just _for_ her?”

“For Mrs. Newsome? Oh it certainly is, as I say. Very much.”

“Then why do you also say it’s for me?”

Strether, in impatience, violently played with his latch. “It’s simple

enough. It’s for both of you.”

Waymarsh at last turned over with a groan. “Well, _I_ won’t marry you!”

“Neither, when it comes to that—!” But the visitor had already laughed

and escaped.

III

He had told Miss Gostrey he should probably take, for departure with

Waymarsh, some afternoon train, and it thereupon in the morning

appeared that this lady had made her own plan for an earlier one. She

had breakfasted when Strether came into the coffee-room; but, Waymarsh

not having yet emerged, he was in time to recall her to the terms of

their understanding and to pronounce her discretion overdone. She was

surely not to break away at the very moment she had created a want. He

had met her as she rose from her little table in a window, where, with

the morning papers beside her, she reminded him, as he let her know, of

Major Pendennis breakfasting at his club—a compliment of which she

professed a deep appreciation; and he detained her as pleadingly as if

he had already—and notably under pressure of the visions of the

night—learned to be unable to do without her. She must teach him at all

events, before she went, to order breakfast as breakfast was ordered in

Europe, and she must especially sustain him in the problem of ordering

for Waymarsh. The latter had laid upon his friend, by desperate sounds

through the door of his room, dreadful divined responsibilities in

respect to beefsteak and oranges—responsibilities which Miss Gostrey

took over with an alertness of action that matched her quick

intelligence. She had before this weaned the expatriated from

traditions compared with which the matutinal beefsteak was but the

creature of an hour, and it was not for her, with some of her memories,

to falter in the path though she freely enough declared, on reflexion,

that there was always in such cases a choice of opposed policies.

“There are times when to give them their head, you know—!”

They had gone to wait together in the garden for the dressing of the

meal, and Strether found her more suggestive than ever “Well, what?”

“Is to bring about for them such a complexity of relations—unless

indeed we call it a simplicity!—that the situation _has_ to wind itself

up. They want to go back.”

“And you want them to go!” Strether gaily concluded.

“I always want them to go, and I send them as fast as I can.’

“Oh I know—you take them to Liverpool.”

“Any port will serve in a storm. I’m—with all my other functions—an

agent for repatriation. I want to re-people our stricken country. What

will become of it else? I want to discourage others.”

The ordered English garden, in the freshness of the day, was delightful

to Strether, who liked the sound, under his feet, of the tight fine

gravel, packed with the chronic damp, and who had the idlest eye for

the deep smoothness of turf and the clean curves of paths. “Other

people?”

“Other countries. Other people—yes. I want to encourage our own.”

Strether wondered. “Not to come? Why then do you ‘meet’ them—since it

doesn’t appear to be to stop them?”

“Oh that they shouldn’t come is as yet too much to ask. What I attend

to is that they come quickly and return still more so. I meet them to

help it to be over as soon as possible, and though I don’t stop them

I’ve my way of putting them through. That’s my little system; and, if

you want to know,” said Maria Gostrey, “it’s my real secret, my

innermost mission and use. I only seem, you see, to beguile and

approve; but I’ve thought it all out and I’m working all the while

underground. I can’t perhaps quite give you my formula, but I think

that practically I succeed. I send you back spent. So you stay back.

Passed through my hands—”

“We don’t turn up again?” The further she went the further he always

saw himself able to follow. “I don’t want your formula—I feel quite

enough, as I hinted yesterday, your abysses. Spent!” he echoed. “If

that’s how you’re arranging so subtly to send me I thank you for the

warning.”

For a minute, amid the pleasantness—poetry in tariffed items, but all

the more, for guests already convicted, a challenge to consumption—they

smiled at each other in confirmed fellowship. “Do you call it subtly?

It’s a plain poor tale. Besides, you’re a special case.”

“Oh special cases—that’s weak!” She was weak enough, further still, to

defer her journey and agree to accompany the gentlemen on their own,

might a separate carriage mark her independence; though it was in spite

of this to befall after luncheon that she went off alone and that, with

a tryst taken for a day of her company in London, they lingered another

night. She had, during the morning—spent in a way that he was to

remember later on as the very climax of his foretaste, as warm with

presentiments, with what he would have called collapses—had all sorts

of things out with Strether; and among them the fact that though there

was never a moment of her life when she wasn’t “due” somewhere, there

was yet scarce a perfidy to others of which she wasn’t capable for his

sake. She explained moreover that wherever she happened to be she found

a dropped thread to pick up, a ragged edge to repair, some familiar

appetite in ambush, jumping out as she approached, yet appeasable with

a temporary biscuit. It became, on her taking the risk of the deviation

imposed on him by her insidious arrangement of his morning meal, a

point of honour for her not to fail with Waymarsh of the larger success

too; and her subsequent boast to Strether was that she had made their

friend fare—and quite without his knowing what was the matter—as Major

Pendennis would have fared at the Megatherium. She had made him

breakfast like a gentleman, and it was nothing, she forcibly asserted,

to what she would yet make him do. She made him participate in the slow

reiterated ramble with which, for Strether, the new day amply filled

itself; and it was by her art that he somehow had the air, on the

ramparts and in the Rows, of carrying a point of his own.

The three strolled and stared and gossiped, or at least the two did;

the case really yielding for their comrade, if analysed, but the

element of stricken silence. This element indeed affected Strether as

charged with audible rumblings, but he was conscious of the care of

taking it explicitly as a sign of pleasant peace. He wouldn’t appeal

too much, for that provoked stiffness; yet he wouldn’t be too freely

tacit, for that suggested giving up. Waymarsh himself adhered to an

ambiguous dumbness that might have represented either the growth of a

perception or the despair of one; and at times and in places—where the

low-browed galleries were darkest, the opposite gables queerest, the

solicitations of every kind densest—the others caught him fixing hard

some object of minor interest, fixing even at moments nothing

discernible, as if he were indulging it with a truce. When he met

Strether’s eye on such occasions he looked guilty and furtive, fell the

next minute into some attitude of retractation. Our friend couldn’t

show him the right things for fear of provoking some total

renouncement, and was tempted even to show him the wrong in order to

make him differ with triumph. There were moments when he himself felt

shy of professing the full sweetness of the taste of leisure, and there

were others when he found himself feeling as if his passages of

interchange with the lady at his side might fall upon the third member

of their party very much as Mr. Burchell, at Dr. Primrose’s fireside,

was influenced by the high flights of the visitors from London. The

smallest things so arrested and amused him that he repeatedly almost

apologised—brought up afresh in explanation his plea of a previous

grind. He was aware at the same time that his grind had been as nothing

to Waymarsh’s, and he repeatedly confessed that, to cover his

frivolity, he was doing his best for his previous virtue. Do what he

might, in any case, his previous virtue was still there, and it seemed

fairly to stare at him out of the windows of shops that were not as the

shops of Woollett, fairly to make him want things that he shouldn’t

know what to do with. It was by the oddest, the least admissible of

laws demoralising him now; and the way it boldly took was to make him

want more wants. These first walks in Europe were in fact a kind of

finely lurid intimation of what one might find at the end of that

process. Had he come back after long years, in something already so

like the evening of life, only to be exposed to it? It was at all

events over the shop-windows that he made, with Waymarsh, most free;

though it would have been easier had not the latter most sensibly

yielded to the appeal of the merely useful trades. He pierced with his

sombre detachment the plate-glass of ironmongers and saddlers, while

Strether flaunted an affinity with the dealers in stamped letter-paper

and in smart neckties. Strether was in fact recurrently shameless in

the presence of the tailors, though it was just over the heads of the

tailors that his countryman most loftily looked. This gave Miss Gostrey

a grasped opportunity to back up Waymarsh at his expense. The weary

lawyer—it was unmistakeable—had a conception of dress; but that, in

view of some of the features of the effect produced, was just what made

the danger of insistence on it. Strether wondered if he by this time

thought Miss Gostrey less fashionable or Lambert Strether more so; and

it appeared probable that most of the remarks exchanged between this

latter pair about passers, figures, faces, personal types, exemplified

in their degree the disposition to talk as “society” talked.

Was what was happening to himself then, was what already _had_

happened, really that a woman of fashion was floating him into society

and that an old friend deserted on the brink was watching the force of

the current? When the woman of fashion permitted Strether—as she

permitted him at the most—the purchase of a pair of gloves, the terms

she made about it, the prohibition of neckties and other items till she

should be able to guide him through the Burlington Arcade, were such as

to fall upon a sensitive ear as a challenge to just imputations. Miss

Gostrey was such a woman of fashion as could make without a symptom of

vulgar blinking an appointment for the Burlington Arcade. Mere

discriminations about a pair of gloves could thus at any rate

represent—always for such sensitive ears as were in

question—possibilities of something that Strether could make a mark

against only as the peril of apparent wantonness. He had quite the

consciousness of his new friend, for their companion, that he might

have had of a Jesuit in petticoats, a representative of the recruiting

interests of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, for

Waymarsh—that was to say the enemy, the monster of bulging eyes and

far-reaching quivering groping tentacles—was exactly society, exactly

the multiplication of shibboleths, exactly the discrimination of types

and tones, exactly the wicked old Rows of Chester, rank with feudalism;

exactly in short Europe.

There was light for observation, however, in an incident that occurred

just before they turned back to luncheon. Waymarsh had been for a

quarter of an hour exceptionally mute and distant, and something, or

other—Strether was never to make out exactly what—proved, as it were,

too much for him after his comrades had stood for three minutes taking

in, while they leaned on an old balustrade that guarded the edge of the

Row, a particularly crooked and huddled street-view. “He thinks us

sophisticated, he thinks us worldly, he thinks us wicked, he thinks us

all sorts of queer things,” Strether reflected; for wondrous were the

vague quantities our friend had within a couple of short days acquired

the habit of conveniently and conclusively lumping together. There

seemed moreover a direct connexion between some such inference and a

sudden grim dash taken by Waymarsh to the opposite side. This movement

was startlingly sudden, and his companions at first supposed him to

have espied, to be pursuing, the glimpse of an acquaintance. They next

made out, however, that an open door had instantly received him, and

they then recognised him as engulfed in the establishment of a

jeweller, behind whose glittering front he was lost to view. The fact

had somehow the note of a demonstration, and it left each of the others

to show a face almost of fear. But Miss Gostrey broke into a laugh.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“Well,” said Strether, “he can’t stand it.”

“But can’t stand what?”

“Anything. Europe.”

“Then how will that jeweller help him?”

Strether seemed to make it out, from their position, between the

interstices of arrayed watches, of close-hung dangling gewgaws. “You’ll

see.”

“Ah that’s just what—if he buys anything—I’m afraid of: that I shall

see something rather dreadful.”

Strether studied the finer appearances. “He may buy everything.”

“Then don’t you think we ought to follow him?”

“Not for worlds. Besides we can’t. We’re paralysed. We exchange a long

scared look, we publicly tremble. The thing is, you see, we ‘realise.’

He has struck for freedom.”

She wondered but she laughed. “Ah what a price to pay! And I was

preparing some for him so cheap.”

“No, no,” Strether went on, frankly amused now; “don’t call it that:

the kind of freedom you deal in is dear.” Then as to justify himself:

“Am I not in _my_ way trying it? It’s this.”

“Being here, you mean, with me?”

“Yes, and talking to you as I do. I’ve known you a few hours, and I’ve

known _him_ all my life; so that if the ease I thus take with you about

him isn’t magnificent”—and the thought of it held him a moment—“why

it’s rather base.”

“It’s magnificent!” said Miss Gostrey to make an end of it. “And you

should hear,” she added, “the ease _I_ take—and I above all intend to

take—with Mr. Waymarsh.”

Strether thought. “About _me?_ Ah that’s no equivalent. The equivalent

would be Waymarsh’s himself serving me up—his remorseless analysis of

me. And he’ll never do that”—he was sadly clear. “He’ll never

remorselessly analyse me.” He quite held her with the authority of

this. “He’ll never say a word to you about me.”

She took it in; she did it justice; yet after an instant her reason,

her restless irony, disposed of it. “Of course he won’t. For what do

you take people, that they’re able to say words about anything, able

remorselessly to analyse? There are not many like you and me. It will

be only because he’s too stupid.”

It stirred in her friend a sceptical echo which was at the same time

the protest of the faith of years. “Waymarsh stupid?”

“Compared with you.”

Strether had still his eyes on the jeweller’s front, and he waited a

moment to answer. “He’s a success of a kind that I haven’t approached.”

“Do you mean he has made money?”

“He makes it—to my belief. And I,” said Strether, “though with a back

quite as bent, have never made anything. I’m a perfectly equipped

failure.”

He feared an instant she’d ask him if he meant he was poor; and he was

glad she didn’t, for he really didn’t know to what the truth on this

unpleasant point mightn’t have prompted her. She only, however,

confirmed his assertion. “Thank goodness you’re a failure—it’s why I so

distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous. Look about

you—look at the successes. Would you _be_ one, on your honour? Look,

moreover,” she continued, “at me.”

For a little accordingly their eyes met. “I see,” Strether returned.

“You too are out of it.”

“The superiority you discern in me,” she concurred, “announces my

futility. If you knew,” she sighed, “the dreams of my youth! But our

realities are what has brought us together. We’re beaten brothers in

arms.”

He smiled at her kindly enough, but he shook his head. “It doesn’t

alter the fact that you’re expensive. You’ve cost me already—!”

But he had hung fire. “Cost you what?”

“Well, my past—in one great lump. But no matter,” he laughed: “I’ll pay

with my last penny.”

Her attention had unfortunately now been engaged by their comrade’s

return, for Waymarsh met their view as he came out of his shop. “I hope

he hasn’t paid,” she said, “with _his_ last; though I’m convinced he

has been splendid, and has been so for you.”

“Ah no—not that!”

“Then for me?”

“Quite as little.” Waymarsh was by this time near enough to show signs

his friend could read, though he seemed to look almost carefully at

nothing in particular.

“Then for himself?”

“For nobody. For nothing. For freedom.”

“But what has freedom to do with it?”

Strether’s answer was indirect. “To be as good as you and me. But

different.”

She had had time to take in their companion’s face; and with it, as

such things were easy for her, she took in all. “Different—yes. But

better!”

If Waymarsh was sombre he was also indeed almost sublime. He told them

nothing, left his absence unexplained, and though they were convinced

he had made some extraordinary purchase they were never to learn its

nature. He only glowered grandly at the tops of the old gables. “It’s

the sacred rage,” Strether had had further time to say; and this sacred

rage was to become between them, for convenient comprehension, the

description of one of his periodical necessities. It was Strether who

eventually contended that it did make him better than they. But by that

time Miss Gostrey was convinced that she didn’t want to be better than

Strether.

Book Second

I

Those occasions on which Strether was, in association with the exile

from Milrose, to see the sacred rage glimmer through would doubtless

have their due periodicity; but our friend had meanwhile to find names

for many other matters. On no evening of his life perhaps, as he

reflected, had he had to supply so many as on the third of his short

stay in London; an evening spent by Miss Gostrey’s side at one of the

theatres, to which he had found himself transported, without his own

hand raised, on the mere expression of a conscientious wonder. She knew

her theatre, she knew her play, as she had triumphantly known, three

days running, everything else, and the moment filled to the brim, for

her companion, that apprehension of the interesting which, whether or

no the interesting happened to filter through his guide, strained now

to its limits his brief opportunity. Waymarsh hadn’t come with them; he

had seen plays enough, he signified, before Strether had joined him—an

affirmation that had its full force when his friend ascertained by

questions that he had seen two and a circus. Questions as to what he

had seen had on him indeed an effect only less favourable than

questions as to what he hadn’t. He liked the former to be

discriminated; but how could it be done, Strether asked of their

constant counsellor, without discriminating the latter?

Miss Gostrey had dined with him at his hotel, face to face over a small

table on which the lighted candles had rose-coloured shades; and the

rose-coloured shades and the small table and the soft fragrance of the

lady—had anything to his mere sense ever been so soft?—were so many

touches in he scarce knew what positive high picture. He had been to

the theatre, even to the opera, in Boston, with Mrs. Newsome, more than

once acting as her only escort; but there had been no little confronted

dinner, no pink lights, no whiff of vague sweetness, as a preliminary:

one of the results of which was that at present, mildly rueful, though

with a sharpish accent, he actually asked himself _why_ there hadn’t.

There was much the same difference in his impression of the noticed

state of his companion, whose dress was “cut down,” as he believed the

term to be, in respect to shoulders and bosom, in a manner quite other

than Mrs. Newsome’s, and who wore round her throat a broad red velvet

band with an antique jewel—he was rather complacently sure it was

antique—attached to it in front. Mrs. Newsome’s dress was never in any

degree “cut down,” and she never wore round her throat a broad red

velvet band: if she had, moreover, would it ever have served so to

carry on and complicate, as he now almost felt, his vision?

It would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the effect

of the ribbon from which Miss Gostrey’s trinket depended, had he not

for the hour, at the best, been so given over to uncontrolled

perceptions. What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his

friend’s velvet band somehow added, in her appearance, to the value of

every other item—to that of her smile and of the way she carried her

head, to that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her

hair? What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man’s work in the world

to do with red velvet bands? He wouldn’t for anything have so exposed

himself as to tell Miss Gostrey how much he liked hers, yet he _had_

none the less not only caught himself in the act—frivolous, no doubt,

idiotic, and above all unexpected—of liking it: he had in addition

taken it as a starting-point for fresh backward, fresh forward, fresh

lateral flights. The manner in which Mrs. Newsome’s throat _was_

encircled suddenly represented for him, in an alien order, almost as

many things as the manner in which Miss Gostrey’s was. Mrs. Newsome

wore, at operatic hours, a black silk dress—very handsome, he knew it

was “handsome”—and an ornament that his memory was able further to

identify as a ruche. He had his association indeed with the ruche, but

it was rather imperfectly romantic. He had once said to the wearer—and

it was as “free” a remark as he had ever made to her—that she looked,

with her ruff and other matters, like Queen Elizabeth; and it had after

this in truth been his fancy that, as a consequence of that tenderness

and an acceptance of the idea, the form of this special tribute to the

“frill” had grown slightly more marked. The connexion, as he sat there

and let his imagination roam, was to strike him as vaguely pathetic;

but there it all was, and pathetic was doubtless in the conditions the

best thing it could possibly be. It had assuredly existed at any rate;

for it seemed now to come over him that no gentleman of his age at

Woollett could ever, to a lady of Mrs. Newsome’s, which was not much

less than his, have embarked on such a simile.

All sorts of things in fact now seemed to come over him, comparatively

few of which his chronicler can hope for space to mention. It came over

him for instance that Miss Gostrey looked perhaps like Mary Stuart:

Lambert Strether had a candour of fancy which could rest for an instant

gratified in such an antithesis. It came over him that never before—no,

literally never—had a lady dined with him at a public place before

going to the play. The publicity of the place was just, in the matter,

for Strether, the rare strange thing; it affected him almost as the

achievement of privacy might have affected a man of a different

experience. He had married, in the far-away years, so young as to have

missed the time natural in Boston for taking girls to the Museum; and

it was absolutely true of hint that—even after the close of the period

of conscious detachment occupying the centre of his life, the grey

middle desert of the two deaths, that of his wife and that, ten years

later, of his boy—he had never taken any one anywhere. It came over him

in especial—though the monition had, as happened, already sounded,

fitfully gleamed, in other forms—that the business he had come out on

hadn’t yet been so brought home to him as by the sight of the people

about him. She gave him the impression, his friend, at first, more

straight than he got it for himself—gave it simply by saying with

off-hand illumination: “Oh yes, they’re types!”—but after he had taken

it he made to the full his own use of it; both while he kept silence

for the four acts and while he talked in the intervals. It was an

evening, it was a world of types, and this was a connexion above all in

which the figures and faces in the stalls were interchangeable with

those on the stage.

He felt as if the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow of

his neighbour, a great stripped handsome red-haired lady who conversed

with a gentleman on her other side in stray dissyllables which had for

his ear, in the oddest way in the world, so much sound that he wondered

they hadn’t more sense; and he recognised by the same law, beyond the

footlights, what he was pleased to take for the very flush of English

life. He had distracted drops in which he couldn’t have said if it were

actors or auditors who were most true, and the upshot of which, each

time, was the consciousness of new contacts. However he viewed his job

it was “types” he should have to tackle. Those before him and around

him were not as the types of Woollett, where, for that matter, it had

begun to seem to him that there must only have been the male and the

female. These made two exactly, even with the individual varieties.

Here, on the other hand, apart from the personal and the sexual

range—which might be greater or less—a series of strong stamps had been

applied, as it were, from without; stamps that his observation played

with as, before a glass case on a table, it might have passed from

medal to medal and from copper to gold. It befell that in the drama

precisely there was a bad woman in a yellow frock who made a pleasant

weak good-looking young man in perpetual evening dress do the most

dreadful things. Strether felt himself on the whole not afraid of the

yellow frock, but he was vaguely anxious over a certain kindness into

which he found himself drifting for its victim. He hadn’t come out, he

reminded himself, to be too kind, or indeed to be kind at all, to

Chadwick Newsome. Would Chad also be in perpetual evening dress? He

somehow rather hoped it—it seemed so to add to _this_ young man’s

general amenability; though he wondered too if, to fight him with his

own weapons, he himself (a thought almost startling) would have

likewise to be. This young man furthermore would have been much more

easy to handle—at least for _him_—than appeared probable in respect to

Chad.

It came up for him with Miss Gostrey that there were things of which

she would really perhaps after all have heard, and she admitted when a

little pressed that she was never quite sure of what she heard as

distinguished from things such as, on occasions like the present, she

only extravagantly guessed. “I seem with this freedom, you see, to have

guessed Mr. Chad. He’s a young man on whose head high hopes are placed

at Woollett; a young man a wicked woman has got hold of and whom his

family over there have sent you out to rescue. You’ve accepted the

mission of separating him from the wicked woman. Are you quite sure

she’s very bad for him?”

Something in his manner showed it as quite pulling him up. “Of course

we are. Wouldn’t _you_ be?”

“Oh I don’t know. One never does—does one?—beforehand. One can only

judge on the facts. Yours are quite new to me; I’m really not in the

least, as you see, in possession of them: so it will be awfully

interesting to have them from you. If you’re satisfied, that’s all

that’s required. I mean if you’re sure you _are_ sure: sure it won’t

do.”

“That he should lead such a life? Rather!”

“Oh but I don’t know, you see, about his life; you’ve not told me about

his life. She may be charming—his life!”

“Charming?”—Strether stared before him. “She’s base, venal—out of the

streets.”

“I see. And _he_—?”

“Chad, wretched boy?”

“Of what type and temper is he?” she went on as Strether had lapsed.

“Well—the obstinate.” It was as if for a moment he had been going to

say more and had then controlled himself.

That was scarce what she wished. “Do you like him?”

This time he was prompt. “No. How _can_ I?”

“Do you mean because of your being so saddled with him?”

“I’m thinking of his mother,” said Strether after a moment. “He has

darkened her admirable life.” He spoke with austerity. “He has worried

her half to death.”

“Oh that’s of course odious.” She had a pause as if for renewed

emphasis of this truth, but it ended on another note. “Is her life very

admirable?”

“Extraordinarily.”

There was so much in the tone that Miss Gostrey had to devote another

pause to the appreciation of it. “And has he only _her?_ I don’t mean

the bad woman in Paris,” she quickly added—“for I assure you I

shouldn’t even at the best be disposed to allow him more than one. But

has he only his mother?”

“He has also a sister, older than himself and married; and they’re both

remarkably fine women.”

“Very handsome, you mean?”

This promptitude—almost, as he might have thought, this precipitation,

gave him a brief drop; but he came up again. “Mrs. Newsome, I think, is

handsome, though she’s not of course, with a son of twenty-eight and a

daughter of thirty, in her very first youth. She married, however,

extremely young.”

“And is wonderful,” Miss Gostrey asked, “for her age?”

Strether seemed to feel with a certain disquiet the pressure of it. “I

don’t say she’s wonderful. Or rather,” he went on the next moment, “I

do say it. It’s exactly what she _is_—wonderful. But I wasn’t thinking

of her appearance,” he explained—“striking as that doubtless is. I was

thinking—well, of many other things.” He seemed to look at these as if

to mention some of them; then took, pulling himself up, another turn.

“About Mrs. Pocock people may differ.”

“Is that the daughter’s name—‘Pocock’?”

“That’s the daughter’s name,” Strether sturdily confessed.

“And people may differ, you mean, about _her_ beauty?”

“About everything.”

“But _you_ admire her?”

He gave his friend a glance as to show how he could bear this “I’m

perhaps a little afraid of her.”

“Oh,” said Miss Gostrey, “I see her from here! You may say then I see

very fast and very far, but I’ve already shown you I do. The young man

and the two ladies,” she went on, “are at any rate all the family?”

“Quite all. His father has been dead ten years, and there’s no brother,

nor any other sister. They’d do,” said Strether, “anything in the world

for him.”

“And you’d do anything in the world for _them?_”

He shifted again; she had made it perhaps just a shade too affirmative

for his nerves. “Oh I don’t know!”

“You’d do at any rate this, and the ‘anything’ they’d do is represented

by their _making_ you do it.”

“Ah they couldn’t have come—either of them. They’re very busy people

and Mrs. Newsome in particular has a large full life. She’s moreover

highly nervous—and not at all strong.”

“You mean she’s an American invalid?”

He carefully distinguished. “There’s nothing she likes less than to be

called one, but she would consent to be one of those things, I think,”

he laughed, “if it were the only way to be the other.”

“Consent to be an American in order to be an invalid?”

“No,” said Strether, “the other way round. She’s at any rate delicate

sensitive high-strung. She puts so much of herself into everything—”

Ah Maria knew these things! “That she has nothing left for anything

else? Of course she hasn’t. To whom do you say it? High-strung? Don’t I

spend my life, for them, jamming down the pedal? I see moreover how it

has told on you.”

Strether took this more lightly. “Oh I jam down the pedal too!”

“Well,” she lucidly returned, “we must from this moment bear on it

together with all our might.” And she forged ahead. “Have they money?”

But it was as if, while her energetic image still held him, her enquiry

fell short. “Mrs. Newsome,” he wished further to explain, “hasn’t

moreover your courage on the question of contact. If she had come it

would have been to see the person herself.”

“The woman? Ah but that’s courage.”

“No—it’s exaltation, which is a very different thing. Courage,” he,

however, accommodatingly threw out, “is what _you_ have.”

She shook her head. “You say that only to patch me up—to cover the

nudity of my want of exaltation. I’ve neither the one nor the other.

I’ve mere battered indifference. I see that what you mean,” Miss

Gostrey pursued, “is that if your friend _had_ come she would take

great views, and the great views, to put it simply, would be too much

for her.”

Strether looked amused at her notion of the simple, but he adopted her

formula. “Everything’s too much for her.”

“Ah then such a service as this of yours—”

“Is more for her than anything else? Yes—far more. But so long as it

isn’t too much for _me_—!”

“Her condition doesn’t matter? Surely not; we leave her condition out;

we take it, that is, for granted. I see it, her condition, as behind

and beneath you; yet at the same time I see it as bearing you up.”

“Oh it does bear me up!” Strether laughed.

“Well then as yours bears _me_ nothing more’s needed.” With which she

put again her question. “Has Mrs. Newsome money?”

This time he heeded. “Oh plenty. That’s the root of the evil. There’s

money, to very large amounts, in the concern. Chad has had the free use

of a great deal. But if he’ll pull himself together and come home, all

the same, he’ll find his account in it.”

She had listened with all her interest. “And I hope to goodness you’ll

find yours!”

“He’ll take up his definite material reward,” said Strether without

acknowledgement of this. “He’s at the parting of the ways. He can come

into the business now—he can’t come later.”

“Is there a business?”

“Lord, yes—a big brave bouncing business. A roaring trade.”

“A great shop?”

“Yes—a workshop; a great production, a great industry. The concern’s a

manufacture—and a manufacture that, if it’s only properly looked after,

may well be on the way to become a monopoly. It’s a little thing they

make—make better, it appears, than other people can, or than other

people, at any rate, do. Mr. Newsome, being a man of ideas, at least in

that particular line,” Strether explained, “put them on it with great

effect, and gave the place altogether, in his time, an immense lift.”

“It’s a place in itself?”

“Well, quite a number of buildings; almost a little industrial colony.

But above all it’s a thing. The article produced.”

“And what _is_ the article produced?”

Strether looked about him as in slight reluctance to say; then the

curtain, which he saw about to rise, came to his aid. “I’ll tell you

next time.” But when the next time came he only said he’d tell her

later on—after they should have left the theatre; for she had

immediately reverted to their topic, and even for himself the picture

of the stage was now overlaid with another image. His postponements,

however, made her wonder—wonder if the article referred to were

anything bad. And she explained that she meant improper or ridiculous

or wrong. But Strether, so far as that went, could satisfy her.

“Unmentionable? Oh no, we constantly talk of it; we are quite familiar

and brazen about it. Only, as a small, trivial, rather ridiculous

object of the commonest domestic use, it’s just wanting in—what shall I

say? Well, dignity, or the least approach to distinction. Right here

therefore, with everything about us so grand—!” In short he shrank.

“It’s a false note?”

“Sadly. It’s vulgar.”

“But surely not vulgarer than this.” Then on his wondering as she

herself had done: “Than everything about us.” She seemed a trifle

irritated. “What do you take this for?”

“Why for—comparatively—divine!”

“This dreadful London theatre? It’s impossible, if you really want to

know.”

“Oh then,” laughed Strether, “I _don’t_ really want to know!”

It made between them a pause, which she, however, still fascinated by

the mystery of the production at Woollett, presently broke. “‘Rather

ridiculous’? Clothes-pins? Saleratus? Shoe-polish?”

It brought him round. “No—you don’t even ‘burn.’ I don’t think, you

know, you’ll guess it.”

“How then can I judge how vulgar it is?”

“You’ll judge when I do tell you”—and he persuaded her to patience. But

it may even now frankly be mentioned that he in the sequel never _was_

to tell her. He actually never did so, and it moreover oddly occurred

that by the law, within her, of the 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?”

Strether cast about. “Well—practices.”

“In business? Infamies? He was an old swindler?”

“Oh,” he said with more emphasis than spirit, “I shan’t describe _him_

nor narrate his exploits.”

“Lord, what abysses! And the late Mr. Newsome then?”

“Well, what about him?”

“Was he like the grandfather?”

“No—he was on the other side of the house. And he was different.”

Miss Gostrey kept it up. “Better?”

Her friend for a moment hung fire. “No.”

Her comment on his hesitation was scarce the less marked for being

mute. “Thank you. _Now_ don’t you see,” she went on, “why the boy

doesn’t come home? He’s drowning his shame.”

“His shame? What shame?”

“What shame? Comment donc? _The_ shame.”

“But where and when,” Strether asked, “is ‘_the_ shame’—where is any

shame—to-day? The men I speak of—they did as every one does; and

(besides being ancient history) it was all a matter of appreciation.”

She showed how she understood. “Mrs. Newsome has appreciated?”

“Ah I can’t speak for _her!_”

“In the midst of such doings—and, as I understand you, profiting by

them, she at least has remained exquisite?”

“Oh I can’t talk of her!” Strether said.

“I thought she was just what you _could_ talk of. You _don’t_ trust

me,” Miss Gostrey after a moment declared.

It had its effect. “Well, her money is spent, her life conceived and

carried on with a large beneficence—”

“That’s a kind of expiation of wrongs? Gracious,” she added before he

could speak, “how intensely you make me see her!”

“If you see her,” Strether dropped, “it’s all that’s necessary.”

She really seemed to have her. “I feel that. She _is_, in spite of

everything, handsome.”

This at least enlivened him. “What do you mean by everything?”

“Well, I mean _you_.” With which she had one of her swift changes of

ground. “You say the concern needs looking after; but doesn’t Mrs.

Newsome look after it?”

“So far as possible. She’s wonderfully able, but it’s not her affair,

and her life’s a good deal overcharged. She has many, many things.”

“And you also?”

“Oh yes—I’ve many too, if you will.”

“I see. But what I mean is,” Miss Gostrey amended, “do you also look

after the business?”

“Oh no, I don’t touch the business.”

“Only everything else?”

“Well, yes—some things.”

“As for instance—?”

Strether obligingly thought. “Well, the Review.”

“The Review?—you have a Review?”

“Certainly. Woollett has a Review—which Mrs. Newsome, for the most

part, magnificently pays for and which I, not at all magnificently,

edit. My name’s on the cover,” Strether pursued, “and I’m really rather

disappointed and hurt that you seem never to have heard of it.”

She neglected for a moment this grievance. “And what kind of a Review

is it?”

His serenity was now completely restored. “Well, it’s green.”

“Do you mean in political colour as they say here—in thought?”

“No; I mean the cover’s green—of the most lovely shade.”

“And with Mrs. Newsome’s name on it too?”

He waited a little. “Oh as for that you must judge if she peeps out.

She’s behind the whole thing; but she’s of a delicacy and a

discretion—!”

Miss Gostrey took it all. “I’m sure. She _would_ be. I don’t underrate

her. She must be rather a swell.”

“Oh yes, she’s rather a swell!”

“A Woollett swell—_bon!_ I like the idea of a Woollett swell. And you

must be rather one too, to be so mixed up with her.”

“Ah no,” said Strether, “that’s not the way it works.”

But she had already taken him up. “The way it works—you needn’t tell

me!—is of course that you efface yourself.”

“With my name on the cover?” he lucidly objected.

“Ah but you don’t put it on for yourself.”

“I beg your pardon—that’s exactly what I do put it on for. It’s exactly

the thing that I’m reduced to doing for myself. It seems to rescue a

little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions, the refuse-heap

of disappointments and failures, my one presentable little scrap of an

identity.”

On this she looked at him as to say many things, but what she at last

simply said was: “She likes to see it there. You’re the bigger swell of

the two,” she immediately continued, “because you think you’re not one.

She thinks she _is_ one. However,” Miss Gostrey added, “she thinks

you’re one too. You’re at all events the biggest she can get hold of.”

She embroidered, she abounded. “I don’t say it to interfere between

you, but on the day she gets hold of a bigger one—!” Strether had

thrown back his head as in silent mirth over something that struck him

in her audacity or felicity, and her flight meanwhile was already

higher. “Therefore close with her—!”

“Close with her?” he asked as she seemed to hang poised.

“Before you lose your chance.”

Their eyes met over it. “What do you mean by closing?”

“And what do I mean by your chance? I’ll tell you when you tell me all

the things _you_ don’t. Is it her _greatest_ fad?” she briskly pursued.

“The Review?” He seemed to wonder how he could best describe it. This

resulted however but in a sketch. “It’s her tribute to the ideal.”

“I see. You go in for tremendous things.”

“We go in for the unpopular side—that is so far as we dare.”

“And how far _do_ you dare?”

“Well, she very far. I much less. I don’t begin to have her faith. She

provides,” said Strether, “three fourths of that. And she provides, as

I’ve confided to you, _all_ the money.”

It evoked somehow a vision of gold that held for a little Miss

Gostrey’s eyes, and she looked as if she heard the bright dollars

shovelled in. “I hope then you make a good thing—”

“I _never_ made a good thing!” he at once returned.

She just waited. “Don’t you call it a good thing to be loved?”

“Oh we’re not loved. We’re not even hated. We’re only just sweetly

ignored.”

She had another pause. “You don’t trust me!” she once more repeated.

“Don’t I when I lift the last veil?—tell you the very secret of the

prison-house?”

Again she met his eyes, but to the result that after an instant her own

turned away with impatience. “You don’t sell? Oh I’m glad of _that!_”

After which however, and before he could protest, she was off again.

“She’s just a _moral_ swell.”

He accepted gaily enough the definition. “Yes—I really think that

describes her.”

But it had for his friend the oddest connexion. “How does she do her

hair?”

He laughed out. “Beautifully!”

“Ah that doesn’t tell me. However, it doesn’t matter—I know. It’s

tremendously neat—a real reproach; quite remarkably thick and without,

as yet, a single strand of white. There!”

He blushed for her realism, but gaped at her truth. “You’re the very

deuce.”

“What else _should_ I be? It was as the very deuce I pounced on you.

But don’t let it trouble you, for everything but the very deuce—at our

age—is a bore and a delusion, and even he himself, after all, but half

a joy.” With which, on a single sweep of her wing, she resumed. “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. This was her great time,

she intimated, for pulling herself together. The delays caused by the

weather, the struggle for vehicles at the door, gave them occasion to

subside on a divan at the back of the vestibule and just beyond the

reach of the fresh damp gusts from the street. Here Strether’s comrade

resumed that free handling of the subject to which his own imagination

of it already owed so much. “Does your young friend in Paris like you?”

It had almost, after the interval, startled him. “Oh I hope not! Why

_should_ he?”

“Why shouldn’t he?” Miss Gostrey asked. “That you’re coming down on him

need have nothing to do with it.”

“You see more in it,” he presently returned, “than I.”

“Of course I see _you_ in it.”

“Well then you see more in ‘me’!”

“Than you see in yourself? Very likely. That’s always one’s right. What

I was thinking of,” she explained, “is the possible particular effect

on him of his _milieu_.”

“Oh his _milieu_—!” Strether really felt he could imagine it better now

than three hours before.

“Do you mean it can only have been so lowering?”

“Why that’s my very starting-point.”

“Yes, but you start so far back. What do his letters say?”

“Nothing. He practically ignores us—or spares us. He doesn’t write.”

“I see. But there are all the same,” she went on, “two quite distinct

things that—given the wonderful place he’s in—may have happened to him.

One is that he may have got brutalised. The other is that he may have

got refined.”

Strether stared—this _was_ a novelty. “Refined?”

“Oh,” she said quietly, “there _are_ refinements.”

The way of it made him, after looking at her, break into a laugh.

“_You_ have them!”

“As one of the signs,” she continued in the same tone, “they constitute

perhaps the worst.”

He thought it over and his gravity returned. “Is it a refinement not to

answer his mother’s letters?”

She appeared to have a scruple, but she brought it out. “Oh I should

say the greatest of all.”

“Well,” said Strether, “_I’m_ quite content to let it, as one of the

signs, pass for the worst that I know he believes he can do what he

likes with me.”

This appeared to strike her. “How do you know it?”

“Oh I’m sure of it. I feel it in my bones.”

“Feel he _can_ do it?”

“Feel that he believes he can. It may come to the same thing!” Strether

laughed.

She wouldn’t, however, have this. “Nothing for you will ever come to

the same thing as anything else.” And she understood what she meant, it

seemed, sufficiently to go straight on. “You say that if he does break

he’ll come in for things at home?”

“Quite positively. He’ll come in for a particular chance—a chance that

any properly constituted young man would jump at. The business has so

developed that an opening scarcely apparent three years ago, but which

his father’s will took account of as in certain conditions possible and

which, under that will, attaches to Chad’s availing himself of it a

large contingent advantage—this opening, the conditions having come

about, now simply awaits him. His mother has kept it for him, holding

out against strong pressure, till the last possible moment. It

requires, naturally, as it carries with it a handsome ‘part,’ a large

share in profits, his being on the spot and making a big effort for a

big result. That’s what I mean by his chance. If he misses it he comes

in, as you say, for nothing. And to see that he doesn’t miss it is, in

a word, what I’ve come out for.”

She let it all sink in. “What you’ve come out for then is simply to

render him an immense service.”

Well, poor Strether was willing to take it so. “Ah if you like.”

“He stands, as they say, if you succeed with him, to gain—”

“Oh a lot of advantages.” Strether had them clearly at his fingers’

ends.

“By which you mean of course a lot of money.”

“Well, not only. I’m acting with a sense for him of other things too.

Consideration and comfort and security—the general safety of being

anchored by a strong chain. He wants, as I see him, to be protected.

Protected I mean from life.”

“Ah voilà!”—her thought fitted with a click. “From life. What you

_really_ want to get him home for is to marry him.”

“Well, that’s about the size of it.”

“Of course,” she said, “it’s rudimentary. But to any one in

particular?”

He smiled at this, looking a little more conscious. “You get everything

out.”

For a moment again their eyes met. “You put everything in!”

He acknowledged the tribute by telling her. “To Mamie Pocock.”

She wondered; then gravely, even exquisitely, as if to make the oddity

also fit: “His own niece?”

“Oh you must yourself find a name for the relation. His

brother-in-law’s sister. Mrs. Jim’s sister-in-law.”

It seemed to have on Miss Gostrey a certain hardening effect. “And who

in the world’s Mrs. Jim?”

“Chad’s sister—who was Sarah Newsome. She’s married—didn’t I mention

it?—to Jim Pocock.”

“Ah yes,” she tacitly replied; but he had mentioned things—! Then,

however, with all the sound it could have, “Who in the world’s Jim

Pocock?” she asked.

“Why Sally’s husband. That’s the only way we distinguish people at

Woollett,” he good-humoredly explained.

“And is it a great distinction—being Sally’s husband?”

He considered. “I think there can be scarcely a greater—unless it may

become one, in the future, to be Chad’s wife.”

“Then how do they distinguish _you?_”

“They _don’t_—except, as I’ve told you, by the green cover.”

Once more their eyes met on it, and she held him an instant. “The green

cover won’t—nor will _any_ cover—avail you with _me_. You’re of a depth

of duplicity!” Still, she could in her own large grasp of the real

condone it. “Is Mamie a great _parti?_”

“Oh the greatest we have—our prettiest brightest girl.”

Miss Gostrey seemed to fix the poor child. “I know what they _can_ be.

And with money?”

“Not perhaps with a great deal of that—but with so much of everything

else that we don’t miss it. We _don’t_ miss money much, you know,”

Strether added, “in general, in America, in pretty girls.”

“No,” she conceded; “but I know also what you do sometimes miss. And do

you,” she asked, “yourself admire her?”

It was a question, he indicated, that there might be several ways of

taking; but he decided after an instant for the humorous. “Haven’t I

sufficiently showed you how I admire _any_ pretty girl?”

Her interest in his problem was by this time such that it scarce left

her freedom, and she kept close to the facts. “I supposed that at

Woollett you wanted them—what shall I call it?—blameless. I mean your

young men for your pretty girls.”

“So did I!” Strether confessed. “But you strike there a curious

fact—the fact that Woollett too accommodates itself to the spirit of

the age and the increasing mildness of manners. Everything changes, and

I hold that our situation precisely marks a date. We _should_ prefer

them blameless, but we have to make the best of them as we find them.

Since the spirit of the age and the increasing mildness send them so

much more to Paris—”

“You’ve to take them back as they come. When they _do_ come. _Bon!_”

Once more she embraced it all, but she had a moment of thought. “Poor

Chad!”

“Ah,” said Strether cheerfully “Mamie will save him!”

She was looking away, still in her vision, and she spoke with

impatience and almost as if he hadn’t understood her. “_You’ll_ save

him. That’s who’ll save him.”

“Oh but with Mamie’s aid. Unless indeed you mean,” he added, “that I

shall effect so much more with yours!”

It made her at last again look at him. “You’ll do more—as you’re so

much better—than all of us put together.”

“I think I’m only better since I’ve known _you!_” Strether bravely

returned.

The depletion of the place, the shrinkage of the crowd and now

comparatively quiet withdrawal of its last elements had already brought

them nearer the door and put them in relation with a messenger of whom

he bespoke Miss Gostrey’s cab. But this left them a few minutes more,

which she was clearly in no mood not to use. “You’ve spoken to me of

what—by your success—Mr. Chad stands to gain. But you’ve not spoken to

me of what you do.”

“Oh I’ve nothing more to gain,” said Strether very simply.

She took it as even quite too simple. “You mean you’ve got it all

‘down’? You’ve been paid in advance?”

“Ah don’t talk about payment!” he groaned.

Something in the tone of it pulled her up, but as their messenger still

delayed she had another chance and she put it in another way. “What—by

failure—do you stand to lose?”

He still, however, wouldn’t have it. “Nothing!” he exclaimed, and on

the messenger’s at this instant reappearing he was able to sink the

subject in their responsive advance. When, a few steps up the street,

under a lamp, he had put her into her four-wheeler and she had asked

him if the man had called for him no second conveyance, he replied

before the door was closed. “You won’t take me with you?”

“Not for the world.”

“Then I shall walk.”

“In the rain?”

“I like the rain,” said Strether. “Good-night!”

She kept him a moment, while his hand was on the door, by not

answering; after which she answered by repeating her question. “What do

you stand to lose?”

Why the question now affected him as other he couldn’t have said; he

could only this time meet it otherwise. “Everything.”

“So I thought. Then you shall succeed. And to that end I’m yours—”

“Ah, dear lady!” he kindly breathed.

“Till death!” said Maria Gostrey. “Good-night.”

II

Strether called, his second morning in Paris, on the bankers of the Rue

Scribe to whom his letter of credit was addressed, and he made this

visit attended by Waymarsh, in whose company he had crossed from London

two days before. They had hastened to the Rue Scribe on the morrow of

their arrival, but Strether had not then found the letters the hope of

which prompted this errand. He had had as yet none at all; hadn’t

expected them in London, but had counted on several in Paris, and,

disconcerted now, had presently strolled back to the Boulevard with a

sense of injury that he felt himself taking for as good a start as any

other. It would serve, this spur to his spirit, he reflected, as,

pausing at the top of the street, he looked up and down the great

foreign avenue, it would serve to begin business with. His idea was to

begin business immediately, and it did much for him the rest of his day

that the beginning of business awaited him. He did little else till

night but ask himself what he should do if he hadn’t fortunately had so

much to do; but he put himself the question in many different

situations and connexions. What carried him hither and yon was an

admirable theory that nothing he could do wouldn’t be in some manner

related to what he fundamentally had on hand, or _would_ be—should he

happen to have a scruple—wasted for it. He did happen to have a

scruple—a scruple about taking no definite step till he should get

letters; but this reasoning carried it off. A single day to feel his

feet—he had felt them as yet only at Chester and in London—was he could

consider, none too much; and having, as he had often privately

expressed it, Paris to reckon with, he threw these hours of freshness

consciously into the reckoning. They made it continually greater, but

that was what it had best be if it was to be anything at all, and he

gave himself up till far into the evening, at the theatre and on the

return, after the theatre, along the bright congested Boulevard, to

feeling it grow. Waymarsh had accompanied him this time to the play,

and the two men had walked together, as a first stage, from the Gymnase

to the Café Riche, into the crowded “terrace” of which

establishment—the night, or rather the morning, for midnight had

struck, being bland and populous—they had wedged themselves for

refreshment. Waymarsh, as a result of some discussion with his friend,

had made a marked virtue of his having now let himself go; and there

had been elements of impression in their half-hour over their watered

beer-glasses that gave him his occasion for conveying that he held this

compromise with his stiffer self to have become extreme. He conveyed

it—for it was still, after all, his stiffer self who gloomed out of the

glare of the terrace—in solemn silence; and there was indeed a great

deal of critical silence, every way, between the companions, even till

they gained the Place de l’Opéra, as to the character of their

nocturnal progress.

This morning there _were_ letters—letters which had reached London,

apparently all together, the day of Strether’s journey, and had taken

their time to follow him; so that, after a controlled impulse to go

into them in the reception-room of the bank, which, reminding him of

the post-office at Woollett, affected him as the abutment of some

transatlantic bridge, he slipped them into the pocket of his loose grey

overcoat with a sense of the felicity of carrying them off. Waymarsh,

who had had letters yesterday, had had them again to-day, and Waymarsh

suggested in this particular no controlled impulses. The last one he

was at all events likely to be observed to struggle with was clearly

that of bringing to a premature close any visit to the Rue Scribe.

Strether had left him there yesterday; he wanted to see the papers, and

he had spent, by what his friend could make out, a succession of hours

with the papers. He spoke of the establishment, with emphasis, as a

post of superior observation; just as he spoke generally of his actual

damnable doom as a device for hiding from him what was going on. Europe

was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for

dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge,

and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations

of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs. Strether, on

his side, set himself to walk again—he had his relief in his pocket;

and indeed, much as he had desired his budget, the growth of

restlessness might have been marked in him from the moment he had

assured himself of the superscription of most of the missives it

contained. This restlessness became therefore his temporary law; he

knew he should recognise as soon as see it the best place of all for

settling down with his chief correspondent. He had for the next hour an

accidental air of looking for it in the windows of shops; he came down

the Rue de la Paix in the sun and, passing across the Tuileries and the

river, indulged more than once—as if on finding himself determined—in a

sudden pause before the book-stalls of the opposite quay. In the garden

of the Tuileries he had lingered, on two or three spots, to look; it

was as if the wonderful Paris spring had stayed him as he roamed. The

prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes—in a soft breeze and a

sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the garden-floor, of

bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong boxes, in the type of

ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where terrace-walls were warm,

in the blue-frocked brass-labelled officialism of humble rakers and

scrapers, in the deep references of a straight-pacing priest or the

sharp ones of a white-gaitered red-legged soldier. He watched little

brisk figures, figures whose movement was as the tick of the great

Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from point to point; the air

had a taste as of something mixed with art, something that presented

nature as a white-capped master-chef. The palace was gone, Strether

remembered the palace; and when he gazed into the irremediable void of

its site the historic sense in him might have been freely at play—the

play under which in Paris indeed it so often winces like a touched

nerve. He filled out spaces with dim symbols of scenes; he caught the

gleam of white statues at the base of which, with his letters out, he

could tilt back a straw-bottomed chair. But his drift was, for reasons,

to the other side, and it floated him unspent up the Rue de Seine and

as far as the Luxembourg. In the Luxembourg Gardens he pulled up; here

at last he found his nook, and here, on a penny chair from which

terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains, little trees in green tubs, little

women in white caps and shrill little girls at play all sunnily

“composed” together, he passed an hour in which the cup of his

impressions seemed truly to overflow. But a week had elapsed since he

quitted the ship, and there were more things in his mind than so few

days could account for. More than once, during the time, he had

regarded himself as admonished; but the admonition this morning was

formidably sharp. It took as it hadn’t done yet the form of a

question—the question of what he was doing with such an extraordinary

sense of escape. This sense was sharpest after he had read his letters,

but that was also precisely why the question pressed. Four of the

letters were from Mrs. Newsome and none of them short; she had lost no

time, had followed on his heels while he moved, so expressing herself

that he now could measure the probable frequency with which he should

hear. They would arrive, it would seem, her communications, at the rate

of several a week; he should be able to count, it might even prove, on

more than one by each mail. If he had begun yesterday with a small

grievance he had therefore an opportunity to begin to-day with its

opposite. He read the letters successively and slowly, putting others

back into his pocket but keeping these for a long time afterwards

gathered in his lap. He held them there, lost in thought, as if to

prolong the presence of what they gave him; or as if at the least to

assure them their part in the constitution of some lucidity. His friend

wrote admirably, and her tone was even more in her style than in her

voice—he might almost, for the hour, have had to come this distance to

get its full carrying quality; yet the plentitude of his consciousness

of difference consorted perfectly with the deepened intensity of the

connexion. It was the difference, the difference of being just where he

was and _as_ he was, that formed the escape—this difference was so much

greater than he had dreamed it would be; and what he finally sat there

turning over was the strange logic of his finding himself so free. He

felt it in a manner his duty to think out his state, to approve the

process, and when he came in fact to trace the steps and add up the

items they sufficiently accounted for the sum. He had never

expected—that was the truth of it—again to find himself young, and all

the years and other things it had taken to make him so were exactly his

present arithmetic. He had to make sure of them to put his scruple to

rest.

It all sprang at bottom from the beauty of Mrs. Newsome’s desire that

he should be worried with nothing that was not of the essence of his

task; by insisting that he should thoroughly intermit and break she had

so provided for his freedom that she would, as it were, have only

herself to thank. Strether could not at this point indeed have

completed his thought by the image of what she might have to thank

herself _for_: the image, at best, of his own likeness—poor Lambert

Strether washed up on the sunny strand by the waves of a single day,

poor Lambert Strether thankful for breathing-time and stiffening

himself while he gasped. There he was, and with nothing in his aspect

or his posture to scandalise: it was only true that if he had seen Mrs.

Newsome coming he would instinctively have jumped up to walk away a

little. He would have come round and back to her bravely, but he would

have had first to pull himself together. She abounded in news of the

situation at home, proved to him how perfectly she was arranging for

his absence, told him who would take up this and who take up that

exactly where he had left it, gave him in fact chapter and verse for

the moral that nothing would suffer. It filled for him, this tone of

hers, all the air; yet it struck him at the same time as the hum of

vain things. This latter effect was what he tried to justify—and with

the success that, grave though the appearance, he at last lighted on a

form that was happy. He arrived at it by the inevitable recognition of

his having been a fortnight before one of the weariest of men. If ever

a man had come off tired Lambert Strether was that man; and hadn’t it

been distinctly on the ground of his fatigue that his wonderful friend

at home had so felt for him and so contrived? It seemed to him somehow

at these instants that, could he only maintain with sufficient firmness

his grasp of that truth, it might become in a manner his compass and

his helm. What he wanted most was some idea that would simplify, and

nothing would do this so much as the fact that he was done for and

finished. If it had been in such a light that he had just detected in

his cup the dregs of youth, that was a mere flaw of the surface of his

scheme. He was so distinctly fagged-out that it must serve precisely as

his convenience, and if he could but consistently be good for little

enough he might do everything he wanted.

Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a single boon—the common

unattainable art of taking things as they came. He appeared to himself

to have given his best years to an active appreciation of the way they

didn’t come; but perhaps—as they would seemingly here be things quite

other—this long ache might at last drop to rest. He could easily see

that from the moment he should accept the notion of his foredoomed

collapse the last thing he would lack would be reasons and memories. Oh

if he _should_ do the sum no slate would hold the figures! The fact

that he had failed, as he considered, in everything, in each relation

and in half a dozen trades, as he liked luxuriously to put it, might

have made, might still make, for an empty present; but it stood solidly

for a crowded past. It had not been, so much achievement missed, a

light yoke nor a short load. It was at present as if the backward

picture had hung there, the long crooked course, grey in the shadow of

his solitude. It had been a dreadful cheerful sociable solitude, a

solitude of life or choice, of community; but though there had been

people enough all round it there had been but three or four persons

_in_ it. Waymarsh was one of these, and the fact struck him just now as

marking the record. Mrs. Newsome was another, and Miss Gostrey had of a

sudden shown signs of becoming a third. Beyond, behind them was the

pale figure of his real youth, which held against its breast the two

presences paler than itself—the young wife he had early lost and the

young son he had stupidly sacrificed. He had again and again made out

for himself that he might have kept his little boy, his little dull boy

who had died at school of rapid diphtheria, if he had not in those

years so insanely given himself to merely missing the mother. It was

the soreness of his remorse that the child had in all likelihood not

really been dull—had been dull, as he had been banished and neglected,

mainly because the father had been unwittingly selfish. This was

doubtless but the secret habit of sorrow, which had slowly given way to

time; yet there remained an ache sharp enough to make the spirit, at

the sight now and again of some fair young man just growing up, wince

with the thought of an opportunity lost. Had ever a man, he had finally

fallen into the way of asking himself, lost so much and even done so

much for so little? There had been particular reasons why all

yesterday, beyond other days, he should have had in one ear this cold

enquiry. His name on the green cover, where he had put it for Mrs.

Newsome, expressed him doubtless just enough to make the world—the

world as distinguished, both for more and for less, from Woollett—ask

who he was. He had incurred the ridicule of having to have his

explanation explained. He was Lambert Strether because he was on the

cover, whereas it should have been, for anything like glory, that he

was on the cover because he was Lambert Strether. He would have done

anything for Mrs. Newsome, have been still more ridiculous—as he might,

for that matter, have occasion to be yet; which came to saying that

this acceptance of fate was all he had to show at fifty-five.

He judged the quantity as small because it _was_ small, and all the

more egregiously since it couldn’t, as he saw the case, so much as

thinkably have been larger. He hadn’t had the gift of making the most

of what he tried, and if he had tried and tried again—no one but

himself knew how often—it appeared to have been that he might

demonstrate what else, in default of that, _could_ be made. Old ghosts

of experiments came back to him, old drudgeries and delusions, and

disgusts, old recoveries with their relapses, old fevers with their

chills, broken moments of good faith, others of still better doubt;

adventures, for the most part, of the sort qualified as lessons. The

special spring that had constantly played for him the day before was

the recognition—frequent enough to surprise him—of the promises to

himself that he had after his other visit never kept. The reminiscence

to-day most quickened for him was that of the vow taken in the course

of the pilgrimage that, newly-married, with the War just over, and

helplessly young in spite of it, he had recklessly made with the

creature who was so much younger still. It had been a bold dash, for

which they had taken money set apart for necessities, but kept sacred

at the moment in a hundred ways, and in none more so than by this

private pledge of his own to treat the occasion as a relation formed

with the higher culture and see that, as they said at Woollett, it

should bear a good harvest. He had believed, sailing home again, that

he had gained something great, and his theory—with an elaborate

innocent plan of reading, digesting, coming back even, every few

years—had then been to preserve, cherish and extend it. As such plans

as these had come to nothing, however, in respect to acquisitions still

more precious, it was doubtless little enough of a marvel that he

should have lost account of that handful of seed. Buried for long years

in dark corners at any rate these few germs had sprouted again under

forty-eight hours of Paris. The process of yesterday had really been

the process of feeling the general stirred life of connexions long

since individually dropped. Strether had become acquainted even on this

ground with short gusts of speculation—sudden flights of fancy in

Louvre galleries, hungry gazes through clear plates behind which

lemon-coloured volumes were as fresh as fruit on the tree.

There were instants at which he could ask whether, since there had been

fundamentally so little question of his keeping anything, the fate

after all decreed for him hadn’t been only to _be_ kept. Kept for

something, in that event, that he didn’t pretend, didn’t possibly dare

as yet to divine; something that made him hover and wonder and laugh

and sigh, made him advance and retreat, feeling half ashamed of his

impulse to plunge and more than half afraid of his impulse to wait. He

remembered for instance how he had gone back in the sixties with

lemon-coloured volumes in general on the brain as well as with a

dozen—selected for his wife too—in his trunk; and nothing had at the

moment shown more confidence than this invocation of the finer taste.

They were still somewhere at home, the dozen—stale and soiled and never

sent to the binder; but what had become of the sharp initiation they

represented? They represented now the mere sallow paint on the door of

the temple of taste that he had dreamed of raising up—a structure he

had practically never carried further. Strether’s present highest

flights were perhaps those in which this particular lapse figured to

him as a symbol, a symbol of his long grind and his want of odd

moments, his want moreover of money, of opportunity, of positive

dignity. That the memory of the vow of his youth should, in order to

throb again, have had to wait for this last, as he felt it, of all his

accidents—that was surely proof enough of how his conscience had been

encumbered. If any further proof were needed it would have been to be

found in the fact that, as he perfectly now saw, he had ceased even to

measure his meagreness, a meagreness that sprawled, in this retrospect,

vague and comprehensive, stretching back like some unmapped Hinterland

from a rough coast-settlement. His conscience had been amusing itself

for the forty-eight hours by forbidding him the purchase of a book; he

held off from that, held off from everything; from the moment he didn’t

yet call on Chad he wouldn’t for the world have taken any other step.

On this evidence, however, of the way they actually affected him he

glared at the lemon-coloured covers in confession of the

subconsciousness that, all the same, in the great desert of the years,

he must have had of them. The green covers at home comprised, by the

law of their purpose, no tribute to letters; it was of a mere rich

kernel of economics, politics, ethics that, glazed and, as Mrs. Newsome

maintained rather against _his_ view, pre-eminently pleasant to touch,

they formed the specious shell. Without therefore any needed

instinctive knowledge of what was coming out, in Paris, on the bright

highway, he struck himself at present as having more than once flushed

with a suspicion: he couldn’t otherwise at present be feeling so many

fears confirmed. There were “movements” he was too late for: weren’t

they, with the fun of them, already spent? There were sequences he had

missed and great gaps in the procession: he might have been watching it

all recede in a golden cloud of dust. If the playhouse wasn’t closed

his seat had at least fallen to somebody else. He had had an uneasy

feeling the night before that if he was at the theatre at all—though he

indeed justified the theatre, in the specific sense, and with a

grotesqueness to which his imagination did all honour, as something he

owed poor Waymarsh—he should have been there with, and as might have

been said, _for_ Chad.

This suggested the question of whether he could properly have taken him

to such a play, and what effect—it was a point that suddenly rose—his

peculiar responsibility might be held in general to have on his choice

of entertainment. It had literally been present to him at the

Gymnase—where one was held moreover comparatively safe—that having his

young friend at his side would have been an odd feature of the work of

redemption; and this quite in spite of the fact that the picture

presented might well, confronted with Chad’s own private stage, have

seemed the pattern of propriety. He clearly hadn’t come out in the name

of propriety but to visit unattended equivocal performances; yet still

less had he done so to undermine his authority by sharing them with the

graceless youth. Was he to renounce all amusement for the sweet sake of

that authority? and _would_ such renouncement give him for Chad a moral

glamour? The little problem bristled the more by reason of poor

Strether’s fairly open sense of the irony of things. Were there then

sides on which his predicament threatened to look rather droll to him?

Should he have to pretend to believe—either to himself or the wretched

boy—that there was anything that could make the latter worse? Wasn’t

some such pretence on the other hand involved in the assumption of

possible processes that would make him better? His greatest uneasiness

seemed to peep at him out of the imminent impression that almost any

acceptance of Paris might give one’s authority away. It hung before him

this morning, the vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent

object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be

discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and

trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment

seemed all depth the next. It was a place of which, unmistakeably, Chad

was fond; wherefore if he, Strether, should like it too much, what on

earth, with such a bond, would become of either of them? It all

depended of course—which was a gleam of light—on how the “too much” was

measured; though indeed our friend fairly felt, while he prolonged the

meditation I describe, that for himself even already a certain measure

had been reached. It will have been sufficiently seen that he was not a

man to neglect any good chance for reflexion. Was it at all possible

for instance to like Paris enough without liking it too much? He

luckily however hadn’t promised Mrs. Newsome not to like it at all. He

was ready to recognise at this stage that such an engagement _would_

have tied his hands. The Luxembourg Gardens were incontestably just so

adorable at this hour by reason—in addition to their intrinsic charm—of

his not having taken it. The only engagement he had taken, when he

looked the thing in the face, was to do what he reasonably could.

It upset him a little none the less and after a while to find himself

at last remembering on what current of association he had been floated

so far. Old imaginations of the Latin Quarter had played their part for

him, and he had duly recalled its having been with this scene of rather

ominous legend that, like so many young men in fiction as well as in

fact, Chad had begun. He was now quite out of it, with his “home,” as

Strether figured the place, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, now; which

was perhaps why, repairing, not to fail of justice either, to the elder

neighbourhood, our friend had felt he could allow for the element of

the usual, the immemorial, without courting perturbation. He was not at

least in danger of seeing the youth and the particular Person flaunt by

together; and yet he was in the very air of which—just to feel what the

early natural note must have been—he wished most to take counsel. It

became at once vivid to him that he had originally had, for a few days,

an almost envious vision of the boy’s romantic privilege. Melancholy

Mürger, with Francine and Musette and Rodolphe, at home, was, in the

company of the tattered, one—if he not in his single self two or

three—of the unbound, the paper-covered dozen on the shelf; and when

Chad had written, five years ago, after a sojourn then already

prolonged to six months, that he had decided to go in for economy and

the real thing, Strether’s fancy had quite fondly accompanied him in

this migration, which was to convey him, as they somewhat confusedly

learned at Woollett, across the bridges and up the Montagne

Sainte-Geneviève. This was the region—Chad had been quite distinct

about it—in which the best French, and many other things, were to be

learned at least cost, and in which all sorts of clever fellows,

compatriots there for a purpose, formed an awfully pleasant set. The

clever fellows, the friendly countrymen were mainly young painters,

sculptors, architects, medical students; but they were, Chad sagely

opined, a much more profitable lot to be with—even on the footing of

not being quite one of them—than the “terrible toughs” (Strether

remembered the edifying discrimination) of the American bars and banks

roundabout the Opéra. Chad had thrown out, in the communications

following this one—for at that time he did once in a while

communicate—that several members of a band of earnest workers under one

of the great artists had taken him right in, making him dine every

night, almost for nothing, at their place, and even pressing him not to

neglect the hypothesis of there being as much “in him” as in any of

them. There had been literally a moment at which it appeared there

might be something in him; there had been at any rate a moment at which

he had written that he didn’t know but what a month or two more might

see him enrolled in some _atelier_. The season had been one at which

Mrs. Newsome was moved to gratitude for small mercies; it had broken on

them all as a blessing that their absentee _had_ perhaps a

conscience—that he was sated in fine with idleness, was ambitious of

variety. The exhibition was doubtless as yet not brilliant, but

Strether himself, even by that time much enlisted and immersed, had

determined, on the part of the two ladies, a temperate approval and in

fact, as he now recollected, a certain austere enthusiasm.

But the very next thing that happened had been a dark drop of the

curtain. The son and brother had not browsed long on the Montagne

Sainte-Geneviève—his effective little use of the name of which, like

his allusion to the best French, appeared to have been but one of the

notes of his rough cunning. The light refreshment of these vain

appearances had not accordingly carried any of them very far. On the

other hand it had gained Chad time; it had given him a chance,

unchecked, to strike his roots, had paved the way for initiations more

direct and more deep. It was Strether’s belief that he had been

comparatively innocent before this first migration, and even that the

first effects of the migration would not have been, without some

particular bad accident, to have been deplored. There had been three

months—he had sufficiently figured it out—in which Chad had wanted to

try. He _had_ tried, though not very hard—he had had his little hour of

good faith. The weakness of this principle in him was that almost any

accident attestedly bad enough was stronger. Such had at any rate

markedly been the case for the precipitation of a special series of

impressions. They had proved, successively, these impressions—all of

Musette and Francine, but Musette and Francine vulgarised by the larger

evolution of the type—irresistibly sharp: he had “taken up,” by what

was at the time to be shrinkingly gathered, as it was scantly

mentioned, with one ferociously “interested” little person after

another. Strether had read somewhere of a Latin motto, a description of

the hours, observed on a clock by a traveller in Spain; and he had been

led to apply it in thought to Chad’s number one, number two, number

three. _Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat_—they had all morally wounded,

the last had morally killed. The last had been longest in possession—in

possession, that is, of whatever was left of the poor boy’s finer

mortality. And it hadn’t been she, it had been one of her early

predecessors, who had determined the second migration, the expensive

return and relapse, the exchange again, as was fairly to be presumed,

of the vaunted best French for some special variety of the worst.

He pulled himself then at last together for his own progress back; not

with the feeling that he had taken his walk in vain. He prolonged it a

little, in the immediate neighbourhood, after he had quitted his chair;

and the upshot of the whole morning for him was that his campaign had

begun. He had wanted to put himself in relation, and he would be hanged

if he were _not_ in relation. He was that at no moment so much as

while, under the old arches of the Odéon, he lingered before the

charming open-air array of literature classic and casual. He found the

effect of tone and tint, in the long charged tables and shelves,

delicate and appetising; the impression—substituting one kind of

low-priced _consommation_ for another—might have been that of one of

the pleasant cafés that overlapped, under an awning, to the pavement;

but he edged along, grazing the tables, with his hands firmly behind

him. He wasn’t there to dip, to consume—he was there to reconstruct. He

wasn’t there for his own profit—not, that is, the direct; he was there

on some chance of feeling the brush of the wing of the stray spirit of

youth. He felt it in fact, he had it beside him; the old arcade indeed,

as his inner sense listened, gave out the faint sound, as from far off,

of the wild waving of wings. They were folded now over the breasts of

buried generations; but a flutter or two lived again in the turned page

of shock-headed slouch-hatted loiterers whose young intensity of type,

in the direction of pale acuteness, deepened his vision, and even his

appreciation, of racial differences, and whose manipulation of the

uncut volume was too often, however, but a listening at closed doors.

He reconstructed a possible groping Chad of three or four years before,

a Chad who had, after all, simply—for that was the only way to see

it—been too vulgar for his privilege. Surely it _was_ a privilege to

have been young and happy just there. Well, the best thing Strether

knew of him was that he had had such a dream.

But his own actual business, half an hour later, was with a third floor

on the Boulevard Malesherbes—so much as that was definite; and the fact

of the enjoyment by the third-floor windows of a continuous balcony, to

which he was helped by this knowledge, had perhaps something to do with

his lingering for five minutes on the opposite side of the street.

There were points as to which he had quite made up his mind, and one of

these bore precisely on the wisdom of the abruptness to which events

had finally committed him, a policy that he was pleased to find not at

all shaken as he now looked at his watch and wondered. He _had_

announced himself—six months before; had written out at least that Chad

wasn’t to be surprised should he see him some day turn up. Chad had

thereupon, in a few words of rather carefully colourless answer,

offered him a general welcome; and Strether, ruefully reflecting that

he might have understood the warning as a hint to hospitality, a bid

for an invitation, had fallen back upon silence as the corrective most

to his own taste. He had asked Mrs. Newsome moreover not to announce

him again; he had so distinct an opinion on his attacking his job,

should he attack it at all, in his own way. Not the least of this

lady’s high merits for him was that he could absolutely rest on her

word. She was the only woman he had known, even at Woollett, as to whom

his conviction was positive that to lie was beyond her art. Sarah

Pocock, for instance, her own daughter, though with social ideals, as

they said, in some respects different—Sarah who _was_, in her way,

æsthetic, had never refused to human commerce that mitigation of

rigour; there were occasions when he had distinctly seen her apply it.

Since, accordingly, at all events, he had had it from Mrs. Newsome that

she had, at whatever cost to her more strenuous view, conformed, in the

matter of preparing Chad, wholly to his restrictions, he now looked up

at the fine continuous balcony with a safe sense that if the case had

been bungled the mistake was at least his property. Was there perhaps

just a suspicion of that in his present pause on the edge of the

Boulevard and well in the pleasant light?

Many things came over him here, and one of them was that he should

doubtless presently know whether he had been shallow or sharp. Another

was that the balcony in question didn’t somehow show as a convenience

easy to surrender. Poor Strether had at this very moment to recognise

the truth that wherever one paused in Paris the imagination reacted

before one could stop it. This perpetual reaction put a price, if one

would, on pauses; but it piled up consequences till there was scarce

room to pick one’s steps among them. What call had he, at such a

juncture, for example, to like Chad’s very house? High broad clear—he

was expert enough to make out in a moment that it was admirably

built—it fairly embarrassed our friend by the quality that, as he would

have said, it “sprang” on him. He had struck off the fancy that it

might, as a preliminary, be of service to him to be seen, by a happy

accident, from the third-story windows, which took all the March sun,

but of what service was it to find himself making out after a moment

that the quality “sprung,” the quality produced by measure and balance,

the fine relation of part to part and space to space, was

probably—aided by the presence of ornament as positive as it was

discreet, and by the complexion of the stone, a cold fair grey, warmed

and polished a little by life—neither more nor less than a case of

distinction, such a case as he could only feel unexpectedly as a sort

of delivered challenge? Meanwhile, however, the chance he had allowed

for—the chance of being seen in time from the balcony—had become a

fact. Two or three of the windows stood open to the violet air; and,

before Strether had cut the knot by crossing, a young man had come out

and looked about him, had lighted a cigarette and tossed the match

over, and then, resting on the rail, had given himself up to watching

the life below while he smoked. His arrival contributed, in its order,

to keeping Strether in position; the result of which in turn was that

Strether soon felt himself noticed. The young man began to look at him

as in acknowledgement of his being himself in observation.

This was interesting so far as it went, but the interest was affected

by the young man’s not being Chad. Strether wondered at first if he

were perhaps Chad altered, and then saw that this was asking too much

of alteration. The young man was light bright and alert—with an air too

pleasant to have been arrived at by patching. Strether had conceived

Chad as patched, but not beyond recognition. He was in presence, he

felt, of amendments enough as they stood; it was a sufficient amendment

that the gentleman up there should be Chad’s friend. He was young too

then, the gentleman up there—he was very young; young enough apparently

to be amused at an elderly watcher, to be curious even to see what the

elderly watcher would do on finding himself watched. There was youth in

that, there was youth in the surrender to the balcony, there was youth

for Strether at this moment in everything but his own business; and

Chad’s thus pronounced association with youth had given the next

instant an extraordinary quick lift to the issue. The balcony, the

distinguished front, testified suddenly, for Strether’s fancy, to

something that was up and up; they placed the whole case materially,

and as by an admirable image, on a level that he found himself at the

end of another moment rejoicing to think he might reach. The young man

looked at him still, he looked at the young man; and the issue, by a

rapid process, was that this knowledge of a perched privacy appeared to

him the last of luxuries. To him too the perched privacy was open, and

he saw it now but in one light—that of the only domicile, the only

fireside, in the great ironic city, on which he had the shadow of a

claim. Miss Gostrey had a fireside; she had told him of it, and it was

something that doubtless awaited him; but Miss Gostrey hadn’t yet

arrived—she mightn’t arrive for days; and the sole attenuation of his

excluded state was his vision of the small, the admittedly secondary

hotel in the bye-street from the Rue de la Paix, in which her

solicitude for his purse had placed him, which affected him somehow as

all indoor chill, glass-roofed court and slippery staircase, and which,

by the same token, expressed the presence of Waymarsh even at times

when Waymarsh might have been certain to be round at the bank. It came

to pass before he moved that Waymarsh, and Waymarsh alone, Waymarsh not

only undiluted but positively strengthened, struck him as the present

alternative to the young man in the balcony. When he did move it was

fairly to escape that alternative. Taking his way over the street at

last and passing through the _porte-cochère_ of the house was like

consciously leaving Waymarsh out. However, he would tell him all about

it.

Book Third

I

Strether told Waymarsh all about it that very evening, on their dining

together at the hotel; which needn’t have happened, he was all the

while aware, hadn’t he chosen to sacrifice to this occasion a rarer

opportunity. The mention to his companion of the sacrifice was moreover

exactly what introduced his recital—or, as he would have called it with

more confidence in his interlocutor, his confession. His confession was

that he had been captured and that one of the features of the affair

had just failed to be his engaging himself on the spot to dinner. As by

such a freedom Waymarsh would have lost him he had obeyed his scruple;

and he had likewise obeyed another scruple—which bore on the question

of his himself bringing a guest.

Waymarsh looked gravely ardent, over the finished soup, at this array

of scruples; Strether hadn’t yet got quite used to being so unprepared

for the consequences of the impression he produced. It was

comparatively easy to explain, however, that he hadn’t felt sure his

guest would please. The person was a young man whose acquaintance he

had made but that afternoon in the course of rather a hindered enquiry

for another person—an enquiry his new friend had just prevented in fact

from being vain. “Oh,” said Strether, “I’ve all sorts of things to tell

you!”—and he put it in a way that was a virtual hint to Waymarsh to

help him to enjoy the telling. He waited for his fish, he drank of his

wine, he wiped his long moustache, he leaned back in his chair, he took

in the two English ladies who had just creaked past them and whom he

would even have articulately greeted if they hadn’t rather chilled the

impulse; so that all he could do was—by way of doing something—to say

“Merci, François!” out quite loud when his fish was brought. Everything

was there that he wanted, everything that could make the moment an

occasion, that would do beautifully—everything but what Waymarsh might

give. The little waxed salle-à-manger was sallow and sociable;

François, dancing over it, all smiles, was a man and a brother; the

high-shouldered patronne, with her high-held, much-rubbed hands, seemed

always assenting exuberantly to something unsaid; the Paris evening in

short was, for Strether, in the very taste of the soup, in the

goodness, as he was innocently pleased to think it, of the wine, in the

pleasant coarse texture of the napkin and the crunch of the

thick-crusted bread. These all were things congruous with his

confession, and his confession was that he _had_—it would come out

properly just there if Waymarsh would only take it properly—agreed to

breakfast out, at twelve literally, the next day. He didn’t quite know

where; the delicacy of the case came straight up in the remembrance of

his new friend’s “We’ll see; I’ll take you somewhere!”—for it had

required little more than that, after all, to let him right in. He was

affected after a minute, face to face with his actual comrade, by the

impulse to overcolour. There had already been things in respect to

which he knew himself tempted by this perversity. If Waymarsh thought

them bad he should at least have his reason for his discomfort; so

Strether showed them as worse. Still, he was now, in his way, sincerely

perplexed.

Chad had been absent from the Boulevard Malesherbes—was absent from

Paris altogether; he had learned that from the concierge, but had

nevertheless gone up, and gone up—there were no two ways about it—from

an uncontrollable, a really, if one would, depraved curiosity. The

concierge had mentioned to him that a friend of the tenant of the

troisième was for the time in possession; and this had been Strether’s

pretext for a further enquiry, an experiment carried on, under Chad’s

roof, without his knowledge. “I found his friend in fact there keeping

the place warm, as he called it, for him; Chad himself being, as

appears, in the south. He went a month ago to Cannes and though his

return begins to be looked for it can’t be for some days. I might, you

see, perfectly have waited a week; might have beaten a retreat as soon

as I got this essential knowledge. But I beat no retreat; I did the

opposite; I stayed, I dawdled, I trifled; above all I looked round. I

saw, in fine; and—I don’t know what to call it—I sniffed. It’s a

detail, but it’s as if there were something—something very good—_to_

sniff.”

Waymarsh’s face had shown his friend an attention apparently so remote

that the latter was slightly surprised to find it at this point abreast

with him. “Do you mean a smell? What of?”

“A charming scent. But I don’t know.”

Waymarsh gave an inferential grunt. “Does he live there with a woman?”

“I don’t know.”

Waymarsh waited an instant for more, then resumed. “Has he taken her

off with him?”

“And will he bring her back?”—Strether fell into the enquiry. But he

wound it up as before. “I don’t know.”

The way he wound it up, accompanied as this was with another drop back,

another degustation of the Léoville, another wipe of his moustache and

another good word for François, seemed to produce in his companion a

slight irritation. “Then what the devil _do_ you know?”

“Well,” said Strether almost gaily, “I guess I don’t know anything!”

His gaiety might have been a tribute to the fact that the state he had

been reduced to did for him again what had been done by his talk of the

matter with Miss Gostrey at the London theatre. It was somehow

enlarging; and the air of that amplitude was now doubtless more or

less—and all for Waymarsh to feel—in his further response. “That’s what

I found out from the young man.”

“But I thought you said you found out nothing.”

“Nothing but that—that I don’t know anything.”

“And what good does that do you?”

“It’s just,” said Strether, “what I’ve come to you to help me to

discover. I mean anything about anything over here. I _felt_ that, up

there. It regularly rose before me in its might. The young man

moreover—Chad’s friend—as good as told me so.”

“As good as told you you know nothing about anything?” Waymarsh

appeared to look at some one who might have as good as told _him_. “How

old is he?”

“Well, I guess not thirty.”

“Yet you had to take that from him?”

“Oh I took a good deal more—since, as I tell you, I took an invitation

to déjeuner.”

“And are you _going_ to that unholy meal?”

“If you’ll come with me. He wants you too, you know. I told him about

you. He gave me his card,” Strether pursued, “and his name’s rather

funny. It’s John Little Bilham, and he says his two surnames are, on

account of his being small, inevitably used together.”

“Well,” Waymarsh asked with due detachment from these details, “what’s

he doing up there?”

“His account of himself is that he’s ‘only a little artist-man.’ That

seemed to me perfectly to describe him. But he’s yet in the phase of

study; this, you know, is the great art-school—to pass a certain number

of years in which he came over. And he’s a great friend of Chad’s, and

occupying Chad’s rooms just now because they’re so pleasant. _He’s_

very pleasant and curious too,” Strether added—“though he’s not from

Boston.”

Waymarsh looked already rather sick of him. “Where _is_ he from?”

Strether thought. “I don’t know that, either. But he’s ‘notoriously,’

as he put it himself, not from Boston.”

“Well,” Waymarsh moralised from dry depths, “every one can’t

notoriously _be_ from Boston. Why,” he continued, “is he curious?”

“Perhaps just for _that_—for one thing! But really,” Strether added,

“for everything. When you meet him you’ll see.”

“Oh I don’t want to meet him,” Waymarsh impatiently growled. “Why don’t

he go home?”

Strether hesitated. “Well, because he likes it over here.”

This appeared in particular more than Waymarsh could bear. “He ought

then to be ashamed of himself, and, as you admit that you think so too,

why drag him in?”

Strether’s reply again took time. “Perhaps I do think so myself—though

I don’t quite yet admit it. I’m not a bit sure—it’s again one of the

things I want to find out. I liked him, and _can_ you like people—? But

no matter.” He pulled himself up. “There’s no doubt I want you to come

down on me and squash me.”

Waymarsh helped himself to the next course, which, however proving not

the dish he had just noted as supplied to the English ladies, had the

effect of causing his imagination temporarily to wander. But it

presently broke out at a softer spot. “Have they got a handsome place

up there?”

“Oh a charming place; full of beautiful and valuable things. I never

saw such a place”—and Strether’s thought went back to it. “For a little

artist-man—!” He could in fact scarce express it.

But his companion, who appeared now to have a view, insisted. “Well?”

“Well, life can hold nothing better. Besides, they’re things of which

he’s in charge.”

“So that he does doorkeeper for your precious pair? Can life,” Waymarsh

enquired, “hold nothing better than _that?_” Then as Strether, silent,

seemed even yet to wonder, “Doesn’t he know what _she_ is?” he went on.

“_I_ don’t know. I didn’t ask him. I couldn’t. It was impossible. You

wouldn’t either. Besides I didn’t want to. No more would you.” Strether

in short explained it at a stroke. “You can’t make out over here what

people do know.”

“Then what did you come over for?”

“Well, I suppose exactly to see for myself—without their aid.”

“Then what do you want mine for?”

“Oh,” Strether laughed, “you’re not one of _them!_ I do know what _you_

know.”

As, however, this last assertion caused Waymarsh again to look at him

hard—such being the latter’s doubt of its implications—he felt his

justification lame. Which was still more the case when Waymarsh

presently said: “Look here, Strether. Quit this.”

Our friend smiled with a doubt of his own. “Do you mean my tone?”

“No—damn your tone. I mean your nosing round. Quit the whole job. Let

them stew in their juice. You’re being used for a thing you ain’t fit

for. People don’t take a fine-tooth comb to groom a horse.”

“Am I a fine-tooth comb?” Strether laughed. “It’s something I never

called myself!”

“It’s what you are, all the same. You ain’t so young as you were, but

you’ve kept your teeth.”

He acknowledged his friend’s humour. “Take care I don’t get them into

_you!_ You’d like them, my friends at home, Waymarsh,” he declared;

“you’d really particularly like them. And I know”—it was slightly

irrelevant, but he gave it sudden and singular force—“I know they’d

like you!”

“Oh don’t work them off on _me!_” Waymarsh groaned.

Yet Strether still lingered with his hands in his pockets. “It’s really

quite as indispensable as I say that Chad should be got back.”

“Indispensable to whom? To you?”

“Yes,” Strether presently said.

“Because if you get him you also get Mrs. Newsome?”

Strether faced it. “Yes.”

“And if you don’t get him you don’t get her?”

It might be merciless, but he continued not to flinch. “I think it

might have some effect on our personal understanding. Chad’s of real

importance—or can easily become so if he will—to the business.”

“And the business is of real importance to his mother’s husband?”

“Well, I naturally want what my future wife wants. And the thing will

be much better if we have our own man in it.”

“If you have your own man in it, in other words,” Waymarsh said,

“you’ll marry—you personally—more money. She’s already rich, as I

understand you, but she’ll be richer still if the business can be made

to boom on certain lines that you’ve laid down.”

“_I_ haven’t laid them down,” Strether promptly returned. “Mr.

Newsome—who knew extraordinarily well what he was about—laid them down

ten years ago.”

Oh well, Waymarsh seemed to indicate with a shake of his mane, _that_

didn’t matter! “You’re fierce for the boom anyway.”

His friend weighed a moment in silence the justice of the charge. “I

can scarcely be called fierce, I think, when I so freely take my chance

of the possibility, the danger, of being influenced in a sense counter

to Mrs. Newsome’s own feelings.”

Waymarsh gave this proposition a long hard look. “I see. You’re afraid

yourself of being squared. But you’re a humbug,” he added, “all the

same.”

“Oh!” Strether quickly protested.

“Yes, you ask me for protection—which makes you very interesting; and

then you won’t take it. You say you want to be squashed—”

“Ah but not so easily! Don’t you see,” Strether demanded “where my

interest, as already shown you, lies? It lies in my not being squared.

If I’m squared where’s my marriage? If I miss my errand I miss that;

and if I miss that I miss everything—I’m nowhere.”

Waymarsh—but all relentlessly—took this in. “What do I care where you

are if you’re spoiled?”

Their eyes met on it an instant. “Thank you awfully,” Strether at last

said. “But don’t you think _her_ judgement of that—?”

“Ought to content me? No.”

It kept them again face to face, and the end of this was that Strether

again laughed. “You do her injustice. You really _must_ know her.

Good-night.”

He breakfasted with Mr. Bilham on the morrow, and, as inconsequently

befell, with Waymarsh massively of the party. The latter announced, at

the eleventh hour and much to his friend’s surprise, that, damn it, he

would as soon join him as do anything else; on which they proceeded

together, strolling in a state of detachment practically luxurious for

them to the Boulevard Malesherbes, a couple engaged that day with the

sharp spell of Paris as confessedly, it might have been seen, as any

couple among the daily thousands so compromised. They walked, wandered,

wondered and, a little, lost themselves; Strether hadn’t had for years

so rich a consciousness of time—a bag of gold into which he constantly

dipped for a handful. It was present to him that when the little

business with Mr. Bilham should be over he would still have shining

hours to use absolutely as he liked. There was no great pulse of haste

yet in this process of saving Chad; nor was that effect a bit more

marked as he sat, half an hour later, with his legs under Chad’s

mahogany, with Mr. Bilham on one side, with a friend of Mr. Bilham’s on

the other, with Waymarsh stupendously opposite, and with the great hum

of Paris coming up in softness, vagueness—for Strether himself indeed

already positive sweetness—through the sunny windows toward which, the

day before, his curiosity had raised its wings from below. The feeling

strongest with him at that moment had borne fruit almost faster than he

could taste it, and Strether literally felt at the present hour that

there was a precipitation in his fate. He had known nothing and nobody

as he stood in the street; but hadn’t his view now taken a bound in the

direction of every one and of every thing?

“What’s he up to, what’s he up to?”—something like that was at the back

of his head all the while in respect to little Bilham; but meanwhile,

till he should make out, every one and every thing were as good as

represented for him by the combination of his host and the lady on his

left. The lady on his left, the lady thus promptly and ingeniously

invited to “meet” Mr. Strether and Mr. Waymarsh—it was the way she

herself expressed her case—was a very marked person, a person who had

much to do with our friend’s asking himself if the occasion weren’t in

its essence the most baited, the most gilded of traps. Baited it could

properly be called when the repast was of so wise a savour, and gilded

surrounding objects seemed inevitably to need to be when Miss

Barrace—which was the lady’s name—looked at them with convex Parisian

eyes and through a glass with a remarkably long tortoise-shell handle.

Why Miss Barrace, mature meagre erect and eminently gay, highly

adorned, perfectly familiar, freely contradictious and reminding him of

some last-century portrait of a clever head without powder—why Miss

Barrace should have been in particular the note of a “trap” Strether

couldn’t on the spot have explained; he blinked in the light of a

conviction that he should know later on, and know well—as it came over

him, for that matter, with force, that he should need to. He wondered

what he was to think exactly of either of his new friends; since the

young man, Chad’s intimate and deputy, had, in thus constituting the

scene, practised so much more subtly than he had been prepared for, and

since in especial Miss Barrace, surrounded clearly by every

consideration, hadn’t scrupled to figure as a familiar object. It was

interesting to him to feel that he was in the presence of new measures,

other standards, a different scale of relations, and that evidently

here were a happy pair who didn’t think of things at all as he and

Waymarsh thought. Nothing was less to have been calculated in the

business than that it should now be for him as if he and Waymarsh were

comparatively quite at one.

The latter was magnificent—this at least was an assurance privately

given him by Miss Barrace. “Oh your friend’s a type, the grand old

American—what shall one call it? The Hebrew prophet, Ezekiel, Jeremiah,

who used when I was a little girl in the Rue Montaigne to come to see

my father and who was usually the American Minister to the Tuileries or

some other court. I haven’t seen one these ever so many years; the

sight of it warms my poor old chilled heart; this specimen is

wonderful; in the right quarter, you know, he’ll have a _succès fou_.”

Strether hadn’t failed to ask what the right quarter might be, much as

he required his presence of mind to meet such a change in their scheme.

“Oh the artist-quarter and that kind of thing; _here_ already, for

instance, as you see.” He had been on the point of echoing “‘Here’?—is

_this_ the artist-quarter?” but she had already disposed of the

question with a wave of all her tortoise-shell and an easy “Bring him

to _me!_” He knew on the spot how little he should be able to bring

him, for the very air was by this time, to his sense, thick and hot

with poor Waymarsh’s judgement of it. He was in the trap still more

than his companion and, unlike his companion, not making the best of

it; which was precisely what doubtless gave him his admirable sombre

glow. Little did Miss Barrace know that what was behind it was his

grave estimate of her own laxity. The general assumption with which our

two friends had arrived had been that of finding Mr. Bilham ready to

conduct them to one or other of those resorts of the earnest, the

æsthetic fraternity which were shown among the sights of Paris. In this

character it would have justified them in a proper insistence on

discharging their score. Waymarsh’s only proviso at the last had been

that nobody should pay for him; but he found himself, as the occasion

developed, paid for on a scale as to which Strether privately made out

that he already nursed retribution. Strether was conscious across the

table of what worked in him, conscious when they passed back to the

small salon to which, the previous evening, he himself had made so rich

a reference; conscious most of all as they stepped out to the balcony

in which one would have had to be an ogre not to recognise the perfect

place for easy aftertastes. These things were enhanced for Miss Barrace

by a succession of excellent cigarettes—acknowledged, acclaimed, as a

part of the wonderful supply left behind him by Chad—in an almost equal

absorption of which Strether found himself blindly, almost wildly

pushing forward. He might perish by the sword as well as by famine, and

he knew that his having abetted the lady by an excess that was rare

with him would count for little in the sum—as Waymarsh might so easily

add it up—of her licence. Waymarsh had smoked of old, smoked hugely;

but Waymarsh did nothing now, and that gave him his advantage over

people who took things up lightly just when others had laid them

heavily down. Strether had never smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted

at his friend that this had been only because of a reason. The reason,

it now began to appear even to himself, was that he had never had a

lady to smoke with.

It was this lady’s being there at all, however, that was the strange

free thing; perhaps, since she _was_ there, her smoking was the least

of her freedoms. If Strether had been sure at each juncture of

what—with Bilham in especial—she talked about, he might have traced

others and winced at them and felt Waymarsh wince; but he was in fact

so often at sea that his sense of the range of reference was merely

general and that he on several different occasions guessed and

interpreted only to doubt. He wondered what they meant, but there were

things he scarce thought they could be supposed to mean, and “Oh no—not

_that!_” was at the end of most of his ventures. This was the very

beginning with him of a condition as to which, later on, it will be

seen, he found cause to pull himself up; and he was to remember the

moment duly as the first step in a process. The central fact of the

place was neither more nor less, when analysed—and a pressure

superficial sufficed—than the fundamental impropriety of Chad’s

situation, round about which they thus seemed cynically clustered.

Accordingly, since they took it for granted, they took for granted all

that was in connexion with it taken for granted at Woollett—matters as

to which, verily, he had been reduced with Mrs. Newsome to the last

intensity of silence. That was the consequence of their being too bad

to be talked about, and was the accompaniment, by the same token, of a

deep conception of their badness. It befell therefore that when poor

Strether put it to himself that their badness was ultimately, or

perhaps even insolently, what such a scene as the one before him was,

so to speak, built upon, he could scarce shirk the dilemma of reading a

roundabout echo of them into almost anything that came up. This, he was

well aware, was a dreadful necessity; but such was the stern logic, he

could only gather, of a relation to the irregular life.

It was the way the irregular life sat upon Bilham and Miss Barrace that

was the insidious, the delicate marvel. He was eager to concede that

their relation to it was all indirect, for anything else in him would

have shown the grossness of bad manners; but the indirectness was none

the less consonant—_that_ was striking—with a grateful enjoyment of

everything that was Chad’s. They spoke of him repeatedly, invoking his

good name and good nature, and the worst confusion of mind for Strether

was that all their mention of him was of a kind to do him honour. They

commended his munificence and approved his taste, and in doing so sat

down, as it seemed to Strether, in the very soil out of which these

things flowered. Our friend’s final predicament was that he himself was

sitting down, for the time, _with_ them, and there was a supreme moment

at which, compared with his collapse, Waymarsh’s erectness affected him

as really high. One thing was certain—he saw he must make up his mind.

He must approach Chad, must wait for him, deal with him, master him,

but he mustn’t dispossess himself of the faculty of seeing things as

they were. He must bring him to _him_—not go himself, as it were, so

much of the way. He must at any rate be clearer as to what—should he

continue to do that for convenience—he was still condoning. It was on

the detail of this quantity—and what could the fact be but

mystifying?—that Bilham and Miss Barrace threw so little light. So

there they were.

II

When Miss Gostrey arrived, at the end of a week, she made him a sign;

he went immediately to see her, and it wasn’t till then that he could

again close his grasp on the idea of a corrective. This idea however

was luckily all before him again from the moment he crossed the

threshold of the little entresol of the Quartier Marbœuf into which she

had gathered, as she said, picking them up in a thousand flights and

funny little passionate pounces, the makings of a final nest. He

recognised in an instant that there really, there only, he should find

the boon with the vision of which he had first mounted Chad’s stairs.

He might have been a little scared at the picture of how much more, in

this place, he should know himself “in” hadn’t his friend been on the

spot to measure the amount to his appetite. Her compact and crowded

little chambers, almost dusky, as they at first struck him, with

accumulations, represented a supreme general adjustment to

opportunities and conditions. Wherever he looked he saw an old ivory or

an old brocade, and he scarce knew where to sit for fear of a

misappliance. The life of the occupant struck him of a sudden as more

charged with possession even than Chad’s or than Miss Barrace’s; wide

as his glimpse had lately become of the empire of “things,” what was

before him still enlarged it; the lust of the eyes and the pride of

life had indeed thus their temple. It was the innermost nook of the

shrine—as brown as a pirate’s cave. In the brownness were glints of

gold; patches of purple were in the gloom; objects all that caught,

through the muslin, with their high rarity, the light of the low

windows. Nothing was clear about them but that they were precious, and

they brushed his ignorance with their contempt as a flower, in a

liberty taken with him, might have been whisked under his nose. But

after a full look at his hostess he knew none the less what most

concerned him. The circle in which they stood together was warm with

life, and every question between them would live there as nowhere else.

A question came up as soon as they had spoken, for his answer, with a

laugh, was quickly: “Well, they’ve got hold of me!” Much of their talk

on this first occasion was his development of that truth. He was

extraordinarily glad to see her, expressing to her frankly what she

most showed him, that one might live for years without a blessing

unsuspected, but that to know it at last for no more than three days

was to need it or miss it for ever. She was the blessing that had now

become his need, and what could prove it better than that without her

he had lost himself?

“What do you mean?” she asked with an absence of alarm that, correcting

him as if he had mistaken the “period” of one of her pieces, gave him

afresh a sense of her easy movement through the maze he had but begun

to tread. “What in the name of all the Pococks have you managed to do?”

“Why exactly the wrong thing. I’ve made a frantic friend of little

Bilham.”

“Ah that sort of thing was of the essence of your case and to have been

allowed for from the first.” And it was only after this that, quite as

a minor matter, she asked who in the world little Bilham might be. When

she learned that he was a friend of Chad’s and living for the time in

Chad’s rooms in Chad’s absence, quite as if acting in Chad’s spirit and

serving Chad’s cause, she showed, however, more interest. “Should you

mind my seeing him? Only once, you know,” she added.

“Oh the oftener the better: he’s amusing—he’s original.”

“He doesn’t shock you?” Miss Gostrey threw out.

“Never in the world! We escape that with a perfection—! I feel it to be

largely, no doubt, because I don’t half-understand him; but our _modus

vivendi_ isn’t spoiled even by that. You must dine with me to meet

him,” Strether went on. “Then you’ll see.’

“Are you giving dinners?”

“Yes—there I am. That’s what I mean.”

All her kindness wondered. “That you’re spending too much money?”

“Dear no—they seem to cost so little. But that I do it to _them_. I

ought to hold off.”

She thought again—she laughed. “The money you must be spending to think

it cheap! But I must be out of it—to the naked eye.”

He looked for a moment as if she were really failing him. “Then you

won’t meet them?” It was almost as if she had developed an unexpected

personal prudence.

She hesitated. “Who are they—first?”

“Why little Bilham to begin with.” He kept back for the moment Miss

Barrace. “And Chad—when he comes—you must absolutely see.”

“When then does he come?”

“When Bilham has had time to write him, and hear from him about me.

Bilham, however,” he pursued, “will report favourably—favourably for

Chad. That will make him not afraid to come. I want you the more

therefore, you see, for my bluff.”

“Oh you’ll do yourself for your bluff.” She was perfectly easy. “At the

rate you’ve gone I’m quiet.”

“Ah but I haven’t,” said Strether, “made one protest.”

She turned it over. “Haven’t you been seeing what there’s to protest

about?”

He let her, with this, however ruefully, have the whole truth. “I

haven’t yet found a single thing.”

“Isn’t there any one _with_ him then?”

“Of the sort I came out about?” Strether took a moment. “How do I know?

And what do I care?”

“Oh oh!”—and her laughter spread. He was struck in fact by the effect

on her of his joke. He saw now how he meant it as a joke. _She_ saw,

however, still other things, though in an instant she had hidden them.

“You’ve got at no facts at all?”

He tried to muster them. “Well, he has a lovely home.”

“Ah that, in Paris,” she quickly returned, “proves nothing. That is

rather it _dis_proves nothing. They may very well, you see, the people

your mission is concerned with, have done it _for_ him.”

“Exactly. And it was on the scene of their doings then that Waymarsh

and I sat guzzling.”

“Oh if you forbore to guzzle here on scenes of doings,” she replied,

“you might easily die of starvation.” With which she smiled at him.

“You’ve worse before you.”

“Ah I’ve _everything_ before me. But on our hypothesis, you know, they

must be wonderful.”

“They _are!_” said Miss Gostrey. “You’re not therefore, you see,” she

added, “wholly without facts. They’ve _been_, in effect, wonderful.”

To have got at something comparatively definite appeared at last a

little to help—a wave by which moreover, the next moment, recollection

was washed. “My young man does admit furthermore that they’re our

friend’s great interest.”

“Is that the expression he uses?”

Strether more exactly recalled. “No—not quite.”

“Something more vivid? Less?”

He had bent, with neared glasses, over a group of articles on a small

stand; and at this he came up. “It was a mere allusion, but, on the

lookout as I was, it struck me. ‘Awful, you know, as Chad is’—those

were Bilham’s words.”

“‘Awful, you know’—? Oh!”—and Miss Gostrey turned them over. She

seemed, however, satisfied. “Well, what more do you want?”

He glanced once more at a bibelot or two, and everything sent him back.

“But it _is_ all the same as if they wished to let me have it between

the eyes.”

She wondered. “Quoi donc?”

“Why what I speak of. The amenity. They can stun you with that as well

as with anything else.”

“Oh,” she answered, “you’ll come round! I must see them each,” she went

on, “for myself. I mean Mr. Bilham and Mr. Newsome—Mr. Bilham naturally

first. Once only—once for each; that will do. But face to face—for half

an hour. What’s Mr. Chad,” she immediately pursued, “doing at Cannes?

Decent men don’t go to Cannes with the—well, with the kind of ladies

you mean.”

“Don’t they?” Strether asked with an interest in decent men that amused

her.

“No, elsewhere, but not to Cannes. Cannes is different. Cannes is

better. Cannes is best. I mean it’s all people you know—when you do

know them. And if _he_ does, why that’s different too. He must have

gone alone. She can’t be with him.”

“I haven’t,” Strether confessed in his weakness, “the least idea.”

There seemed much in what she said, but he was able after a little to

help her to a nearer impression. The meeting with little Bilham took

place, by easy arrangement, in the great gallery of the Louvre; and

when, standing with his fellow visitor before one of the splendid

Titians—the overwhelming portrait of the young man with the

strangely-shaped glove and the blue-grey eyes—he turned to see the

third member of their party advance from the end of the waxed and

gilded vista, he had a sense of having at last taken hold. He had

agreed with Miss Gostrey—it dated even from Chester—for a morning at

the Louvre, and he had embraced independently the same idea as thrown

out by little Bilham, whom he had already accompanied to the museum of

the Luxembourg. The fusion of these schemes presented no difficulty,

and it was to strike him again that in little Bilham’s company

contrarieties in general dropped.

“Oh he’s all right—he’s one of _us!_” Miss Gostrey, after the first

exchange, soon found a chance to murmur to her companion; and Strether,

as they proceeded and paused and while a quick unanimity between the

two appeared to have phrased itself in half a dozen remarks—Strether

knew that he knew almost immediately what she meant, and took it as

still another sign that he had got his job in hand. This was the more

grateful to him that he could think of the intelligence now serving him

as an acquisition positively new. He wouldn’t have known even the day

before what she meant—that is if she meant, what he assumed, that they

were intense Americans together. He had just worked round—and with a

sharper turn of the screw than any yet—to the conception of an American

intense as little Bilham was intense. The young man was his first

specimen; the specimen had profoundly perplexed him; at present however

there was light. It was by little Bilham’s amazing serenity that he had

at first been affected, but he had inevitably, in his circumspection,

felt it as the trail of the serpent, the corruption, as he might

conveniently have said, of Europe; whereas the promptness with which it

came up for Miss Gostrey but as a special little form of the oldest

thing they knew justified it at once to his own vision as well. He

wanted to be able to like his specimen with a clear good conscience,

and this fully permitted it. What had muddled him was precisely the

small artist-man’s way—it was so complete—of being more American than

anybody. But it now for the time put Strether vastly at his ease to

have this view of a new way.

The amiable youth then looked out, as it had first struck Strether, at

a world in respect to which he hadn’t a prejudice. The one our friend

most instantly missed was the usual one in favour of an occupation

accepted. Little Bilham had an occupation, but it was only an

occupation declined; and it was by his general exemption from alarm,

anxiety or remorse on this score that the impression of his serenity

was made. He had come out to Paris to paint—to fathom, that is, at

large, that mystery; but study had been fatal to him so far as anything

_could_ be fatal, and his productive power faltered in proportion as

his knowledge grew. Strether had gathered from him that at the moment

of his finding him in Chad’s rooms he hadn’t saved from his shipwreck a

scrap of anything but his beautiful intelligence and his confirmed

habit of Paris. He referred to these things with an equal fond

familiarity, and it was sufficiently clear that, as an outfit, they

still served him. They were charming to Strether through the hour spent

at the Louvre, where indeed they figured for him as an unseparated part

of the charged iridescent air, the glamour of the name, the splendour

of the space, the colour of the masters. Yet they were present too

wherever the young man led, and the day after the visit to the Louvre

they hung, in a different walk, about the steps of our party. He had

invited his companions to cross the river with him, offering to show

them his own poor place; and his own poor place, which was very poor,

gave to his idiosyncrasies, for Strether—the small sublime indifference

and independences that had struck the latter as fresh—an odd and

engaging dignity. He lived at the end of an alley that went out of an

old short cobbled street, a street that went in turn out of a new long

smooth avenue—street and avenue and alley having, however, in common a

sort of social shabbiness; and he introduced them to the rather cold

and blank little studio which he had lent to a comrade for the term of

his elegant absence. The comrade was another ingenuous compatriot, to

whom he had wired that tea was to await them “regardless,” and this

reckless repast, and the second ingenuous compatriot, and the faraway

makeshift life, with its jokes and its gaps, its delicate daubs and its

three or four chairs, its overflow of taste and conviction and its lack

of nearly all else—these things wove round the occasion a spell to

which our hero unreservedly surrendered.

He liked the ingenuous compatriots—for two or three others soon

gathered; he liked the delicate daubs and the free

discriminations—involving references indeed, involving enthusiasms and

execrations that made him, as they said, sit up; he liked above all the

legend of good-humoured poverty, of mutual accommodation fairly raised

to the romantic, that he soon read into the scene. The ingenuous

compatriots showed a candour, he thought, surpassing even the candour

of Woollett; they were red-haired and long-legged, they were quaint and

queer and dear and droll; they made the place resound with the

vernacular, which he had never known so marked as when figuring for the

chosen language, he must suppose, of contemporary art. They twanged

with a vengeance the æsthetic lyre—they drew from it wonderful airs.

This aspect of their life had an admirable innocence; and he looked on

occasion at Maria Gostrey to see to what extent that element reached

her. She gave him however for the hour, as she had given him the

previous day, no further sign than to show how she dealt with boys;

meeting them with the air of old Parisian practice that she had for

every one, for everything, in turn. Wonderful about the delicate daubs,

masterful about the way to make tea, trustful about the legs of chairs

and familiarly reminiscent of those, in the other time, the named, the

numbered or the caricatured, who had flourished or failed, disappeared

or arrived, she had accepted with the best grace her second course of

little Bilham, and had said to Strether, the previous afternoon on his

leaving them, that, since her impression was to be renewed, she would

reserve judgement till after the new evidence.

The new evidence was to come, as it proved, in a day or two. He soon

had from Maria a message to the effect that an excellent box at the

Français had been lent her for the following night; it seeming on such

occasions not the least of her merits that she was subject to such

approaches. The sense of how she was always paying for something in

advance was equalled on Strether’s part only by the sense of how she

was always being paid; all of which made for his consciousness, in the

larger air, of a lively bustling traffic, the exchange of such values

as were not for him to handle. She hated, he knew, at the French play,

anything but a box—just as she hated at the English anything but a

stall; and a box was what he was already in this phase girding himself

to press upon her. But she had for that matter her community with

little Bilham: she too always, on the great issues, showed as having

known in time. It made her constantly beforehand with him and gave him

mainly the chance to ask himself how on the day of their settlement

their account would stand. He endeavoured even now to keep it a little

straight by arranging that if he accepted her invitation she should

dine with him first; but the upshot of this scruple was that at eight

o’clock on the morrow he awaited her with Waymarsh under the pillared

portico. She hadn’t dined with him, and it was characteristic of their

relation that she had made him embrace her refusal without in the least

understanding it. She ever caused her rearrangements to affect him as

her tenderest touches. It was on that principle for instance that,

giving him the opportunity to be amiable again to little Bilham, she

had suggested his offering the young man a seat in their box. Strether

had dispatched for this purpose a small blue missive to the Boulevard

Malesherbes, but up to the moment of their passing into the theatre he

had received no response to his message. He held, however, even after

they had been for some time conveniently seated, that their friend, who

knew his way about, would come in at his own right moment. His

temporary absence moreover seemed, as never yet, to make the right

moment for Miss Gostrey. Strether had been waiting till tonight to get

back from her in some mirrored form her impressions and conclusions.

She had elected, as they said, to see little Bilham once; but now she

had seen him twice and had nevertheless not said more than a word.

Waymarsh meanwhile sat opposite him with their hostess between; and

Miss Gostrey spoke of herself as an instructor of youth introducing her

little charges to a work that was one of the glories of literature. The

glory was happily unobjectionable, and the little charges were candid;

for herself she had travelled that road and she merely waited on their

innocence. But she referred in due time to their absent friend, whom it

was clear they should have to give up. “He either won’t have got your

note,” she said, “or you won’t have got his: he has had some kind of

hindrance, and, of course, for that matter, you know, a man never

writes about coming to a box.” She spoke as if, with her look, it might

have been Waymarsh who had written to the youth, and the latter’s face

showed a mixture of austerity and anguish. She went on however as if to

meet this. “He’s far and away, you know, the best of them.”

“The best of whom, ma’am?”

“Why of all the long procession—the boys, the girls, or the old men and

old women as they sometimes really are; the hope, as one may say, of

our country. They’ve all passed, year after year; but there has been no

one in particular I’ve ever wanted to stop. I feel—don’t _you?_—that I

want to stop little Bilham; he’s so exactly right as he is.” She

continued to talk to Waymarsh. “He’s too delightful. If he’ll only not

spoil it! But they always _will_; they always do; they always have.”

“I don’t think Waymarsh knows,” Strether said after a moment, “quite

what it’s open to Bilham to spoil.”

“It can’t be a good American,” Waymarsh lucidly enough replied; “for it

didn’t strike me the young man had developed much in _that_ shape.”

“Ah,” Miss Gostrey sighed, “the name of the good American is as easily

given as taken away! What _is_ it, to begin with, to _be_ one, and

what’s the extraordinary hurry? Surely nothing that’s so pressing was

ever so little defined. It’s such an order, really, that before we cook

you the dish we must at least have your receipt. Besides the poor

chicks have time! What I’ve seen so often spoiled,” she pursued, “is

the happy attitude itself, the state of faith and—what shall I call

it?—the sense of beauty. You’re right about him”—she now took in

Strether; “little Bilham has them to a charm, we must keep little

Bilham along.” Then she was all again for Waymarsh. “The others have

all wanted so dreadfully to do something, and they’ve gone and done it

in too many cases indeed. It leaves them never the same afterwards; the

charm’s always somehow broken. Now _he_, I think, you know, really

won’t. He won’t do the least dreadful little thing. We shall continue

to enjoy him just as he is. No—he’s quite beautiful. He sees

everything. He isn’t a bit ashamed. He has every scrap of the courage

of it that one could ask. Only think what he _might_ do. One wants

really—for fear of some accident—to keep him in view. At this very

moment perhaps what mayn’t he be up to? I’ve had my disappointments—the

poor things are never really safe; or only at least when you have them

under your eye. One can never completely trust them. One’s uneasy, and

I think that’s why I most miss him now.”

She had wound up with a laugh of enjoyment over her embroidery of her

idea—an enjoyment that her face communicated to Strether, who almost

wished none the less at this moment that she would let poor Waymarsh

alone. _He_ knew more or less what she meant; but the fact wasn’t a

reason for her not pretending to Waymarsh that he didn’t. It was craven

of him perhaps, but he would, for the high amenity of the occasion,

have liked Waymarsh not to be so sure of his wit. Her recognition of it

gave him away and, before she had done with him or with that article,

would give him worse. What was he, all the same, to do? He looked

across the box at his friend; their eyes met; something queer and

stiff, something that bore on the situation but that it was better not

to touch, passed in silence between them. Well, the effect of it for

Strether was an abrupt reaction, a final impatience of his own tendency

to temporise. Where was that taking him anyway? It was one of the quiet

instants that sometimes settle more matters than the outbreaks dear to

the historic muse. The only qualification of the quietness was the

synthetic “Oh hang it!” into which Strether’s share of the silence

soundlessly flowered. It represented, this mute ejaculation, a final

impulse to burn his ships. These ships, to the historic muse, may seem

of course mere cockles, but when he presently spoke to Miss Gostrey it

was with the sense at least of applying the torch. “Is it then a

conspiracy?”

“Between the two young men? Well, I don’t pretend to be a seer or a

prophetess,” she presently replied; “but if I’m simply a woman of sense

he’s working for you to-night. I don’t quite know how—but it’s in my

bones.” And she looked at him at last as if, little material as she yet

gave him, he’d really understand. “For an opinion _that’s_ my opinion.

He makes you out too well not to.”

“Not to work for me to-night?” Strether wondered. “Then I hope he isn’t

doing anything very bad.”

“They’ve got you,” she portentously answered.

“Do you mean he _is_—?”

“They’ve got you,” she merely repeated. Though she disclaimed the

prophetic vision she was at this instant the nearest approach he had

ever met to the priestess of the oracle. The light was in her eyes.

“You must face it now.”

He faced it on the spot. “They _had_ arranged—?”

“Every move in the game. And they’ve been arranging ever since. He has

had every day his little telegram from Cannes.”

It made Strether open his eyes. “Do you _know_ that?”

“I do better. I see it. This was, before I met him, what I wondered

whether I _was_ to see. But as soon as I met him I ceased to wonder,

and our second meeting made me sure. I took him all in. He was

acting—he is still—on his daily instructions.”

“So that Chad has done the whole thing?”

“Oh no—not the whole. _We’ve_ done some of it. You and I and ‘Europe.’”

“Europe—yes,” Strether mused.

“Dear old Paris,” she seemed to explain. But there was more, and, with

one of her turns, she risked it. “And dear old Waymarsh. You,” she

declared, “have been a good bit of it.”

He sat massive. “A good bit of what, ma’am?”

“Why of the wonderful consciousness of our friend here. You’ve helped

too in your way to float him to where he is.”

“And where the devil _is_ he?”

She passed it on with a laugh. “Where the devil, Strether, are you?”

He spoke as if he had just been thinking it out. “Well, quite already

in Chad’s hands, it would seem.” And he had had with this another

thought. “Will that be—just all through Bilham—the way he’s going to

work it? It would be, for him, you know, an idea. And Chad with an

idea—!”

“Well?” she asked while the image held him.

“Well, is Chad—what shall I say?—monstrous?”

“Oh as much as you like! But the idea you speak of,” she said, “won’t

have been his best. He’ll have a better. It won’t be all through little

Bilham that he’ll work it.”

This already sounded almost like a hope destroyed. “Through whom else

then?”

“That’s what we shall see!” But quite as she spoke she turned, and

Strether turned; for the door of the box had opened, with the click of

the _ouvreuse_, from the lobby, and a gentleman, a stranger to them,

had come in with a quick step. The door closed behind him, and, though

their faces showed him his mistake, his air, which was striking, was

all good confidence. The curtain had just again arisen, and, in the

hush of the general attention, Strether’s challenge was tacit, as was

also the greeting, with a quickly deprecating hand and smile, of the

unannounced visitor. He discreetly signed that he would wait, would

stand, and these things and his face, one look from which she had

caught, had suddenly worked for Miss Gostrey. She fitted to them all an

answer for Strether’s last question. The solid stranger was simply the

answer—as she now, turning to her friend, indicated. She brought it

straight out for him—it presented the intruder. “Why, through this

gentleman!” The gentleman indeed, at the same time, though sounding for

Strether a very short name, did practically as much to explain.

Strether gasped the name back—then only had he seen Miss Gostrey had

said more than she knew. They were in presence of Chad himself.

Our friend was to go over it afterwards again and again—he was going

over it much of the time that they were together, and they were

together constantly for three or four days: the note had been so

strongly struck during that first half-hour that everything happening

since was comparatively a minor development. The fact was that his

perception of the young man’s identity—so absolutely checked for a

minute—had been quite one of the sensations that count in life; he

certainly had never known one that had acted, as he might have said,

with more of a crowded rush. And the rush though both vague and

multitudinous, had lasted a long time, protected, as it were, yet at

the same time aggravated, by the circumstance of its coinciding with a

stretch of decorous silence. They couldn’t talk without disturbing the

spectators in the part of the balcony just below them; and it, for that

matter, came to Strether—being a thing of the sort that did come to

him—that these were the accidents of a high civilisation; the imposed

tribute to propriety, the frequent exposure to conditions, usually

brilliant, in which relief has to await its time. Relief was never

quite near at hand for kings, queens, comedians and other such people,

and though you might be yourself not exactly one of those, you could

yet, in leading the life of high pressure, guess a little how they

sometimes felt. It was truly the life of high pressure that Strether

had seemed to feel himself lead while he sat there, close to Chad,

during the long tension of the act. He was in presence of a fact that

occupied his whole mind, that occupied for the half-hour his senses

themselves all together; but he couldn’t without inconvenience show

anything—which moreover might count really as luck. What he might have

shown, had he shown at all, was exactly the kind of emotion—the emotion

of bewilderment—that he had proposed to himself from the first,

whatever should occur, to show least. The phenomenon that had suddenly

sat down there with him was a phenomenon of change so complete that his

imagination, which had worked so beforehand, felt itself, in the

connexion, without margin or allowance. It had faced every contingency

but that Chad should not _be_ Chad, and this was what it now had to

face with a mere strained smile and an uncomfortable flush.

He asked himself if, by any chance, before he should have in some way

to commit himself, he might feel his mind settled to the new vision,

might habituate it, so to speak, to the remarkable truth. But oh it was

too remarkable, the truth; for what could be more remarkable than this

sharp rupture of an identity? You could deal with a man as himself—you

couldn’t deal with him as somebody else. It was a small source of peace

moreover to be reduced to wondering how little he might know in such an

event what a sum he was setting you. He couldn’t absolutely not know,

for you couldn’t absolutely not let him. It was a _case_ then simply, a

strong case, as people nowadays called such things, a case of

transformation unsurpassed, and the hope was but in the general law

that strong cases were liable to control from without. Perhaps he,

Strether himself, was the only person after all aware of it. Even Miss

Gostrey, with all her science, wouldn’t be, would she?—and he had never

seen any one less aware of anything than Waymarsh as he glowered at

Chad. The social sightlessness of his old friend’s survey marked for

him afresh, and almost in an humiliating way, the inevitable limits of

direct aid from this source. He was not certain, however, of not

drawing a shade of compensation from the privilege, as yet untasted, of

knowing more about something in particular than Miss Gostrey did. His

situation too was a case, for that matter, and he was now so

interested, quite so privately agog, about it, that he had already an

eye to the fun it would be to open up to her afterwards. He derived

during his half-hour no assistance from her, and just this fact of her

not meeting his eyes played a little, it must be confessed, into his

predicament.

He had introduced Chad, in the first minutes, under his breath, and

there was never the primness in her of the person unacquainted; but she

had none the less betrayed at first no vision but of the stage, where

she occasionally found a pretext for an appreciative moment that she

invited Waymarsh to share. The latter’s faculty of participation had

never had, all round, such an assault to meet; the pressure on him

being the sharper for this chosen attitude in her, as Strether judged

it, of isolating, for their natural intercourse, Chad and himself. This

intercourse was meanwhile restricted to a frank friendly look from the

young man, something markedly like a smile, but falling far short of a

grin, and to the vivacity of Strether’s private speculation as to

whether _he_ carried himself like a fool. He didn’t quite see how he

could so feel as one without somehow showing as one. The worst of that

question moreover was that he knew it as a symptom the sense of which

annoyed him. “If I’m going to be odiously conscious of how I may strike

the fellow,” he reflected, “it was so little what I came out for that I

may as well stop before I begin.” This sage consideration too,

distinctly, seemed to leave untouched the fact that he _was_ going to

be conscious. He was conscious of everything but of what would have

served him.

He was to know afterwards, in the watches of the night, that nothing

would have been more open to him than after a minute or two to propose

to Chad to seek with him the refuge of the lobby. He hadn’t only not

proposed it, but had lacked even the presence of mind to see it as

possible. He had stuck there like a schoolboy wishing not to miss a

minute of the show; though for that portion of the show then presented

he hadn’t had an instant’s real attention. He couldn’t when the curtain

fell have given the slightest account of what had happened. He had

therefore, further, not at that moment acknowledged the amenity added

by this acceptance of his awkwardness to Chad’s general patience.

Hadn’t he none the less known at the very time—known it stupidly and

without reaction—that the boy was accepting something? He was modestly

benevolent, the boy—that was at least what he had been capable of the

superiority of making out his chance to be; and one had one’s self

literally not had the gumption to get in ahead of him. If we should go

into all that occupied our friend in the watches of the night we should

have to mend our pen; but an instance or two may mark for us the

vividness with which he could remember. He remembered the two

absurdities that, if his presence of mind _had_ failed, were the things

that had had most to do with it. He had never in his life seen a young

man come into a box at ten o’clock at night, and would, if challenged

on the question in advance, have scarce been ready to pronounce as to

different ways of doing so. But it was in spite of this definite to him

that Chad had had a way that was wonderful: a fact carrying with it an

implication that, as one might imagine it, he knew, he had learned,

how.

Here already then were abounding results; he had on the spot and

without the least trouble of intention taught Strether that even in so

small a thing as that there were different ways. He had done in the

same line still more than this; had by a mere shake or two of the head

made his old friend observe that the change in him was perhaps more

than anything else, for the eye, a matter of the marked streaks of

grey, extraordinary at his age, in his thick black hair; as well as

that this new feature was curiously becoming to him, did something for

him, as characterisation, also even—of all things in the world—as

refinement, that had been a good deal wanted. Strether felt, however,

he would have had to confess, that it wouldn’t have been easy just now,

on this and other counts, in the presence of what had been supplied, to

be quite clear as to what had been missed. A reflexion a candid critic

might have made of old, for instance, was that it would have been

happier for the son to look more like the mother; but this was a

reflexion that at present would never occur. The ground had quite

fallen away from it, yet no resemblance whatever to the mother had

supervened. It would have been hard for a young man’s face and air to

disconnect themselves more completely than Chad’s at this juncture from

any discerned, from any imaginable aspect of a New England female

parent. That of course was no more than had been on the cards; but it

produced in Strether none the less one of those frequent phenomena of

mental reference with which all judgement in him was actually beset.

Again and again as the days passed he had had a sense of the pertinence

of communicating quickly with Woollett—communicating with a quickness

with which telegraphy alone would rhyme; the fruit really of a fine

fancy in him for keeping things straight, for the happy forestalment of

error. No one could explain better when needful, nor put more

conscience into an account or a report; which burden of conscience is

perhaps exactly the reason why his heart always sank when the clouds of

explanation gathered. His highest ingenuity was in keeping the sky of

life clear of them. Whether or no he had a grand idea of the lucid, he

held that nothing ever was in fact—for any one else—explained. One went

through the vain motions, but it was mostly a waste of life. A personal

relation was a relation only so long as people either perfectly

understood or, better still, didn’t care if they didn’t. From the

moment they cared if they didn’t it was living by the sweat of one’s

brow; and the sweat of one’s brow was just what one might buy one’s

self off from by keeping the ground free of the wild weed of delusion.

It easily grew too fast, and the Atlantic cable now alone could race

with it. That agency would each day have testified for him to something

that was not what Woollett had argued. He was not at this moment

absolutely sure that the effect of the morrow’s—or rather of the

night’s—appreciation of the crisis wouldn’t be to determine some brief

missive. “Have at last seen him, but oh dear!”—some temporary relief of

that sort seemed to hover before him. It hovered somehow as preparing

them all—yet preparing them for what? If he might do so more luminously

and cheaply he would tick out in four words: “Awfully old—grey hair.”

To this particular item in Chad’s appearance he constantly, during

their mute half-hour, reverted; as if so very much more than he could

have said had been involved in it. The most he could have said would

have been: “If he’s going to make me feel young—!” which indeed,

however, carried with it quite enough. If Strether was to feel young,

that is, it would be because Chad was to feel old; and an aged and

hoary sinner had been no part of the scheme.

The question of Chadwick’s true time of life was, doubtless, what came

up quickest after the adjournment of the two, when the play was over,

to a café in the Avenue de l’Opéra. Miss Gostrey had in due course been

perfect for such a step; she had known exactly what they wanted—to go

straight somewhere and talk; and Strether had even felt she had known

what he wished to say and that he was arranging immediately to begin.

She hadn’t pretended this, as she _had_ pretended on the other hand, to

have divined Waymarsh’s wish to extend to her an independent protection

homeward; but Strether nevertheless found how, after he had Chad

opposite to him at a small table in the brilliant halls that his

companion straightway selected, sharply and easily discriminated from

others, it was quite, to his mind, as if she heard him speak; as if,

sitting up, a mile away, in the little apartment he knew, she would

listen hard enough to catch. He found too that he liked that idea, and

he wished that, by the same token, Mrs. Newsome might have caught as

well. For what had above all been determined in him as a necessity of

the first order was not to lose another hour, nor a fraction of one;

was to advance, to overwhelm, with a rush. This was how he would

anticipate—by a night-attack, as might be—any forced maturity that a

crammed consciousness of Paris was likely to take upon itself to assert

on behalf of the boy. He knew to the full, on what he had just

extracted from Miss Gostrey, Chad’s marks of alertness; but they were a

reason the more for not dawdling. If he was himself moreover to be

treated as young he wouldn’t at all events be so treated before he

should have struck out at least once. His arms might be pinioned

afterwards, but it would have been left on record that he was fifty.

The importance of this he had indeed begun to feel before they left the

theatre; it had become a wild unrest, urging him to seize his chance.

He could scarcely wait for it as they went; he was on the verge of the

indecency of bringing up the question in the street; he fairly caught

himself going on—so he afterwards invidiously named it—as if there

would be for him no second chance should the present be lost. Not till,

on the purple divan before the perfunctory _bock_, he had brought out

the words themselves, was he sure, for that matter, that the present

would be saved.

Book Fourth

I

“I’ve come, you know, to make you break with everything, neither more

nor less, and take you straight home; so you’ll be so good as

immediately and favourably to consider it!”—Strether, face to face with

Chad after the play, had sounded these words almost breathlessly, and

with an effect at first positively disconcerting to himself alone. For

Chad’s receptive attitude was that of a person who had been gracefully

quiet while the messenger at last reaching him has run a mile through

the dust. During some seconds after he had spoken Strether felt as if

_he_ had made some such exertion; he was not even certain that the

perspiration wasn’t on his brow. It was the kind of consciousness for

which he had to thank the look that, while the strain lasted, the young

man’s eyes gave him. They reflected—and the deuce of the thing was that

they reflected really with a sort of shyness of kindness—his

momentarily disordered state; which fact brought on in its turn for our

friend the dawn of a fear that Chad might simply “take it out”—take

everything out—in being sorry for him. Such a fear, any fear, was

unpleasant. But everything was unpleasant; it was odd how everything

had suddenly turned so. This however was no reason for letting the

least thing go. Strether had the next minute proceeded as roundly as if

with an advantage to follow up. “Of course I’m a busybody, if you want

to fight the case to the death; but after all mainly in the sense of

having known you and having given you such attention as you kindly

permitted when you were in jackets and knickerbockers. Yes—it was

knickerbockers, I’m busybody enough to remember that; and that you had,

for your age—I speak of the first far-away time—tremendously stout

legs. Well, we want you to break. Your mother’s heart’s passionately

set upon it, but she has above and beyond that excellent arguments and

reasons. I’ve not put them into her head—I needn’t remind you how

little she’s a person who needs that. But they exist—you must take it

from me as a friend both of hers and yours—for myself as well. I didn’t

invent them, I didn’t originally work them out; but I understand them,

I think I can explain them—by which I mean make you actively do them

justice; and that’s why you see me here. You had better know the worst

at once. It’s a question of an immediate rupture and an immediate

return. I’ve been conceited enough to dream I can sugar that pill. I

take at any rate the greatest interest in the question. I took it

already before I left home, and I don’t mind telling you that, altered

as you are, I take it still more now that I’ve seen you. You’re older

and—I don’t know what to call it!—more of a handful; but you’re by so

much the more, I seem to make out, to our purpose.”

“Do I strike you as improved?” Strether was to recall that Chad had at

this point enquired.

He was likewise to recall—and it had to count for some time as his

greatest comfort—that it had been “given” him, as they said at

Woollett, to reply with some presence of mind: “I haven’t the least

idea.” He was really for a while to like thinking he had been

positively hard. On the point of conceding that Chad had improved in

appearance, but that to the question of appearance the remark must be

confined, he checked even that compromise and left his reservation

bare. Not only his moral, but also, as it were, his æsthetic sense had

a little to pay for this, Chad being unmistakeably—and wasn’t it a

matter of the confounded grey hair again?—handsomer than he had ever

promised. That however fell in perfectly with what Strether had said.

They had no desire to keep down his proper expansion, and he wouldn’t

be less to their purpose for not looking, as he had too often done of

old, only bold and wild. There was indeed a signal particular in which

he would distinctly be more so. Strether didn’t, as he talked,

absolutely follow himself; he only knew he was clutching his thread and

that he held it from moment to moment a little tighter; his mere

uninterruptedness during the few minutes helped him to do that. He had

frequently for a month, turned over what he should say on this very

occasion, and he seemed at last to have said nothing he had thought

of—everything was so totally different.

But in spite of all he had put the flag at the window. This was what he

had done, and there was a minute during which he affected himself as

having shaken it hard, flapped it with a mighty flutter, straight in

front of his companion’s nose. It gave him really almost the sense of

having already acted his part. The momentary relief—as if from the

knowledge that nothing of _that_ at least could be undone—sprang from a

particular cause, the cause that had flashed into operation, in Miss

Gostrey’s box, with direct apprehension, with amazed recognition, and

that had been concerned since then in every throb of his consciousness.

What it came to was that with an absolutely _new_ quantity to deal with

one simply couldn’t know. The new quantity was represented by the fact

that Chad had been made over. That was all; whatever it was it was

everything. Strether had never seen the thing so done before—it was

perhaps a speciality of Paris. If one had been present at the process

one might little by little have mastered the result; but he was face to

face, as matters stood, with the finished business. It had freely been

noted for him that he might be received as a dog among skittles, but

that was on the basis of the old quantity. He had originally thought of

lines and tones as things to be taken, but these possibilities had now

quite melted away. There was no computing at all what the young man

before him would think or feel or say on any subject whatever. This

intelligence Strether had afterwards, to account for his nervousness,

reconstituted as he might, just as he had also reconstituted the

promptness with which Chad had corrected his uncertainty. An

extraordinarily short time had been required for the correction, and

there had ceased to be anything negative in his companion’s face and

air as soon as it was made. “Your engagement to my mother has become

then what they call here a _fait accompli?_”—it had consisted, the

determinant touch, in nothing more than that.

Well, that was enough, Strether had felt while his answer hung fire. He

had felt at the same time, however, that nothing could less become him

than that it should hang fire too long. “Yes,” he said brightly, “it

was on the happy settlement of the question that I started. You see

therefore to what tune I’m in your family. Moreover,” he added, “I’ve

been supposing you’d suppose it.”

“Oh I’ve been supposing it for a long time, and what you tell me helps

me to understand that you should want to do something. To do something,

I mean,” said Chad, “to commemorate an event so—what do they call

it?—so auspicious. I see you make out, and not unnaturally,” he

continued, “that bringing me home in triumph as a sort of

wedding-present to Mother would commemorate it better than anything

else. You want to make a bonfire in fact,” he laughed, “and you pitch

me on. Thank you, thank you!” he laughed again.

He was altogether easy about it, and this made Strether now see how at

bottom, and in spite of the shade of shyness that really cost him

nothing, he had from the first moment been easy about everything. The

shade of shyness was mere good taste. People with manners formed could

apparently have, as one of their best cards, the shade of shyness too.

He had leaned a little forward to speak; his elbows were on the table;

and the inscrutable new face that he had got somewhere and somehow was

brought by the movement nearer to his critic’s. There was a fascination

for that critic in its not being, this ripe physiognomy, the face that,

under observation at least, he had originally carried away from

Woollett. Strether found a certain freedom on his own side in defining

it as that of a man of the world—a formula that indeed seemed to come

now in some degree to his relief; that of a man to whom things had

happened and were variously known. In gleams, in glances, the past did

perhaps peep out of it; but such lights were faint and instantly

merged. Chad was brown and thick and strong, and of old Chad had been

rough. Was all the difference therefore that he was actually smooth?

Possibly; for that he _was_ smooth was as marked as in the taste of a

sauce or in the rub of a hand. The effect of it was general—it had

retouched his features, drawn them with a cleaner line. It had cleared

his eyes and settled his colour and polished his fine square teeth—the

main ornament of his face; and at the same time that it had given him a

form and a surface, almost a design, it had toned his voice,

established his accent, encouraged his smile to more play and his other

motions to less. He had formerly, with a great deal of action,

expressed very little; and he now expressed whatever was necessary with

almost none at all. It was as if in short he had really, copious

perhaps but shapeless, been put into a firm mould and turned

successfully out. The phenomenon—Strether kept eyeing it as a

phenomenon, an eminent case—was marked enough to be touched by the

finger. He finally put his hand across the table and laid it on Chad’s

arm. “If you’ll promise me—here on the spot and giving me your word of

honour—to break straight off, you’ll make the future the real right

thing for all of us alike. You’ll ease off the strain of this decent

but none the less acute suspense in which I’ve for so many days been

waiting for you, and let me turn in to rest. I shall leave you with my

blessing and go to bed in peace.”

Chad again fell back at this and, his hands pocketed, settled himself a

little; in which posture he looked, though he rather anxiously smiled,

only the more earnest. Then Strether seemed to see that he was really

nervous, and he took that as what he would have called a wholesome

sign. The only mark of it hitherto had been his more than once taking

off and putting on his wide-brimmed crush hat. He had at this moment

made the motion again to remove it, then had only pushed it back, so

that it hung informally on his strong young grizzled crop. It was a

touch that gave the note of the familiar—the intimate and the

belated—to their quiet colloquy; and it was indeed by some such trivial

aid that Strether became aware at the same moment of something else.

The observation was at any rate determined in him by some light too

fine to distinguish from so many others, but it was none the less

sharply determined. Chad looked unmistakeably during these

instants—well, as Strether put it to himself, all he was worth. Our

friend had a sudden apprehension of what that would on certain sides

be. He saw him in a flash as the young man marked out by women; and for

a concentrated minute the dignity, the comparative austerity, as he

funnily fancied it, of this character affected him almost with awe.

There was an experience on his interlocutor’s part that looked out at

him from under the displaced hat, and that looked out moreover by a

force of its own, the deep fact of its quantity and quality, and not

through Chad’s intending bravado or swagger. That was then the way men

marked out by women _were_—and also the men by whom the women were

doubtless in turn sufficiently distinguished. It affected Strether for

thirty seconds as a relevant truth, a truth which, however, the next

minute, had fallen into its relation. “Can’t you imagine there being

some questions,” Chad asked, “that a fellow—however much impressed by

your charming way of stating things—would like to put to you first?”

“Oh yes—easily. I’m here to answer everything. I think I can even tell

you things, of the greatest interest to you, that you won’t know enough

to ask me. We’ll take as many days to it as you like. But I want,”

Strether wound up, “to go to bed now.”

“Really?”

Chad had spoken in such surprise that he was amused. “Can’t you believe

it?—with what you put me through?”

The young man seemed to consider. “Oh I haven’t put you through

much—yet.”

“Do you mean there’s so much more to come?” Strether laughed. “All the

more reason then that I should gird myself.” And as if to mark what he

felt he could by this time count on he was already on his feet.

Chad, still seated, stayed him, with a hand against him, as he passed

between their table and the next. “Oh we shall get on!”

The tone was, as who should say, everything Strether could have

desired; and quite as good the expression of face with which the

speaker had looked up at him and kindly held him. All these things

lacked was their not showing quite so much as the fruit of experience.

Yes, experience was what Chad did play on him, if he didn’t play any

grossness of defiance. Of course experience was in a manner defiance;

but it wasn’t, at any rate—rather indeed quite the contrary!—grossness;

which was so much gained. He fairly grew older, Strether thought, while

he himself so reasoned. Then with his mature pat of his visitor’s arm

he also got up; and there had been enough of it all by this time to

make the visitor feel that something _was_ settled. Wasn’t it settled

that he had at least the testimony of Chad’s own belief in a

settlement? Strether found himself treating Chad’s profession that they

would get on as a sufficient basis for going to bed. He hadn’t

nevertheless after this gone to bed directly; for when they had again

passed out together into the mild bright night a check had virtually

sprung from nothing more than a small circumstance which might have

acted only as confirming quiescence. There were people, expressive

sound, projected light, still abroad, and after they had taken in for a

moment, through everything, the great clear architectural street, they

turned off in tacit union to the quarter of Strether’s hotel. “Of

course,” Chad here abruptly began, “of course Mother’s making things

out with you about me has been natural—and of course also you’ve had a

good deal to go upon. Still, you must have filled out.”

He had stopped, leaving his friend to wonder a little what point he

wished to make; and this it was that enabled Strether meanwhile to make

one. “Oh we’ve never pretended to go into detail. We weren’t in the

least bound to _that_. It was ‘filling out’ enough to miss you as we

did.”

But Chad rather oddly insisted, though under the high lamp at their

corner, where they paused, he had at first looked as if touched by

Strether’s allusion to the long sense, at home, of his absence. “What I

mean is you must have imagined.”

“Imagined what?”

“Well—horrors.”

It affected Strether: horrors were so little—superficially at least—in

this robust and reasoning image. But he was none the less there to be

veracious. “Yes, I dare say we _have_ imagined horrors. But where’s the

harm if we haven’t been wrong?”

Chad raised his face to the lamp, and it was one of the moments at

which he had, in his extraordinary way, most his air of designedly

showing himself. It was as if at these instants he just presented

himself, his identity so rounded off, his palpable presence and his

massive young manhood, as such a link in the chain as might practically

amount to a kind of demonstration. It was as if—and how but

anomalously?—he couldn’t after all help thinking sufficiently well of

these things to let them go for what they were worth. What could there

be in this for Strether but the hint of some self-respect, some sense

of power, oddly perverted; something latent and beyond access, ominous

and perhaps enviable? The intimation had the next thing, in a flash,

taken on a name—a name on which our friend seized as he asked himself

if he weren’t perhaps really dealing with an irreducible young Pagan.

This description—he quite jumped at it—had a sound that gratified his

mental ear, so that of a sudden he had already adopted it. Pagan—yes,

that was, wasn’t it? what Chad _would_ logically be. It was what he

must be. It was what he was. The idea was a clue and, instead of

darkening the prospect, projected a certain clearness. Strether made

out in this quick ray that a Pagan was perhaps, at the pass they had

come to, the thing most wanted at Woollett. They’d be able to do with

one—a good one; he’d find an opening—yes; and Strether’s imagination

even now prefigured and accompanied the first appearance there of the

rousing personage. He had only the slight discomfort of feeling, as the

young man turned away from the lamp, that his thought had in the

momentary silence possibly been guessed. “Well, I’ve no doubt,” said

Chad, “you’ve come near enough. The details, as you say, don’t matter.

It _has_ been generally the case that I’ve let myself go. But I’m

coming round—I’m not so bad now.” With which they walked on again to

Strether’s hotel.

“Do you mean,” the latter asked as they approached the door, “that

there isn’t any woman with you now?”

“But pray what has that to do with it?”

“Why it’s the whole question.”

“Of my going home?” Chad was clearly surprised. “Oh not much! Do you

think that when I want to go any one will have any power—”

“To keep you”—Strether took him straight up—“from carrying out your

wish? Well, our idea has been that somebody has hitherto—or a good many

persons perhaps—kept you pretty well from ‘wanting.’ That’s what—if

you’re in anybody’s hands—may again happen. You don’t answer my

question”—he kept it up; “but if you aren’t in anybody’s hands so much

the better. There’s nothing then but what makes for your going.”

Chad turned this over. “I don’t answer your question?” He spoke quite

without resenting it. “Well, such questions have always a rather

exaggerated side. One doesn’t know quite what you mean by being in

women’s ‘hands.’ It’s all so vague. One is when one isn’t. One isn’t

when one is. And then one can’t quite give people away.” He seemed

kindly to explain. “I’ve _never_ got stuck—so very hard; and, as

against anything at any time really better, I don’t think I’ve ever

been afraid.” There was something in it that held Strether to wonder,

and this gave him time to go on. He broke out as with a more helpful

thought. “Don’t you know how I like Paris itself?”

The upshot was indeed to make our friend marvel. “Oh if _that’s_ all

that’s the matter with you—!” It was _he_ who almost showed resentment.

Chad’s smile of a truth more than met it. “But isn’t that enough?”

Strether hesitated, but it came out. “Not enough for your mother!”

Spoken, however, it sounded a trifle odd—the effect of which was that

Chad broke into a laugh. Strether, at this, succumbed as well, though

with extreme brevity. “Permit us to have still our theory. But if you

_are_ so free and so strong you’re inexcusable. I’ll write in the

morning,” he added with decision. “I’ll say I’ve got you.”

This appeared to open for Chad a new interest. “How often do you

write?”

“Oh perpetually.”

“And at great length?”

Strether had become a little impatient. “I hope it’s not found too

great.”

“Oh I’m sure not. And you hear as often?”

Again Strether paused. “As often as I deserve.”

“Mother writes,” said Chad, “a lovely letter.”

Strether, before the closed _porte-cochère_, fixed him a moment. “It’s

more, my boy, than _you_ do! But our suppositions don’t matter,” he

added, “if you’re actually not entangled.”

Chad’s pride seemed none the less a little touched. “I never _was_

that—let me insist. I always had my own way.” With which he pursued:

“And I have it at present.”

“Then what are you here for? What has kept you,” Strether asked, “if

you _have_ been able to leave?”

It made Chad, after a stare, throw himself back. “Do you think one’s

kept only by women?” His surprise and his verbal emphasis rang out so

clear in the still street that Strether winced till he remembered the

safety of their English speech. “Is that,” the young man demanded,

“what they think at Woollett?” At the good faith in the question

Strether had changed colour, feeling that, as he would have said, he

had put his foot in it. He had appeared stupidly to misrepresent what

they thought at Woollett; but before he had time to rectify Chad again

was upon him. “I must say then you show a low mind!”

It so fell in, unhappily for Strether, with that reflexion of his own

prompted in him by the pleasant air of the Boulevard Malesherbes, that

its disconcerting force was rather unfairly great. It was a dig that,

administered by himself—and administered even to poor Mrs. Newsome—was

no more than salutary; but administered by Chad—and quite logically—it

came nearer drawing blood. They _hadn’t_ a low mind—nor any approach to

one; yet incontestably they had worked, and with a certain smugness, on

a basis that might be turned against them. Chad had at any rate pulled

his visitor up; he had even pulled up his admirable mother; he had

absolutely, by a turn of the wrist and a jerk of the far-flung noose,

pulled up, in a bunch, Woollett browsing in its pride. There was no

doubt Woollett _had_ insisted on his coarseness; and what he at present

stood there for in the sleeping street was, by his manner of striking

the other note, to make of such insistence a preoccupation compromising

to the insisters. It was exactly as if they had imputed to him a

vulgarity that he had by a mere gesture caused to fall from him. The

devil of the case was that Strether felt it, by the same stroke, as

falling straight upon himself. He had been wondering a minute ago if

the boy weren’t a Pagan, and he found himself wondering now if he

weren’t by chance a gentleman. It didn’t in the least, on the spot,

spring up helpfully for him that a person couldn’t at the same time be

both. There was nothing at this moment in the air to challenge the

combination; there was everything to give it on the contrary something

of a flourish. It struck Strether into the bargain as doing something

to meet the most difficult of the questions; though perhaps indeed only

by substituting another. Wouldn’t it be precisely by having learned to

be a gentleman that he had mastered the consequent trick of looking so

well that one could scarce speak to him straight? But what in the world

was the clue to such a prime producing cause? There were too many clues

then that Strether still lacked, and these clues to clues were among

them. What it accordingly amounted to for him was that he had to take

full in the face a fresh attribution of ignorance. He had grown used by

this time to reminders, especially from his own lips, of what he didn’t

know; but he had borne them because in the first place they were

private and because in the second they practically conveyed a tribute.

He didn’t know what was bad, and—as others didn’t know how little he

knew it—he could put up with his state. But if he didn’t know, in so

important a particular, what was good, Chad at least was now aware he

didn’t; and that, for some reason, affected our friend as curiously

public. It was in fact an exposed condition that the young man left him

in long enough for him to feel its chill—till he saw fit, in a word,

generously again to cover him. This last was in truth what Chad quite

gracefully did. But he did it as with a simple thought that met the

whole of the case. “Oh I’m all right!” It was what Strether had rather

bewilderedly to go to bed on.

II

It really looked true moreover from the way Chad was to behave after

this. He was full of attentions to his mother’s ambassador; in spite of

which, all the while, the latter’s other relations rather remarkably

contrived to assert themselves. Strether’s sittings pen in hand with

Mrs. Newsome up in his own room were broken, yet they were richer; and

they were more than ever interspersed with the hours in which he

reported himself, in a different fashion, but with scarce less

earnestness and fulness, to Maria Gostrey. Now that, as he would have

expressed it, he had really something to talk about he found himself,

in respect to any oddity that might reside for him in the double

connexion, at once more aware and more indifferent. He had been fine to

Mrs. Newsome about his useful friend, but it had begun to haunt his

imagination that Chad, taking up again for her benefit a pen too long

disused, might possibly be finer. It wouldn’t at all do, he saw, that

anything should come up for him at Chad’s hand but what specifically

_was_ to have come; the greatest divergence from which would be

precisely the element of any lubrication of their intercourse by

levity. It was accordingly to forestall such an accident that he

frankly put before the young man the several facts, just as they had

occurred, of his funny alliance. He spoke of these facts, pleasantly

and obligingly, as “the whole story,” and felt that he might qualify

the alliance as funny if he remained sufficiently grave about it. He

flattered himself that he even exaggerated the wild freedom of his

original encounter with the wonderful lady; he was scrupulously

definite about the absurd conditions in which they had made

acquaintance—their having picked each other up almost in the street;

and he had (finest inspiration of all!) a conception of carrying the

war into the enemy’s country by showing surprise at the enemy’s

ignorance.

He had always had a notion that this last was the grand style of

fighting; the greater therefore the reason for it, as he couldn’t

remember that he had ever before fought in the grand style. Every one,

according to this, knew Miss Gostrey: how came it Chad didn’t know her?

The difficulty, the impossibility, was really to escape it; Strether

put on him, by what he took for granted, the burden of proof of the

contrary. This tone was so far successful as that Chad quite appeared

to recognise her as a person whose fame had reached him, but against

his acquaintance with whom much mischance had worked. He made the point

at the same time that his social relations, such as they could be

called, were perhaps not to the extent Strether supposed with the

rising flood of their compatriots. He hinted at his having more and

more given way to a different principle of selection; the moral of

which seemed to be that he went about little in the “colony.” For the

moment certainly he had quite another interest. It was deep, what he

understood, and Strether, for himself, could only so observe it. He

couldn’t see as yet how deep. Might he not all too soon! For there was

really too much of their question that Chad had already committed

himself to liking. He liked, to begin with, his prospective stepfather;

which was distinctly what had not been on the cards. His hating him was

the untowardness for which Strether had been best prepared; he hadn’t

expected the boy’s actual form to give him more to do than his imputed.

It gave him more through suggesting that he must somehow make up to

himself for not being sure he was sufficiently disagreeable. That had

really been present to him as his only way to be sure he was

sufficiently thorough. The point was that if Chad’s tolerance of his

thoroughness were insincere, were but the best of devices for gaining

time, it none the less did treat everything as tacitly concluded.

That seemed at the end of ten days the upshot of the abundant, the

recurrent talk through which Strether poured into him all it concerned

him to know, put him in full possession of facts and figures. Never

cutting these colloquies short by a minute, Chad behaved, looked and

spoke as if he were rather heavily, perhaps even a trifle gloomily, but

none the less fundamentally and comfortably free. He made no crude

profession of eagerness to yield, but he asked the most intelligent

questions, probed, at moments, abruptly, even deeper than his friend’s

layer of information, justified by these touches the native estimate of

his latent stuff, and had in every way the air of trying to live,

reflectively, into the square bright picture. He walked up and down in

front of this production, sociably took Strether’s arm at the points at

which he stopped, surveyed it repeatedly from the right and from the

left, inclined a critical head to either quarter, and, while he puffed

a still more critical cigarette, animadverted to his companion on this

passage and that. Strether sought relief—there were hours when he

required it—in repeating himself; it was in truth not to be blinked

that Chad had a way. The main question as yet was of what it was a way

_to_. It made vulgar questions no more easy; but that was unimportant

when all questions save those of his own asking had dropped. That he

was free was answer enough, and it wasn’t quite ridiculous that this

freedom should end by presenting itself as what was difficult to move.

His changed state, his lovely home, his beautiful things, his easy

talk, his very appetite for Strether, insatiable and, when all was

said, flattering—what were such marked matters all but the notes of his

freedom? He had the effect of making a sacrifice of it just in these

handsome forms to his visitor; which was mainly the reason the visitor

was privately, for the time, a little out of countenance. Strether was

at this period again and again thrown back on a felt need to remodel

somehow his plan. He fairly caught himself shooting rueful glances, shy

looks of pursuit, toward the embodied influence, the definite

adversary, who had by a stroke of her own failed him and on a fond

theory of whose palpable presence he had, under Mrs. Newsome’s

inspiration, altogether proceeded. He had once or twice, in secret,

literally expressed the irritated wish that _she_ would come out and

find her.

He couldn’t quite yet force it upon Woollett that such a career, such a

perverted young life, showed after all a certain plausible side, _did_

in the case before them flaunt something like an impunity for the

social man; but he could at least treat himself to the statement that

would prepare him for the sharpest echo. This echo—as distinct over

there in the dry thin air as some shrill “heading” above a column of

print—seemed to reach him even as he wrote. “He says there’s no woman,”

he could hear Mrs. Newsome report, in capitals almost of newspaper

size, to Mrs. Pocock; and he could focus in Mrs. Pocock the response of

the reader of the journal. He could see in the younger lady’s face the

earnestness of her attention and catch the full scepticism of her but

slightly delayed “What is there then?” Just so he could again as little

miss the mother’s clear decision: “There’s plenty of disposition, no

doubt, to pretend there isn’t.” Strether had, after posting his letter,

the whole scene out; and it was a scene during which, coming and going,

as befell, he kept his eye not least upon the daughter. He had his fine

sense of the conviction Mrs. Pocock would take occasion to reaffirm—a

conviction bearing, as he had from the first deeply divined it to bear,

on Mr. Strether’s essential inaptitude. She had looked him in his

conscious eyes even before he sailed, and that she didn’t believe _he_

would find the woman had been written in her book. Hadn’t she at the

best but a scant faith in his ability to find women? It wasn’t even as

if he had found her mother—so much more, to her discrimination, had her

mother performed the finding. Her mother had, in a case her private

judgement of which remained educative of Mrs. Pocock’s critical sense,

found the man. The man owed his unchallenged state, in general, to the

fact that Mrs. Newsome’s discoveries were accepted at Woollett; but he

knew in his bones, our friend did, how almost irresistibly Mrs. Pocock

would now be moved to show what she thought of his own. Give _her_ a

free hand, would be the moral, and the woman would soon be found.

His impression of Miss Gostrey after her introduction to Chad was

meanwhile an impression of a person almost unnaturally on her guard. He

struck himself as at first unable to extract from her what he wished;

though indeed _of_ what he wished at this special juncture he would

doubtless have contrived to make but a crude statement. It sifted and

settled nothing to put to her, _tout bêtement_, as she often said, “Do

you like him, eh?”—thanks to his feeling it actually the least of his

needs to heap up the evidence in the young man’s favour. He repeatedly

knocked at her door to let her have it afresh that Chad’s case—whatever

else of minor interest it might yield—was first and foremost a miracle

almost monstrous. It was the alteration of the entire man, and was so

signal an instance that nothing else, for the intelligent observer,

could—_could_ it?—signify. “It’s a plot,” he declared—“there’s more in

it than meets the eye.” He gave the rein to his fancy. “It’s a plant!”

His fancy seemed to please her. “Whose then?”

“Well, the party responsible is, I suppose, the fate that waits for

one, the dark doom that rides. What I mean is that with such elements

one can’t count. I’ve but my poor individual, my modest human means. It

isn’t playing the game to turn on the uncanny. All one’s energy goes to

facing it, to tracking it. One wants, confound it, don’t you see?” he

confessed with a queer face—“one wants to enjoy anything so rare. Call

it then life”—he puzzled it out—“call it poor dear old life simply that

springs the surprise. Nothing alters the fact that the surprise is

paralysing, or at any rate engrossing—all, practically, hang it, that

one sees, that one _can_ see.”

Her silences were never barren, nor even dull. “Is that what you’ve

written home?”

He tossed it off. “Oh dear, yes!”

She had another pause while, across her carpets, he had another walk.

“If you don’t look out you’ll have them straight over.”

“Oh but I’ve said he’ll go back.”

“And _will_ he?” Miss Gostrey asked.

The special tone of it made him, pulling up, look at her long. “What’s

that but just the question I’ve spent treasures of patience and

ingenuity in giving _you_, by the sight of him—after everything had led

up—every facility to answer? What is it but just the thing I came here

to-day to get out of you? Will he?”

“No—he won’t,” she said at last. “He’s not free.”

The air of it held him. “Then you’ve all the while known—?”

“I’ve known nothing but what I’ve seen; and I wonder,” she declared

with some impatience, “that you didn’t see as much. It was enough to be

with him there—”

“In the box? Yes,” he rather blankly urged.

“Well—to feel sure.”

“Sure of what?”

She got up from her chair, at this, with a nearer approach than she had

ever yet shown to dismay at his dimness. She even, fairly pausing for

it, spoke with a shade of pity. “Guess!”

It was a shade, fairly, that brought a flush into his face; so that for

a moment, as they waited together, their difference was between them.

“You mean that just your hour with him told you so much of his story?

Very good; I’m not such a fool, on my side, as that I don’t understand

you, or as that I didn’t in some degree understand _him_. That he has

done what he liked most isn’t, among any of us, a matter the least in

dispute. There’s equally little question at this time of day of what it

is he does like most. But I’m not talking,” he reasonably explained,

“of any mere wretch he may still pick up. I’m talking of some person

who in his present situation may have held her own, may really have

counted.”

“That’s exactly what _I_ am!” said Miss Gostrey. But she as quickly

made her point. “I thought you thought—or that they think at

Woollett—that that’s what mere wretches necessarily do. Mere wretches

necessarily _don’t!_” she declared with spirit. “There must, behind

every appearance to the contrary, still be somebody—somebody who’s not

a mere wretch, since we accept the miracle. What else but such a

somebody can such a miracle be?”

He took it in. “Because the fact itself _is_ the woman?”

“_A_ woman. Some woman or other. It’s one of the things that _have_ to

be.”

“But you mean then at least a good one.”

“A good woman?” She threw up her arms with a laugh. “I should call her

excellent!”

“Then why does he deny her?”

Miss Gostrey thought a moment. “Because she’s too good to admit! Don’t

you see,” she went on, “how she accounts for him?”

Strether clearly, more and more, did see; yet it made him also see

other things. “But isn’t what we want that he shall account for _her?_”

“Well, he does. What you have before you is his way. You must forgive

him if it isn’t quite outspoken. In Paris such debts are tacit.”

Strether could imagine; but still—! “Even when the woman’s good?”

Again she laughed out. “Yes, and even when the man is! There’s always a

caution in such cases,” she more seriously explained—“for what it may

seem to show. There’s nothing that’s taken as showing so much here as

sudden unnatural goodness.”

“Ah then you’re speaking now,” Strether said, “of people who are _not_

nice.”

“I delight,” she replied, “in your classifications. But do you want

me,” she asked, “to give you in the matter, on this ground, the wisest

advice I’m capable of? Don’t consider her, don’t judge her at all in

herself. Consider her and judge her only in Chad.”

He had the courage at least of his companion’s logic. “Because then I

shall like her?” He almost looked, with his quick imagination as if he

already did, though seeing at once also the full extent of how little

it would suit his book. “But is that what I came out for?”

She had to confess indeed that it wasn’t. But there was something else.

“Don’t make up your mind. There are all sorts of things. You haven’t

seen him all.”

This on his side Strether recognised; but his acuteness none the less

showed him the danger. “Yes, but if the more I see the better he

seems?”

Well, she found something. “That may be—but his disavowal of her isn’t,

all the same, pure consideration. There’s a hitch.” She made it out.

“It’s the effort to sink her.”

Strether winced at the image. “To ‘sink’—?”

“Well, I mean there’s a struggle, and a part of it is just what he

hides. Take time—that’s the only way not to make some mistake that

you’ll regret. Then you’ll see. He does really want to shake her off.”

Our friend had by this time so got into the vision that he almost

gasped. “After all she has done for him?”

Miss Gostrey gave him a look which broke the next moment into a

wonderful smile. “He’s not so good as you think!”

They remained with him, these words, promising him, in their character

of warning, considerable help; but the support he tried to draw from

them found itself on each renewal of contact with Chad defeated by

something else. What could it be, this disconcerting force, he asked

himself, but the sense, constantly renewed, that Chad _was_—quite in

fact insisted on being—as good as he thought? It seemed somehow as if

he couldn’t _but_ be as good from the moment he wasn’t as bad. There

was a succession of days at all events when contact with him—and in its

immediate effect, as if it could produce no other—elbowed out of

Strether’s consciousness everything but itself. Little Bilham once more

pervaded the scene, but little Bilham became even in a higher degree

than he had originally been one of the numerous forms of the inclusive

relation; a consequence promoted, to our friend’s sense, by two or

three incidents with which we have yet to make acquaintance. Waymarsh

himself, for the occasion, was drawn into the eddy; it absolutely,

though but temporarily, swallowed him down, and there were days when

Strether seemed to bump against him as a sinking swimmer might brush a

submarine object. The fathomless medium held them—Chad’s manner was the

fathomless medium; and our friend felt as if they passed each other, in

their deep immersion, with the round impersonal eye of silent fish. It

was practically produced between them that Waymarsh was giving him then

his chance; and the shade of discomfort that Strether drew from the

allowance resembled not a little the embarrassment he had known at

school, as a boy, when members of his family had been present at

exhibitions. He could perform before strangers, but relatives were

fatal, and it was now as if, comparatively, Waymarsh were a relative.

He seemed to hear him say “Strike up then!” and to enjoy a foretaste of

conscientious domestic criticism. He _had_ struck up, so far as he

actually could; Chad knew by this time in profusion what he wanted; and

what vulgar violence did his fellow pilgrim expect of him when he had

really emptied his mind? It went somehow to and fro that what poor

Waymarsh meant was “I told you so—that you’d lose your immortal soul!”

but it was also fairly explicit that Strether had his own challenge and

that, since they must go to the bottom of things, he wasted no more

virtue in watching Chad than Chad wasted in watching him. His dip for

duty’s sake—where was it worse than Waymarsh’s own? For _he_ needn’t

have stopped resisting and refusing, needn’t have parleyed, at that

rate, with the foe.

The strolls over Paris to see something or call somewhere were

accordingly inevitable and natural, and the late sessions in the

wondrous troisième, the lovely home, when men dropped in and the

picture composed more suggestively through the haze of tobacco, of

music more or less good and of talk more or less polyglot, were on a

principle not to be distinguished from that of the mornings and the

afternoons. Nothing, Strether had to recognise as he leaned back and

smoked, could well less resemble a scene of violence than even the

liveliest of these occasions. They were occasions of discussion, none

the less, and Strether had never in his life heard so many opinions on

so many subjects. There were opinions at Woollett, but only on three or

four. The differences were there to match; if they were doubtless deep,

though few, they were quiet—they were, as might be said, almost as shy

as if people had been ashamed of them. People showed little diffidence

about such things, on the other hand, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, and

were so far from being ashamed of them—or indeed of anything else—that

they often seemed to have invented them to avert those agreements that

destroy the taste of talk. No one had ever done that at Woollett,

though Strether could remember times when he himself had been tempted

to it without quite knowing why. He saw why at present—he had but

wanted to promote intercourse.

These, however, were but parenthetic memories, and the turn taken by

his affair on the whole was positively that if his nerves were on the

stretch it was because he missed violence. When he asked himself if

none would then, in connexion with it, ever come at all, he might

almost have passed as wondering how to provoke it. It would be too

absurd if such a vision as _that_ should have to be invoked for relief;

it was already marked enough as absurd that he should actually have

begun with flutters and dignities on the score of a single accepted

meal. What sort of a brute had he expected Chad to be, anyway?—Strether

had occasion to make the enquiry but was careful to make it in private.

He could himself, comparatively recent as it was—it was truly but the

fact of a few days since—focus his primal crudity; but he would on the

approach of an observer, as if handling an illicit possession, have

slipped the reminiscence out of sight. There were echoes of it still in

Mrs. Newsome’s letters, and there were moments when these echoes made

him exclaim on her want of tact. He blushed of course, at once, still

more for the explanation than for the ground of it: it came to him in

time to save his manners that she couldn’t at the best become tactful

as quickly as he. Her tact had to reckon with the Atlantic Ocean, the

General Post-Office and the extravagant curve of the globe. Chad had

one day offered tea at the Boulevard Malesherbes to a chosen few, a

group again including the unobscured Miss Barrace; and Strether had on

coming out walked away with the acquaintance whom in his letters to

Mrs. Newsome he always spoke of as the little artist-man. He had had

full occasion to mention him as the other party, so oddly, to the only

close personal alliance observation had as yet detected in Chad’s

existence. Little Bilham’s way this afternoon was not Strether’s, but

he had none the less kindly come with him, and it was somehow a part of

his kindness that as it had sadly begun to rain they suddenly found

themselves seated for conversation at a café in which they had taken

refuge. He had passed no more crowded hour in Chad’s society than the

one just ended; he had talked with Miss Barrace, who had reproached him

with not having come to see her, and he had above all hit on a happy

thought for causing Waymarsh’s tension to relax. Something might

possibly be extracted for the latter from the idea of his success with

that lady, whose quick apprehension of what might amuse her had given

Strether a free hand. What had she meant if not to ask whether she

couldn’t help him with his splendid encumbrance, and mightn’t the

sacred rage at any rate be kept a little in abeyance by thus creating

for his comrade’s mind even in a world of irrelevance the possibility

of a relation? What was it but a relation to be regarded as so

decorative and, in especial, on the strength of it, to be whirled away,

amid flounces and feathers, in a coupé lined, by what Strether could

make out, with dark blue brocade? He himself had never been whirled

away—never at least in a coupé and behind a footman; he had driven with

Miss Gostrey in cabs, with Mrs. Pocock, a few times, in an open buggy,

with Mrs. Newsome in a four-seated cart and, occasionally up at the

mountains, on a buckboard; but his friend’s actual adventure

transcended his personal experience. He now showed his companion soon

enough indeed how inadequate, as a general monitor, this last queer

quantity could once more feel itself.

“What game under the sun is he playing?” He signified the next moment

that his allusion was not to the fat gentleman immersed in dominoes on

whom his eyes had begun by resting, but to their host of the previous

hour, as to whom, there on the velvet bench, with a final collapse of

all consistency, he treated himself to the comfort of indiscretion.

“Where do you see him come out?”

Little Bilham, in meditation, looked at him with a kindness almost

paternal. “Don’t you like it over here?”

Strether laughed out—for the tone was indeed droll; he let himself go.

“What has that to do with it? The only thing I’ve any business to like

is to feel that I’m moving him. That’s why I ask you whether you

believe I _am?_ Is the creature”—and he did his best to show that he

simply wished to ascertain—“honest?”

His companion looked responsible, but looked it through a small dim

smile. “What creature do you mean?”

It was on this that they did have for a little a mute interchange. “Is

it untrue that he’s free? How then,” Strether asked wondering “does he

arrange his life?”

“Is the creature you mean Chad himself?” little Bilham said.

Strether here, with a rising hope, just thought, “We must take one of

them at a time.” But his coherence lapsed. “_Is_ there some woman? Of

whom he’s really afraid of course I mean—or who does with him what she

likes.”

“It’s awfully charming of you,” Bilham presently remarked, “not to have

asked me that before.”

“Oh I’m not fit for my job!”

The exclamation had escaped our friend, but it made little Bilham more

deliberate. “Chad’s a rare case!” he luminously observed. “He’s awfully

changed,” he added.

“Then you see it too?”

“The way he has improved? Oh yes—I think every one must see it. But I’m

not sure,” said little Bilham, “that I didn’t like him about as well in

his other state.”

“Then this _is_ really a new state altogether?”

“Well,” the young man after a moment returned, “I’m not sure he was

really meant by nature to be quite so good. It’s like the new edition

of an old book that one has been fond of—revised and amended, brought

up to date, but not quite the thing one knew and loved. However that

may be at all events,” he pursued, “I don’t think, you know, that he’s

really playing, as you call it, any game. I believe he really wants to

go back and take up a career. He’s capable of one, you know, that will

improve and enlarge him still more. He won’t then,” little Bilham

continued to remark, “be my pleasant well-rubbed old-fashioned volume

at all. But of course I’m beastly immoral. I’m afraid it would be a

funny world altogether—a world with things the way I like them. I

ought, I dare say, to go home and go into business myself. Only I’d

simply rather die—simply. And I’ve not the least difficulty in making

up my mind not to, and in knowing exactly why, and in defending my

ground against all comers. All the same,” he wound up, “I assure you I

don’t say a word against it—for himself, I mean—to Chad. I seem to see

it as much the best thing for him. You see he’s not happy.”

“_Do_ I?”—Strether stared. “I’ve been supposing I see just the

opposite—an extraordinary case of the equilibrium arrived at and

assured.”

“Oh there’s a lot behind it.”

“Ah there you are!” Strether exclaimed. “That’s just what I want to get

at. You speak of your familiar volume altered out of recognition. Well,

who’s the editor?”

Little Bilham looked before him a minute in silence. “He ought to get

married. _That_ would do it. And he wants to.”

“Wants to marry her?”

Again little Bilham waited, and, with a sense that he had information,

Strether scarce knew what was coming. “He wants to be free. He isn’t

used, you see,” the young man explained in his lucid way, “to being so

good.”

Strether hesitated. “Then I may take it from you that he _is_ good?”

His companion matched his pause, but making it up with a quiet fulness.

“_Do_ take it from me.”

“Well then why isn’t he free? He swears to me he is, but meanwhile does

nothing—except of course that he’s so kind to me—to prove it; and

couldn’t really act much otherwise if he weren’t. My question to you

just now was exactly on this queer impression of his diplomacy: as if

instead of really giving ground his line were to keep me on here and

set me a bad example.”

As the half-hour meanwhile had ebbed Strether paid his score, and the

waiter was presently in the act of counting out change. Our friend

pushed back to him a fraction of it, with which, after an emphatic

recognition, the personage in question retreated. “You give too much,”

little Bilham permitted himself benevolently to observe.

“Oh I always give too much!” Strether helplessly sighed. “But you

don’t,” he went on as if to get quickly away from the contemplation of

that doom, “answer my question. Why isn’t he free?”

Little Bilham had got up as if the transaction with the waiter had been

a signal, and had already edged out between the table and the divan.

The effect of this was that a minute later they had quitted the place,

the gratified waiter alert again at the open door. Strether had found

himself deferring to his companion’s abruptness as to a hint that he

should be answered as soon as they were more isolated. This happened

when after a few steps in the outer air they had turned the next

corner. There our friend had kept it up. “Why isn’t he free if he’s

good?”

Little Bilham looked him full in the face. “Because it’s a virtuous

attachment.”

This had settled the question so effectually for the time—that is for

the next few days—that it had given Strether almost a new lease of

life. It must be added however that, thanks to his constant habit of

shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he

presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.

His imagination had in other words already dealt with his young

friend’s assertion; of which it had made something that sufficiently

came out on the very next occasion of his seeing Maria Gostrey. This

occasion moreover had been determined promptly by a new circumstance—a

circumstance he was the last man to leave her for a day in ignorance

of. “When I said to him last night,” he immediately began, “that

without some definite word from him now that will enable me to speak to

them over there of our sailing—or at least of mine, giving them some

sort of date—my responsibility becomes uncomfortable and my situation

awkward; when I said that to him what do you think was his reply?” And

then as she this time gave it up: “Why that he has two particular

friends, two ladies, mother and daughter, about to arrive in

Paris—coming back from an absence; and that he wants me so furiously to

meet them, know them and like them, that I shall oblige him by kindly

not bringing our business to a crisis till he has had a chance to see

them again himself. Is that,” Strether enquired, “the way he’s going to

try to get off? These are the people,” he explained, “that he must have

gone down to see before I arrived. They’re the best friends he has in

the world, and they take more interest than any one else in what

concerns him. As I’m his next best he sees a thousand reasons why we

should comfortably meet. He hasn’t broached the question sooner because

their return was uncertain—seemed in fact for the present impossible.

But he more than intimates that—if you can believe it—their desire to

make my acquaintance has had to do with their surmounting

difficulties.”

“They’re dying to see you?” Miss Gostrey asked.

“Dying. Of course,” said Strether, “they’re the virtuous attachment.”

He had already told her about that—had seen her the day after his talk

with little Bilham; and they had then threshed out together the bearing

of the revelation. She had helped him to put into it the logic in which

little Bilham had left it slightly deficient Strether hadn’t pressed

him as to the object of the preference so unexpectedly described;

feeling in the presence of it, with one of his irrepressible scruples,

a delicacy from which he had in the quest of the quite other article

worked himself sufficiently free. He had held off, as on a small

principle of pride, from permitting his young friend to mention a name;

wishing to make with this the great point that Chad’s virtuous

attachments were none of his business. He had wanted from the first not

to think too much of his dignity, but that was no reason for not

allowing it any little benefit that might turn up. He had often enough

wondered to what degree his interference might pass for interested; so

that there was no want of luxury in letting it be seen whenever he

could that he didn’t interfere. That had of course at the same time not

deprived him of the further luxury of much private astonishment; which

however he had reduced to some order before communicating his

knowledge. When he had done this at last it was with the remark that,

surprised as Miss Gostrey might, like himself, at first be, she would

probably agree with him on reflexion that such an account of the matter

did after all fit the confirmed appearances. Nothing certainly, on all

the indications, could have been a greater change for him than a

virtuous attachment, and since they had been in search of the “word” as

the French called it, of that change, little Bilham’s

announcement—though so long and so oddly delayed—would serve as well as

another. She had assured Strether in fact after a pause that the more

she thought of it the more it did serve; and yet her assurance hadn’t

so weighed with him as that before they parted he hadn’t ventured to

challenge her sincerity. Didn’t she believe the attachment _was_

virtuous?—he had made sure of her again with the aid of that question.

The tidings he brought her on this second occasion were moreover such

as would help him to make surer still.

She showed at first none the less as only amused. “You say there are

two? An attachment to them both then would, I suppose, almost

necessarily be innocent.”

Our friend took the point, but he had his clue. “Mayn’t he be still in

the stage of not quite knowing which of them, mother or daughter, he

likes best?”

She gave it more thought. “Oh it must be the daughter—at his age.”

“Possibly. Yet what do we know,” Strether asked, “about hers? She may

be old enough.”

“Old enough for what?”

“Why to marry Chad. That may be, you know, what they want. And if Chad

wants it too, and little Bilham wants it, and even _we_, at a pinch,

could do with it—that is if she doesn’t prevent repatriation—why it may

be plain sailing yet.”

It was always the case for him in these counsels that each of his

remarks, as it came, seemed to drop into a deeper well. He had at all

events to wait a moment to hear the slight splash of this one. “I don’t

see why if Mr. Newsome wants to marry the young lady he hasn’t already

done it or hasn’t been prepared with some statement to you about it.

And if he both wants to marry her and is on good terms with them why

isn’t he ‘free’?”

Strether, responsively, wondered indeed. “Perhaps the girl herself

doesn’t like him.”

“Then why does he speak of them to you as he does?”

Strether’s mind echoed the question, but also again met it. “Perhaps

it’s with the mother he’s on good terms.”

“As against the daughter?”

“Well, if she’s trying to persuade the daughter to consent to him, what

could make him like the mother more? Only,” Strether threw out, “why

shouldn’t the daughter consent to him?”

“Oh,” said Miss Gostrey, “mayn’t it be that every one else isn’t quite

so struck with him as you?”

“Doesn’t regard him you mean as such an ‘eligible’ young man? _Is_ that

what I’ve come to?” he audibly and rather gravely sought to know.

“However,” he went on, “his marriage is what his mother most

desires—that is if it will help. And oughtn’t _any_ marriage to help?

They must want him”—he had already worked it out—“to be better off.

Almost any girl he may marry will have a direct interest in his taking

up his chances. It won’t suit _her_ at least that he shall miss them.”

Miss Gostrey cast about. “No—you reason well! But of course on the

other hand there’s always dear old Woollett itself.”

“Oh yes,” he mused—“there’s always dear old Woollett itself.”

She waited a moment. “The young lady mayn’t find herself able to

swallow _that_ quantity. She may think it’s paying too much; she may

weigh one thing against another.”

Strether, ever restless in such debates, took a vague turn “It will all

depend on who she is. That of course—the proved ability to deal with

dear old Woollett, since I’m sure she does deal with it—is what makes

so strongly for Mamie.”

“Mamie?”

He stopped short, at her tone, before her; then, though seeing that it

represented not vagueness, but a momentary embarrassed fulness, let his

exclamation come. “You surely haven’t forgotten about Mamie!”

“No, I haven’t forgotten about Mamie,” she smiled. “There’s no doubt

whatever that there’s ever so much to be said for her. Mamie’s _my_

girl!” she roundly declared.

Strether resumed for a minute his walk. “She’s really perfectly lovely,

you know. Far prettier than any girl I’ve seen over here yet.”

“That’s precisely on what I perhaps most build.” And she mused a moment

in her friend’s way. “I should positively like to take her in hand!”

He humoured the fancy, though indeed finally to deprecate it. “Oh but

don’t, in your zeal, go over to her! I need you most and can’t, you

know, be left.”

But she kept it up. “I wish they’d send her out to me!”

“If they knew you,” he returned, “they would.”

“Ah but don’t they?—after all that, as I’ve understood you you’ve told

them about me?”

He had paused before her again, but he continued his course “They

_will_—before, as you say, I’ve done.” Then he came out with the point

he had wished after all most to make. “It seems to give away now his

game. This is what he has been doing—keeping me along for. He has been

waiting for them.”

Miss Gostrey drew in her lips. “You see a good deal in it!”

“I doubt if I see as much as you. Do you pretend,” he went on, “that

you don’t see—?”

“Well, what?”—she pressed him as he paused.

“Why that there must be a lot between them—and that it has been going

on from the first; even from before I came.”

She took a minute to answer. “Who are they then—if it’s so grave?”

“It mayn’t be grave—it may be gay. But at any rate it’s marked. Only I

don’t know,” Strether had to confess, “anything about them. Their name

for instance was a thing that, after little Bilham’s information, I

found it a kind of refreshment not to feel obliged to follow up.”

“Oh,” she returned, “if you think you’ve got off—!”

Her laugh produced in him a momentary gloom. “I don’t think I’ve got

off. I only think I’m breathing for about five minutes. I dare say I

_shall_ have, at the best, still to get on.” A look, over it all,

passed between them, and the next minute he had come back to good

humour. “I don’t meanwhile take the smallest interest in their name.”

“Nor in their nationality?—American, French, English, Polish?”

“I don’t care the least little ‘hang,’” he smiled, “for their

nationality. It would be nice if they’re Polish!” he almost immediately

added.

“Very nice indeed.” The transition kept up her spirits. “So you see you

do care.”

He did this contention a modified justice. “I think I should if they

_were_ Polish. Yes,” he thought—“there might be joy in _that_.”

“Let us then hope for it.” But she came after this nearer to the

question. “If the girl’s of the right age of course the mother can’t

be. I mean for the virtuous attachment. If the girl’s twenty—and she

can’t be less—the mother must be at least forty. So it puts the mother

out. _She’s_ too old for him.”

Strether, arrested again, considered and demurred. “Do you think so? Do

you think any one would be too old for him? _I’m_ eighty, and I’m too

young. But perhaps the girl,” he continued, “_isn’t_ twenty. Perhaps

she’s only ten—but such a little dear that Chad finds himself counting

her in as an attraction of the acquaintance. Perhaps she’s only five.

Perhaps the mother’s but five-and-twenty—a charming young widow.”

Miss Gostrey entertained the suggestion. “She _is_ a widow then?”

“I haven’t the least idea!” They once more, in spite of this vagueness,

exchanged a look—a look that was perhaps the longest yet. It seemed in

fact, the next thing, to require to explain itself; which it did as it

could. “I only feel what I’ve told you—that he has some reason.”

Miss Gostrey’s imagination had taken its own flight. “Perhaps she’s

_not_ a widow.”

Strether seemed to accept the possibility with reserve. Still he

accepted it. “Then that’s why the attachment—if it’s to her—is

virtuous.”

But she looked as if she scarce followed. “Why is it virtuous if—since

she’s free—there’s nothing to impose on it any condition?”

He laughed at her question. “Oh I perhaps don’t mean as virtuous as

_that!_ Your idea is that it can be virtuous—in any sense worthy of the

name—only if she’s _not_ free? But what does it become then,” he asked,

“for _her?_”

“Ah that’s another matter.” He said nothing for a moment, and she soon

went on. “I dare say you’re right, at any rate, about Mr. Newsome’s

little plan. He _has_ been trying you—has been reporting on you to

these friends.”

Strether meanwhile had had time to think more. “Then where’s his

straightness?”

“Well, as we say, it’s struggling up, breaking out, asserting itself as

it can. We can be on the side, you see, of his straightness. We can

help him. But he has made out,” said Miss Gostrey, “that you’ll do.”

“Do for what?”

“Why, for _them_—for _ces dames_. He has watched you, studied you,

liked you—and recognised that _they_ must. It’s a great compliment to

you, my dear man; for I’m sure they’re particular. You came out for a

success. Well,” she gaily declared, “you’re having it!”

He took it from her with momentary patience and then turned abruptly

away. It was always convenient to him that there were so many fine

things in her room to look at. But the examination of two or three of

them appeared soon to have determined a speech that had little to do

with them. “You don’t believe in it!”

“In what?”

“In the character of the attachment. In its innocence.”

But she defended herself. “I don’t pretend to know anything about it.

Everything’s possible. We must see.”

“See?” he echoed with a groan. “Haven’t we seen enough?”

“_I_ haven’t,” she smiled.

“But do you suppose then little Bilham has lied?”

“You must find out.”

It made him almost turn pale. “Find out any _more?_”

He had dropped on a sofa for dismay; but she seemed, as she stood over

him, to have the last word. “Wasn’t what you came out for to find out

_all?_”

Book Fifth

I

The Sunday of the next week was a wonderful day, and Chad Newsome had

let his friend know in advance that he had provided for it. There had

already been a question of his taking him to see the great Gloriani,

who was at home on Sunday afternoons and at whose house, for the most

part, fewer bores were to be met than elsewhere; but the project,

through some accident, had not had instant effect, and now revived in

happier conditions. Chad had made the point that the celebrated

sculptor had a queer old garden, for which the weather—spring at last

frank and fair—was propitious; and two or three of his other allusions

had confirmed for Strether the expectation of something special. He had

by this time, for all introductions and adventures, let himself

recklessly go, cherishing the sense that whatever the young man showed

him he was showing at least himself. He could have wished indeed, so

far as this went, that Chad were less of a mere cicerone; for he was

not without the impression—now that the vision of his game, his plan,

his deep diplomacy, did recurrently assert itself—of his taking refuge

from the realities of their intercourse in profusely dispensing, as our

friend mentally phrased it, _panem et circenses_. Our friend continued

to feel rather smothered in flowers, though he made in his other

moments the almost angry inference that this was only because of his

odious ascetic suspicion of any form of beauty. He periodically assured

himself—for his reactions were sharp—that he shouldn’t reach the truth

of anything till he had at least got rid of that.

He had known beforehand that Madame de Vionnet and her daughter would

probably be on view, an intimation to that effect having constituted

the only reference again made by Chad to his good friends from the

south. The effect of Strether’s talk about them with Miss Gostrey had

been quite to consecrate his reluctance to pry; something in the very

air of Chad’s silence—judged in the light of that talk—offered it to

him as a reserve he could markedly match. It shrouded them about with

he scarce knew what, a consideration, a distinction; he was in presence

at any rate—so far as it placed him there—of ladies; and the one thing

that was definite for him was that they themselves should be, to the

extent of his responsibility, in presence of a gentleman. Was it

because they were very beautiful, very clever, or even very good—was it

for one of these reasons that Chad was, so to speak, nursing his

effect? Did he wish to spring them, in the Woollett phrase, with a

fuller force—to confound his critic, slight though as yet the

criticism, with some form of merit exquisitely incalculable? The most

the critic had at all events asked was whether the persons in question

were French; and that enquiry had been but a proper comment on the

sound of their name. “Yes. That is no!” had been Chad’s reply; but he

had immediately added that their English was the most charming in the

world, so that if Strether were wanting an excuse for not getting on

with them he wouldn’t in the least find one. Never in fact had

Strether—in the mood into which the place had quickly launched

him—felt, for himself, less the need of an excuse. Those he might have

found would have been, at the worst, all for the others, the people

before him, in whose liberty to be as they were he was aware that he

positively rejoiced. His fellow guests were multiplying, and these

things, their liberty, their intensity, their variety, their conditions

at large, were in fusion in the admirable medium of the scene.

The place itself was a great impression—a small pavilion, clear-faced

and sequestered, an effect of polished parquet, of fine white panel and

spare sallow gilt, of decoration delicate and rare, in the heart of the

Faubourg Saint-Germain and on the edge of a cluster of gardens attached

to old noble houses. Far back from streets and unsuspected by crowds,

reached by a long passage and a quiet court, it was as striking to the

unprepared mind, he immediately saw, as a treasure dug up; giving him

too, more than anything yet, the note of the range of the immeasurable

town and sweeping away, as by a last brave brush, his usual landmarks

and terms. It was in the garden, a spacious cherished remnant, out of

which a dozen persons had already passed, that Chad’s host presently

met them while the tall bird-haunted trees, all of a twitter with the

spring and the weather, and the high party-walls, on the other side of

which grave _hôtels_ stood off for privacy, spoke of survival,

transmission, association, a strong indifferent persistent order. The

day was so soft that the little party had practically adjourned to the

open air but the open air was in such conditions all a chamber of

state. Strether had presently the sense of a great convent, a convent

of missions, famous for he scarce knew what, a nursery of young

priests, of scattered shade, of straight alleys and chapel-bells, that

spread its mass in one quarter; he had the sense of names in the air,

of ghosts at the windows, of signs and tokens, a whole range of

expression, all about him, too thick for prompt discrimination.

This assault of images became for a moment, in the address of the

distinguished sculptor, almost formidable: Gloriani showed him, in such

perfect confidence, on Chad’s introduction of him, a fine worn handsome

face, a face that was like an open letter in a foreign tongue. With his

genius in his eyes, his manners on his lips, his long career behind him

and his honours and rewards all round, the great artist, in the course

of a single sustained look and a few words of delight at receiving him,

affected our friend as a dazzling prodigy of type. Strether had seen in

museums—in the Luxembourg as well as, more reverently, later on, in the

New York of the billionaires—the work of his hand; knowing too that

after an earlier time in his native Rome he had migrated, in

mid-career, to Paris, where, with a personal lustre almost violent, he

shone in a constellation: all of which was more than enough to crown

him, for his guest, with the light, with the romance, of glory.

Strether, in contact with that element as he had never yet so

intimately been, had the consciousness of opening to it, for the happy

instant, all the windows of his mind, of letting this rather grey

interior drink in for once the sun of a clime not marked in his old

geography. He was to remember again repeatedly the medal-like Italian

face, in which every line was an artist’s own, in which time told only

as tone and consecration; and he was to recall in especial, as the

penetrating radiance, as the communication of the illustrious spirit

itself, the manner in which, while they stood briefly, in welcome and

response, face to face, he was held by the sculptor’s eyes. He wasn’t

soon to forget them, was to think of them, all unconscious,

unintending, preoccupied though they were, as the source of the deepest

intellectual sounding to which he had ever been exposed. He was in fact

quite to cherish his vision of it, to play with it in idle hours; only

speaking of it to no one and quite aware he couldn’t have spoken

without appearing to talk nonsense. Was what it had told him or what it

had asked him the greater of the mysteries? Was it the most special

flare, unequalled, supreme, of the æsthetic torch, lighting that

wondrous world for ever, or was it above all the long straight shaft

sunk by a personal acuteness that life had seasoned to steel? Nothing

on earth could have been stranger and no one doubtless more surprised

than the artist himself, but it was for all the world to Strether just

then as if in the matter of his accepted duty he had positively been on

trial. The deep human expertness in Gloriani’s charming smile—oh the

terrible life behind it!—was flashed upon him as a test of his stuff.

Chad meanwhile, after having easily named his companion, had still more

easily turned away and was already greeting other persons present. He

was as easy, clever Chad, with the great artist as with his obscure

compatriot, and as easy with every one else as with either: this fell

into its place for Strether and made almost a new light, giving him, as

a concatenation, something more he could enjoy. He liked Gloriani, but

should never see him again; of that he was sufficiently sure. Chad

accordingly, who was wonderful with both of them, was a kind of link

for hopeless fancy, an implication of possibilities—oh if everything

had been different! Strether noted at all events that he was thus on

terms with illustrious spirits, and also that—yes, distinctly—he hadn’t

in the least swaggered about it. Our friend hadn’t come there only for

this figure of Abel Newsome’s son, but that presence threatened to

affect the observant mind as positively central. Gloriani indeed,

remembering something and excusing himself, pursued Chad to speak to

him, and Strether was left musing on many things. One of them was the

question of whether, since he had been tested, he had passed. Did the

artist drop him from having made out that he wouldn’t do? He really

felt just to-day that he might do better than usual. Hadn’t he done

well enough, so far as that went, in being exactly so dazzled? and in

not having too, as he almost believed, wholly hidden from his host that

he felt the latter’s plummet? Suddenly, across the garden, he saw

little Bilham approach, and it was a part of the fit that was on him

that as their eyes met he guessed also _his_ knowledge. If he had said

to him on the instant what was uppermost he would have said: “_Have_ I

passed?—for of course I know one has to pass here.” Little Bilham would

have reassured him, have told him that he exaggerated, and have adduced

happily enough the argument of little Bilham’s own very presence;

which, in truth, he could see, was as easy a one as Gloriani’s own or

as Chad’s. He himself would perhaps then after a while cease to be

frightened, would get the point of view for some of the faces—types

tremendously alien, alien to Woollett—that he had already begun to take

in. Who were they all, the dispersed groups and couples, the ladies

even more unlike those of Woollett than the gentlemen?—this was the

enquiry that, when his young friend had greeted him, he did find

himself making.

“Oh they’re every one—all sorts and sizes; of course I mean within

limits, though limits down perhaps rather more than limits up. There

are always artists—he’s beautiful and inimitable to the _cher

confrère_; and then _gros bonnets_ of many kinds—ambassadors, cabinet

ministers, bankers, generals, what do I know? even Jews. Above all

always some awfully nice women—and not too many; sometimes an actress,

an artist, a great performer—but only when they’re not monsters; and in

particular the right _femmes du monde_. You can fancy his history on

that side—I believe it’s fabulous: they _never_ give him up. Yet he

keeps them down: no one knows how he manages; it’s too beautiful and

bland. Never too many—and a mighty good thing too; just a perfect

choice. But there are not in any way many bores; it has always been so;

he has some secret. It’s extraordinary. And you don’t find it out. He’s

the same to every one. He doesn’t ask questions.’

“Ah doesn’t he?” Strether laughed.

Bilham met it with all his candour. “How then should _I_ be here?

“Oh for what you tell me. You’re part of the perfect choice.”

Well, the young man took in the scene. “It seems rather good to-day.”

Strether followed the direction of his eyes. “Are they all, this time,

_femmes du monde?_”

Little Bilham showed his competence. “Pretty well.”

This was a category our friend had a feeling for; a light, romantic and

mysterious, on the feminine element, in which he enjoyed for a little

watching it. “Are there any Poles?”

His companion considered. “I think I make out a ‘Portuguee.’ But I’ve

seen Turks.”

Strether wondered, desiring justice. “They seem—all the women—very

harmonious.”

“Oh in closer quarters they come out!” And then, while Strether was

aware of fearing closer quarters, though giving himself again to the

harmonies, “Well,” little Bilham went on, “it _is_ at the worst rather

good, you know. If you like it, you feel it, this way, that shows

you’re not in the least out. But you always know things,” he handsomely

added, “immediately.”

Strether liked it and felt it only too much; so “I say, don’t lay traps

for me!” he rather helplessly murmured.

“Well,” his companion returned, “he’s wonderfully kind to _us_.”

“To us Americans you mean?”

“Oh no—he doesn’t know anything about _that_. That’s half the battle

here—that you can never hear politics. We don’t talk them. I mean to

poor young wretches of all sorts. And yet it’s always as charming as

this; it’s as if, by something in the air, our squalor didn’t show. It

puts us all back—into the last century.”

“I’m afraid,” Strether said, amused, “that it puts me rather forward:

oh ever so far!”

“Into the next? But isn’t that only,” little Bilham asked, “because

you’re really of the century before?”

“The century before the last? Thank you!” Strether laughed. “If I ask

you about some of the ladies it can’t be then that I may hope, as such

a specimen of the rococo, to please them.”

“On the contrary they adore—we all adore here—the rococo, and where is

there a better setting for it than the whole thing, the pavilion and

the garden, together? There are lots of people with collections,”

little Bilham smiled as he glanced round. “You’ll be secured!”

It made Strether for a moment give himself again to contemplation.

There were faces he scarce knew what to make of. Were they charming or

were they only strange? He mightn’t talk politics, yet he suspected a

Pole or two. The upshot was the question at the back of his head from

the moment his friend had joined him. “Have Madame de Vionnet and her

daughter arrived?”

“I haven’t seen them yet, but Miss Gostrey has come. She’s in the

pavilion looking at objects. One can see _she’s_ a collector,” little

Bilham added without offence.

“Oh yes, she’s a collector, and I knew she was to come. Is Madame de

Vionnet a collector?” Strether went on.

“Rather, I believe; almost celebrated.” The young man met, on it, a

little, his friend’s eyes. “I happen to know—from Chad, whom I saw last

night—that they’ve come back; but only yesterday. He wasn’t sure—up to

the last. This, accordingly,” little Bilham went on, “will be—if they

_are_ here—their first appearance after their return.”

Strether, very quickly, turned these things over. “Chad told you last

night? To me, on our way here, he said nothing about it.”

“But did you ask him?”

Strether did him the justice. “I dare say not.”

“Well,” said little Bilham, “you’re not a person to whom it’s easy to

tell things you don’t want to know. Though it _is_ easy, I admit—it’s

quite beautiful,” he benevolently added, “when you do want to.”

Strether looked at him with an indulgence that matched his

intelligence. “Is that the deep reasoning on which—about these

ladies—you’ve been yourself so silent?”

Little Bilham considered the depth of his reasoning. “I haven’t been

silent. I spoke of them to you the other day, the day we sat together

after Chad’s tea-party.”

Strether came round to it. “They then are the virtuous attachment?”

“I can only tell you that it’s what they pass for. But isn’t that

enough? What more than a vain appearance does the wisest of us know? I

commend you,” the young man declared with a pleasant emphasis, “the

vain appearance.”

Strether looked more widely round, and what he saw, from face to face,

deepened the effect of his young friend’s words. “Is it so good?”

“Magnificent.”

Strether had a pause. “The husband’s dead?”

“Dear no. Alive.”

“Oh!” said Strether. After which, as his companion laughed: “How then

can it be so good?”

“You’ll see for yourself. One does see.”

“Chad’s in love with the daughter?”

“That’s what I mean.”

Strether wondered. “Then where’s the difficulty?”

“Why, aren’t you and I—with our grander bolder ideas?”

“Oh mine—!” Strether said rather strangely. But then as if to

attenuate: “You mean they won’t hear of Woollett?”

Little Bilham smiled. “Isn’t that just what you must see about?”

It had brought them, as she caught the last words, into relation with

Miss Barrace, whom Strether had already observed—as he had never before

seen a lady at a party—moving about alone. Coming within sound of them

she had already spoken, and she took again, through her long-handled

glass, all her amused and amusing possession. “How much, poor Mr.

Strether, you seem to have to see about! But you can’t say,” she gaily

declared, “that I don’t do what I can to help you. Mr. Waymarsh is

placed. I’ve left him in the house with Miss Gostrey.”

“The way,” little Bilham exclaimed, “Mr. Strether gets the ladies to

work for him! He’s just preparing to draw in another; to pounce—don’t

you see him?—on Madame de Vionnet.”

“Madame de Vionnet? Oh, oh, oh!” Miss Barrace cried in a wonderful

crescendo. There was more in it, our friend made out, than met the ear.

Was it after all a joke that he should be serious about anything? He

envied Miss Barrace at any rate her power of not being. She seemed,

with little cries and protests and quick recognitions, movements like

the darts of some fine high-feathered free-pecking bird, to stand

before life as before some full shop-window. You could fairly hear, as

she selected and pointed, the tap of her tortoise-shell against the

glass. “It’s certain that we do need seeing about; only I’m glad it’s

not I who have to do it. One does, no doubt, begin that way; then

suddenly one finds that one has given it up. It’s too much, it’s too

difficult. You’re wonderful, you people,” she continued to Strether,

“for not feeling those things—by which I mean impossibilities. You

never feel them. You face them with a fortitude that makes it a lesson

to watch you.”

“Ah but”—little Bilham put it with discouragement—“what do we achieve

after all? We see about you and report—when we even go so far as

reporting. But nothing’s done.”

“Oh you, Mr. Bilham,” she replied as with an impatient rap on the

glass, “you’re not worth sixpence! You come over to convert the

savages—for I know you verily did, I remember you—and the savages

simply convert _you_.”

“Not even!” the young man woefully confessed: “they haven’t gone

through that form. They’ve simply—the cannibals!—eaten me; converted me

if you like, but converted me into food. I’m but the bleached bones of

a Christian.”

“Well then there we are! Only”—and Miss Barrace appealed again to

Strether—“don’t let it discourage you. You’ll break down soon enough,

but you’ll meanwhile have had your moments. _Il faut en avoir_. I

always like to see you while you last. And I’ll tell you who _will_

last.”

“Waymarsh?”—he had already taken her up.

She laughed out as at the alarm of it. “He’ll resist even Miss Gostrey:

so grand is it not to understand. He’s wonderful.”

“He is indeed,” Strether conceded. “He wouldn’t tell me of this

affair—only said he had an engagement; but with such a gloom, you must

let me insist, as if it had been an engagement to be hanged. Then

silently and secretly he turns up here with you. Do you call _that_

‘lasting’?”

“Oh I hope it’s lasting!” Miss Barrace said. “But he only, at the best,

bears with me. He doesn’t understand—not one little scrap. He’s

delightful. He’s wonderful,” she repeated.

“Michelangelesque!”—little Bilham completed her meaning. “He _is_ a

success. Moses, on the ceiling, brought down to the floor;

overwhelming, colossal, but somehow portable.”

“Certainly, if you mean by portable,” she returned, “looking so well in

one’s carriage. He’s too funny beside me in his corner; he looks like

somebody, somebody foreign and famous, _en exil_; so that people

wonder—it’s very amusing—whom I’m taking about. I show him Paris, show

him everything, and he never turns a hair. He’s like the Indian chief

one reads about, who, when he comes up to Washington to see the Great

Father, stands wrapt in his blanket and gives no sign. _I_ might be the

Great Father—from the way he takes everything.” She was delighted at

this hit of her identity with that personage—it fitted so her

character; she declared it was the title she meant henceforth to adopt.

“And the way he sits, too, in the corner of my room, only looking at my

visitors very hard and as if he wanted to start something! They wonder

what he does want to start. But he’s wonderful,” Miss Barrace once more

insisted. “He has never started anything yet.”

It presented him none the less, in truth, to her actual friends, who

looked at each other in intelligence, with frank amusement on Bilham’s

part and a shade of sadness on Strether’s. Strether’s sadness

sprang—for the image had its grandeur—from his thinking how little he

himself was wrapt in his blanket, how little, in marble halls, all too

oblivious of the Great Father, he resembled a really majestic

aboriginal. But he had also another reflexion. “You’ve all of you here

so much visual sense that you’ve somehow all ‘run’ to it. There are

moments when it strikes one that you haven’t any other.”

“Any moral,” little Bilham explained, watching serenely, across the

garden, the several _femmes du monde_. “But Miss Barrace has a moral

distinction,” he kindly continued; speaking as if for Strether’s

benefit not less than for her own.

“_Have_ you?” Strether, scarce knowing what he was about, asked of her

almost eagerly.

“Oh not a distinction”—she was mightily amused at his tone—“Mr.

Bilham’s too good. But I think I may say a sufficiency. Yes, a

sufficiency. Have you supposed strange things of me?”—and she fixed him

again, through all her tortoise-shell, with the droll interest of it.

“You _are_ all indeed wonderful. I should awfully disappoint you. I do

take my stand on my sufficiency. But I know, I confess,” she went on,

“strange people. I don’t know how it happens; I don’t do it on purpose;

it seems to be my doom—as if I were always one of their habits: it’s

wonderful! I dare say moreover,” she pursued with an interested

gravity, “that I do, that we all do here, run too much to mere eye. But

how can it be helped? We’re all looking at each other—and in the light

of Paris one sees what things resemble. That’s what the light of Paris

seems always to show. It’s the fault of the light of Paris—dear old

light!”

“Dear old Paris!” little Bilham echoed.

“Everything, every one shows,” Miss Barrace went on.

“But for what they really are?” Strether asked.

“Oh I like your Boston ‘reallys’! But sometimes—yes.”

“Dear old Paris then!” Strether resignedly sighed while for a moment

they looked at each other. Then he broke out: “Does Madame de Vionnet

do that? I mean really show for what she is?”

Her answer was prompt. “She’s charming. She’s perfect.”

“Then why did you a minute ago say ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ at her name?”

She easily remembered. “Why just because—! She’s wonderful.”

“Ah she too?”—Strether had almost a groan.

But Miss Barrace had meanwhile perceived relief. “Why not put your

question straight to the person who can answer it best?”

“No,” said little Bilham; “don’t put any question; wait, rather—it will

be much more fun—to judge for yourself. He has come to take you to

her.”

II

On which Strether saw that Chad was again at hand, and he afterwards

scarce knew, absurd as it may seem, what had then quickly occurred. The

moment concerned him, he felt, more deeply than he could have

explained, and he had a subsequent passage of speculation as to

whether, on walking off with Chad, he hadn’t looked either pale or red.

The only thing he was clear about was that, luckily, nothing indiscreet

had in fact been said and that Chad himself was more than ever, in Miss

Barrace’s great sense, wonderful. It was one of the connexions—though

really why it should be, after all, was none so apparent—in which the

whole change in him came out as most striking. Strether recalled as

they approached the house that he had impressed him that first night as

knowing how to enter a box. Well, he impressed him scarce less now as

knowing how to make a presentation. It did something for Strether’s own

quality—marked it as estimated; so that our poor friend, conscious and

passive, really seemed to feel himself quite handed over and delivered;

absolutely, as he would have said, made a present of, given away. As

they reached the house a young woman, about to come forth, appeared,

unaccompanied, on the steps; at the exchange with whom of a word on

Chad’s part Strether immediately perceived that, obligingly, kindly,

she was there to meet them. Chad had left her in the house, but she had

afterwards come halfway and then the next moment had joined them in the

garden. Her air of youth, for Strether, was at first almost

disconcerting, while his second impression was, not less sharply, a

degree of relief at there not having just been, with the others, any

freedom used about her. It was upon him at a touch that she was no

subject for that, and meanwhile, on Chad’s introducing him, she had

spoken to him, very simply and gently, in an English clearly of the

easiest to her, yet unlike any other he had ever heard. It wasn’t as if

she tried; nothing, he could see after they had been a few minutes

together, was as if she tried; but her speech, charming correct and

odd, was like a precaution against her passing for a Pole. There were

precautions, he seemed indeed to see, only when there were really

dangers.

Later on he was to feel many more of them, but by that time he was to

feel other things besides. She was dressed in black, but in black that

struck him as light and transparent; she was exceedingly fair, and,

though she was as markedly slim, her face had a roundness, with eyes

far apart and a little strange. Her smile was natural and dim; her hat

not extravagant; he had only perhaps a sense of the clink, beneath her

fine black sleeves, of more gold bracelets and bangles than he had ever

seen a lady wear. Chad was excellently free and light about their

encounter; it was one of the occasions on which Strether most wished he

himself might have arrived at such ease and such humour: “Here you are

then, face to face at last; you’re made for each other—_vous allez

voir_; and I bless your union.” It was indeed, after he had gone off,

as if he had been partly serious too. This latter motion had been

determined by an enquiry from him about “Jeanne”; to which her mother

had replied that she was probably still in the house with Miss Gostrey,

to whom she had lately committed her. “Ah but you know,” the young man

had rejoined, “he must see her”; with which, while Strether pricked up

his ears, he had started as if to bring her, leaving the other objects

of his interest together. Strether wondered to find Miss Gostrey

already involved, feeling that he missed a link; but feeling also, with

small delay, how much he should like to talk with her of Madame de

Vionnet on this basis of evidence.

The evidence as yet in truth was meagre; which, for that matter, was

perhaps a little why his expectation had had a drop. There was somehow

not quite a wealth in her; and a wealth was all that, in his

simplicity, he had definitely prefigured. Still, it was too much to be

sure already that there was but a poverty. They moved away from the

house, and, with eyes on a bench at some distance, he proposed that

they should sit down. “I’ve heard a great deal about you,” she said as

they went; but he had an answer to it that made her stop short. “Well,

about _you_, Madame de Vionnet, I’ve heard, I’m bound to say, almost

nothing”—those struck him as the only words he himself could utter with

any lucidity; conscious as he was, and as with more reason, of the

determination to be in respect to the rest of his business perfectly

plain and go perfectly straight. It hadn’t at any rate been in the

least his idea to spy on Chad’s proper freedom. It was possibly,

however, at this very instant and under the impression of Madame de

Vionnet’s pause, that going straight began to announce itself as a

matter for care. She had only after all to smile at him ever so gently

in order to make him ask himself if he weren’t already going crooked.

It might be going crooked to find it of a sudden just only clear that

she intended very definitely to be what he would have called nice to

him. This was what passed between them while, for another instant, they

stood still; he couldn’t at least remember afterwards what else it

might have been. The thing indeed really unmistakeable was its rolling

over him as a wave that he had been, in conditions incalculable and

unimaginable, a subject of discussion. He had been, on some ground that

concerned her, answered for; which gave her an advantage he should

never be able to match.

“Hasn’t Miss Gostrey,” she asked, “said a good word for me?”

What had struck him first was the way he was bracketed with that lady;

and he wondered what account Chad would have given of their

acquaintance. Something not as yet traceable, at all events, had

obviously happened. “I didn’t even know of her knowing you.”

“Well, now she’ll tell you all. I’m so glad you’re in relation with

her.”

This was one of the things—the “all” Miss Gostrey would now tell

him—that, with every deference to present preoccupation, was uppermost

for Strether after they had taken their seat. One of the others was, at

the end of five minutes, that she—oh incontestably, yes—_differed_

less; differed, that is, scarcely at all—well, superficially speaking,

from Mrs. Newsome or even from Mrs. Pocock. She was ever so much

younger than the one and not so young as the other; but what _was_

there in her, if anything, that would have made it impossible he should

meet her at Woollett? And wherein was her talk during their moments on

the bench together not the same as would have been found adequate for a

Woollett garden-party?—unless perhaps truly in not being quite so

bright. She observed to him that Mr. Newsome had, to her knowledge,

taken extraordinary pleasure in his visit; but there was no good lady

at Woollett who wouldn’t have been at least up to that. Was there in

Chad, by chance, after all, deep down, a principle of aboriginal

loyalty that had made him, for sentimental ends, attach himself to

elements, happily encountered, that would remind him most of the old

air and the old soil? Why accordingly be in a flutter—Strether could

even put it that way—about this unfamiliar phenomenon of the _femme du

monde?_ On these terms Mrs. Newsome herself was as much of one. Little

Bilham verily had testified that they came out, the ladies of the type,

in close quarters; but it was just in these quarters—now comparatively

close—that he felt Madame de Vionnet’s common humanity. She did come

out, and certainly to his relief, but she came out as the usual thing.

There might be motives behind, but so could there often be even at

Woollett. The only thing was that if she showed him she wished to like

him—as the motives behind might conceivably prompt—it would possibly

have been more thrilling for him that she should have shown as more

vividly alien. Ah she was neither Turk nor Pole!—which would be indeed

flat once more for Mrs. Newsome and Mrs. Pocock. A lady and two

gentlemen had meanwhile, however, approached their bench, and this

accident stayed for the time further developments.

They presently addressed his companion, the brilliant strangers; she

rose to speak to them, and Strether noted how the escorted lady, though

mature and by no means beautiful, had more of the bold high look, the

range of expensive reference, that he had, as might have been said,

made his plans for. Madame de Vionnet greeted her as “Duchesse” and was

greeted in turn, while talk started in French, as “Ma toute-belle”;

little facts that had their due, their vivid interest for Strether.

Madame de Vionnet didn’t, none the less, introduce him—a note he was

conscious of as false to the Woollett scale and the Woollett humanity;

though it didn’t prevent the Duchess, who struck him as confident and

free, very much what he had obscurely supposed duchesses, from looking

at him as straight and as hard—for it _was_ hard—as if she would have

liked, all the same, to know him. “Oh yes, my dear, it’s all right,

it’s _me_; and who are _you_, with your interesting wrinkles and your

most effective (is it the handsomest, is it the ugliest?) of

noses?”—some such loose handful of bright flowers she seemed,

fragrantly enough, to fling at him. Strether almost wondered—at such a

pace was he going—if some divination of the influence of either party

were what determined Madame de Vionnet’s abstention. One of the

gentlemen, in any case, succeeded in placing himself in close relation

with our friend’s companion; a gentleman rather stout and importantly

short, in a hat with a wonderful wide curl to its brim and a frock coat

buttoned with an effect of superlative decision. His French had quickly

turned to equal English, and it occurred to Strether that he might well

be one of the ambassadors. His design was evidently to assert a claim

to Madame de Vionnet’s undivided countenance, and he made it good in

the course of a minute—led her away with a trick of three words; a

trick played with a social art of which Strether, looking after them as

the four, whose backs were now all turned, moved off, felt himself no

master.

He sank again upon his bench and, while his eyes followed the party,

reflected, as he had done before, on Chad’s strange communities. He sat

there alone for five minutes, with plenty to think of; above all with

his sense of having suddenly been dropped by a charming woman overlaid

now by other impressions and in fact quite cleared and indifferent. He

hadn’t yet had so quiet a surrender; he didn’t in the least care if

nobody spoke to him more. He might have been, by his attitude, in for

something of a march so broad that the want of ceremony with which he

had just been used could fall into its place as but a minor incident of

the procession. Besides, there would be incidents enough, as he felt

when this term of contemplation was closed by the reappearance of

little Bilham, who stood before him a moment with a suggestive “Well?”

in which he saw himself reflected as disorganised, as possibly floored.

He replied with a “Well!” intended to show that he wasn’t floored in

the least. No indeed; he gave it out, as the young man sat down beside

him, that if, at the worst, he had been overturned at all, he had been

overturned into the upper air, the sublimer element with which he had

an affinity and in which he might be trusted a while to float. It

wasn’t a descent to earth to say after an instant and in sustained

response to the reference: “You’re quite sure her husband’s living?”

“Oh dear, yes.”

“Ah then—!”

“Ah then what?”

Strether had after all to think. “Well, I’m sorry for them.” But it

didn’t for the moment matter more than that. He assured his young

friend he was quite content. They wouldn’t stir; were all right as they

were. He didn’t want to be introduced; had been introduced already

about as far as he could go. He had seen moreover an immensity; liked

Gloriani, who, as Miss Barrace kept saying, was wonderful; had made

out, he was sure, the half-dozen other men who were distinguished, the

artists, the critics and oh the great dramatist—_him_ it was easy to

spot; but wanted—no, thanks, really—to talk with none of them; having

nothing at all to say and finding it would do beautifully as it was; do

beautifully because what it was—well, was just simply too late. And

when after this little Bilham, submissive and responsive, but with an

eye to the consolation nearest, easily threw off some “Better late than

never!” all he got in return for it was a sharp “Better early than

late!” This note indeed the next thing overflowed for Strether into a

quiet stream of demonstration that as soon as he had let himself go he

felt as the real relief. It had consciously gathered to a head, but the

reservoir had filled sooner than he knew, and his companion’s touch was

to make the waters spread. There were some things that had to come in

time if they were to come at all. If they didn’t come in time they were

lost for ever. It was the general sense of them that had overwhelmed

him with its long slow rush.

“It’s not too late for _you_, on any side, and you don’t strike me as

in danger of missing the train; besides which people can be in general

pretty well trusted, of course—with the clock of their freedom ticking

as loud as it seems to do here—to keep an eye on the fleeting hour. All

the same don’t forget that you’re young—blessedly young; be glad of it

on the contrary and live up to it. Live all you can; it’s a mistake not

to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you

have your life. If you haven’t had that what _have_ you had? This place

and these impressions—mild as you may find them to wind a man up so;

all my impressions of Chad and of people I’ve seen at _his_ place—well,

have had their abundant message for me, have just dropped _that_ into

my mind. I see it now. I haven’t done so enough before—and now I’m old;

too old at any rate for what I see. Oh I _do_ see, at least; and more

than you’d believe or I can express. It’s too late. And it’s as if the

train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the

gumption to know it was there. Now I hear its faint receding whistle

miles and miles down the line. What one loses one loses; make no

mistake about that. The affair—I mean the affair of life—couldn’t, no

doubt, have been different for me; for it’s at the best a tin mould,

either fluted and embossed, with ornamental excrescences, or else

smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one’s

consciousness is poured—so that one ‘takes’ the form as the great cook

says, and is more or less compactly held by it: one lives in fine as

one can. Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be,

like me, without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the

right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it; I don’t quite

know which. Of course at present I’m a case of reaction against the

mistake; and the voice of reaction should, no doubt, always be taken

with an allowance. But that doesn’t affect the point that the right

time is now yours. The right time is _any_ time that one is still so

lucky as to have. You’ve plenty; that’s the great thing; you’re, as I

say, damn you, so happily and hatefully young. Don’t at any rate miss

things out of stupidity. Of course I don’t take you for a fool, or I

shouldn’t be addressing you thus awfully. Do what you like so long as

you don’t make _my_ mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!” ... Slowly

and sociably, with full pauses and straight dashes, Strether had so

delivered himself; holding little Bilham from step to step deeply and

gravely attentive. The end of all was that the young man had turned

quite solemn, and that this was a contradiction of the innocent gaiety

the speaker had wished to promote. He watched for a moment the

consequence of his words, and then, laying a hand on his listener’s

knee and as if to end with the proper joke: “And now for the eye I

shall keep on you!”

“Oh but I don’t know that I want to be, at your age, too different from

you!”

“Ah prepare while you’re about it,” said Strether, “to be more

amusing.”

Little Bilham continued to think, but at last had a smile. “Well, you

_are_ amusing—to _me_.”

“_Impayable_, as you say, no doubt. But what am I to myself?” Strether

had risen with this, giving his attention now to an encounter that, in

the middle of the garden, was in the act of taking place between their

host and the lady at whose side Madame de Vionnet had quitted him. This

lady, who appeared within a few minutes to have left her friends,

awaited Gloriani’s eager approach with words on her lips that Strether

couldn’t catch, but of which her interesting witty face seemed to give

him the echo. He was sure she was prompt and fine, but also that she

had met her match, and he liked—in the light of what he was quite sure

was the Duchess’s latent insolence—the good humour with which the great

artist asserted equal resources. Were they, this pair, of the “great

world”?—and was he himself, for the moment and thus related to them by

his observation, _in_ it? Then there was something in the great world

covertly tigerish, which came to him across the lawn and in the

charming air as a waft from the jungle. Yet it made him admire most of

the two, made him envy, the glossy male tiger, magnificently marked.

These absurdities of the stirred sense, fruits of suggestion ripening

on the instant, were all reflected in his next words to little Bilham.

“I know—if we talk of that—whom _I_ should enjoy being like!”

Little Bilham followed his eyes; but then as with a shade of knowing

surprise: “Gloriani?”

Our friend had in fact already hesitated, though not on the hint of his

companion’s doubt, in which there were depths of critical reserve. He

had just made out, in the now full picture, something and somebody

else; another impression had been superimposed. A young girl in a white

dress and a softly plumed white hat had suddenly come into view, and

what was presently clear was that her course was toward them. What was

clearer still was that the handsome young man at her side was Chad

Newsome, and what was clearest of all was that she was therefore

Mademoiselle de Vionnet, that she was unmistakeably pretty—bright

gentle shy happy wonderful—and that Chad now, with a consummate

calculation of effect, was about to present her to his old friend’s

vision. What was clearest of all indeed was something much more than

this, something at the single stroke of which—and wasn’t it simply

juxtaposition?—all vagueness vanished. It was the click of a spring—he

saw the truth. He had by this time also met Chad’s look; there was more

of it in that; and the truth, accordingly, so far as Bilham’s enquiry

was concerned, had thrust in the answer. “Oh Chad!”—it was that rare

youth he should have enjoyed being “like.” The virtuous attachment

would be all there before him; the virtuous attachment would be in the

very act of appeal for his blessing; Jeanne de Vionnet, this charming

creature, would be exquisitely, intensely now—the object of it. Chad

brought her straight up to him, and Chad was, oh yes, at this

moment—for the glory of Woollett or whatever—better still even than

Gloriani. He had plucked this blossom; he had kept it over-night in

water; and at last as he held it up to wonder he did enjoy his effect.

That was why Strether had felt at first the breath of calculation—and

why moreover, as he now knew, his look at the girl would be, for the

young man, a sign of the latter’s success. What young man had ever

paraded about that way, without a reason, a maiden in her flower? And

there was nothing in his reason at present obscure. Her type

sufficiently told of it—they wouldn’t, they couldn’t, want her to go to

Woollett. Poor Woollett, and what it might miss!—though brave Chad

indeed too, and what it might gain! Brave Chad however had just

excellently spoken. “This is a good little friend of mine who knows all

about you and has moreover a message for you. And this, my dear”—he had

turned to the child herself—“is the best man in the world, who has it

in his power to do a great deal for us and whom I want you to like and

revere as nearly as possible as much as I do.”

She stood there quite pink, a little frightened, prettier and prettier

and not a bit like her mother. There was in this last particular no

resemblance but that of youth to youth; and here was in fact suddenly

Strether’s sharpest impression. It went wondering, dazed, embarrassed,

back to the woman he had just been talking with; it was a revelation in

the light of which he already saw she would become more interesting. So

slim and fresh and fair, she had yet put forth this perfection; so that

for really believing it of her, for seeing her to any such developed

degree as a mother, comparison would be urgent. Well, what was it now

but fairly thrust upon him? “Mamma wishes me to tell you before we go,”

the girl said, “that she hopes very much you’ll come to see us very

soon. She has something important to say to you.”

“She quite reproaches herself,” Chad helpfully explained: “you were

interesting her so much when she accidentally suffered you to be

interrupted.”

“Ah don’t mention it!” Strether murmured, looking kindly from one to

the other and wondering at many things.

“And I’m to ask you for myself,” Jeanne continued with her hands

clasped together as if in some small learnt prayer—“I’m to ask you for

myself if you won’t positively come.”

“Leave it to me, dear—I’ll take care of it!” Chad genially declared in

answer to this, while Strether himself almost held his breath. What was

in the girl was indeed too soft, too unknown for direct dealing; so

that one could only gaze at it as at a picture, quite staying one’s own

hand. But with Chad he was now on ground—Chad he could meet; so

pleasant a confidence in that and in everything did the young man

freely exhale. There was the whole of a story in his tone to his

companion, and he spoke indeed as if already of the family. It made

Strether guess the more quickly what it might be about which Madame de

Vionnet was so urgent. Having seen him then she had found him easy; she

wished to have it out with him that some way for the young people must

be discovered, some way that would not impose as a condition the

transplantation of her daughter. He already saw himself discussing with

this lady the attractions of Woollett as a residence for Chad’s

companion. Was that youth going now to trust her with the affair—so

that it would be after all with one of his “lady-friends” that his

mother’s missionary should be condemned to deal? It was quite as if for

an instant the two men looked at each other on this question. But there

was no mistaking at last Chad’s pride in the display of such a

connexion. This was what had made him so carry himself while, three

minutes before, he was bringing it into view; what had caused his

friend, first catching sight of him, to be so struck with his air. It

was, in a word, just when he thus finally felt Chad putting things

straight off on him that he envied him, as he had mentioned to little

Bilham, most. The whole exhibition however was but a matter of three or

four minutes, and the author of it had soon explained that, as Madame

de Vionnet was immediately going “on,” this could be for Jeanne but a

snatch. They would all meet again soon, and Strether was meanwhile to

stay and amuse himself—“I’ll pick you up again in plenty of time.” He

took the girl off as he had brought her, and Strether, with the faint

sweet foreignness of her “Au revoir, monsieur!” in his ears as a note

almost unprecedented, watched them recede side by side and felt how,

once more, her companion’s relation to her got an accent from it. They

disappeared among the others and apparently into the house; whereupon

our friend turned round to give out to little Bilham the conviction of

which he was full. But there was no little Bilham any more; little

Bilham had within the few moments, for reasons of his own, proceeded

further: a circumstance by which, in its order, Strether was also

sensibly affected.

III

Chad was not in fact on this occasion to keep his promise of coming

back; but Miss Gostrey had soon presented herself with an explanation

of his failure. There had been reasons at the last for his going off

with _ces dames_; and he had asked her with much instance to come out

and take charge of their friend. She did so, Strether felt as she took

her place beside him, in a manner that left nothing to desire. He had

dropped back on his bench, alone again for a time, and the more

conscious for little Bilham’s defection of his unexpressed thought; in

respect to which however this next converser was a still more capacious

vessel. “It’s the child!” he had exclaimed to her almost as soon as she

appeared; and though her direct response was for some time delayed he

could feel in her meanwhile the working of this truth. It might have

been simply, as she waited, that they were now in presence altogether

of truth spreading like a flood and not for the moment to be offered

her in the mere cupful; inasmuch as who should _ces dames_ prove to be

but persons about whom—once thus face to face with them—she found she

might from the first have told him almost everything? This would have

freely come had he taken the simple precaution of giving her their

name. There could be no better example—and she appeared to note it with

high amusement—than the way, making things out already so much for

himself, he was at last throwing precautions to the winds. They were

neither more nor less, she and the child’s mother, than old

school-friends—friends who had scarcely met for years but whom this

unlooked-for chance had brought together with a rush. It was a relief,

Miss Gostrey hinted, to feel herself no longer groping; she was

unaccustomed to grope and as a general thing, he might well have seen,

made straight enough for her clue. With the one she had now picked up

in her hands there need be at least no waste of wonder. “She’s coming

to see me—that’s for _you_,” Strether’s counsellor continued; “but I

don’t require it to know where I am.”

The waste of wonder might be proscribed; but Strether,

characteristically, was even by this time in the immensity of space.

“By which you mean that you know where _she_ is?”

She just hesitated. “I mean that if she comes to see me I shall—now

that I’ve pulled myself round a bit after the shock—not be at home.”

Strether hung poised. “You call it—your recognition—a shock?”

She gave one of her rare flickers of impatience. “It was a surprise, an

emotion. Don’t be so literal. I wash my hands of her.”

Poor Strether’s face lengthened. “She’s impossible—?”

“She’s even more charming than I remembered her.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

She had to think how to put it. “Well, _I’m_ impossible. It’s

impossible. Everything’s impossible.”

He looked at her an instant. “I see where you’re coming out.

Everything’s possible.” Their eyes had on it in fact an exchange of

some duration; after which he pursued: “Isn’t it that beautiful child?”

Then as she still said nothing: “Why don’t you mean to receive her?”

Her answer in an instant rang clear. “Because I wish to keep out of the

business.”

It provoked in him a weak wail. “You’re going to abandon me _now?_”

“No, I’m only going to abandon _her_. She’ll want me to help her with

you. And I won’t.”

“You’ll only help me with her? Well then—!” Most of the persons

previously gathered had, in the interest of tea, passed into the house,

and they had the gardens mainly to themselves. The shadows were long,

the last call of the birds, who had made a home of their own in the

noble interspaced quarter, sounded from the high trees in the other

gardens as well, those of the old convent and of the old _hôtels_; it

was as if our friends had waited for the full charm to come out.

Strether’s impressions were still present; it was as if something had

happened that “nailed” them, made them more intense; but he was to ask

himself soon afterwards, that evening, what really _had_

happened—conscious as he could after all remain that for a gentleman

taken, and taken the first time, into the “great world,” the world of

ambassadors and duchesses, the items made a meagre total. It was

nothing new to him, however, as we know, that a man might have—at all

events such a man as he—an amount of experience out of any proportion

to his adventures; so that, though it was doubtless no great adventure

to sit on there with Miss Gostrey and hear about Madame de Vionnet, the

hour, the picture, the immediate, the recent, the possible—as well as

the communication itself, not a note of which failed to

reverberate—only gave the moments more of the taste of history.

It was history, to begin with, that Jeanne’s mother had been

three-and-twenty years before, at Geneva, schoolmate and good

girlfriend to Maria Gostrey, who had moreover enjoyed since then,

though interruptedly and above all with a long recent drop, other

glimpses of her. Twenty-three years put them both on, no doubt; and

Madame de Vionnet—though she had married straight after school—couldn’t

be today an hour less than thirty-eight. This made her ten years older

than Chad—though ten years, also, if Strether liked, older than she

looked; the least, at any rate, that a prospective mother-in-law could

be expected to do with. She would be of all mothers-in-law the most

charming; unless indeed, through some perversity as yet insupposeable,

she should utterly belie herself in that relation. There was none

surely in which, as Maria remembered her, she mustn’t be charming; and

this frankly in spite of the stigma of failure in the tie where failure

always most showed. It was no test there—when indeed _was_ it a test

there?—for Monsieur de Vionnet had been a brute. She had lived for

years apart from him—which was of course always a horrid position; but

Miss Gostrey’s impression of the matter had been that she could scarce

have made a better thing of it had she done it on purpose to show she

was amiable. She was so amiable that nobody had had a word to say;

which was luckily not the case for her husband. He was so impossible

that she had the advantage of all her merits.

It was still history for Strether that the Comte de Vionnet—it being

also history that the lady in question was a Countess—should now, under

Miss Gostrey’s sharp touch, rise before him as a high distinguished

polished impertinent reprobate, the product of a mysterious order; it

was history, further, that the charming girl so freely sketched by his

companion should have been married out of hand by a mother, another

figure of striking outline, full of dark personal motive; it was

perhaps history most of all that this company was, as a matter of

course, governed by such considerations as put divorce out of the

question. “_Ces gens-là_ don’t divorce, you know, any more than they

emigrate or abjure—they think it impious and vulgar”; a fact in the

light of which they seemed but the more richly special. It was all

special; it was all, for Strether’s imagination, more or less rich. The

girl at the Genevese school, an isolated interesting attaching

creature, then both sensitive and violent, audacious but always

forgiven, was the daughter of a French father and an English mother

who, early left a widow, had married again—tried afresh with a

foreigner; in her career with whom she had apparently given her child

no example of comfort. All these people—the people of the English

mother’s side—had been of condition more or less eminent; yet with

oddities and disparities that had often since made Maria, thinking them

over, wonder what they really quite rhymed to. It was in any case her

belief that the mother, interested and prone to adventure, had been

without conscience, had only thought of ridding herself most quickly of

a possible, an actual encumbrance. The father, by her impression, a

Frenchman with a name one knew, had been a different matter, leaving

his child, she clearly recalled, a memory all fondness, as well as an

assured little fortune which was unluckily to make her more or less of

a prey later on. She had been in particular, at school, dazzlingly,

though quite booklessly, clever; as polyglot as a little Jewess (which

she wasn’t, oh no!) and chattering French, English, German, Italian,

anything one would, in a way that made a clean sweep, if not of prizes

and parchments, at least of every “part,” whether memorised or

improvised, in the curtained costumed school repertory, and in especial

of all mysteries of race and vagueness of reference, all swagger about

“home,” among their variegated mates.

It would doubtless be difficult to-day, as between French and English,

to name her and place her; she would certainly show, on knowledge, Miss

Gostrey felt, as one of those convenient types who don’t keep you

explaining—minds with doors as numerous as the many-tongued cluster of

confessionals at Saint Peter’s. You might confess to her with

confidence in Roumelian, and even Roumelian sins. Therefore—! But

Strether’s narrator covered her implication with a laugh; a laugh by

which his betrayal of a sense of the lurid in the picture was also

perhaps sufficiently protected. He had a moment of wondering, while his

friend went on, what sins might be especially Roumelian. She went on at

all events to the mention of her having met the young thing—again by

some Swiss lake—in her first married state, which had appeared for the

few intermediate years not at least violently disturbed. She had been

lovely at that moment, delightful to _her_, full of responsive emotion,

of amused recognitions and amusing reminders, and then once more, much

later, after a long interval, equally but differently charming—touching

and rather mystifying for the five minutes of an encounter at a

railway-station _en province_, during which it had come out that her

life was all changed. Miss Gostrey had understood enough to see,

essentially, what had happened, and yet had beautifully dreamed that

she was herself faultless. There were doubtless depths in her, but she

was all right; Strether would see if she wasn’t. She was another person

however—that had been promptly marked—from the small child of nature at

the Geneva school, a little person quite made over (as foreign women

_were_, compared with American) by marriage. Her situation too had

evidently cleared itself up; there would have been—all that was

possible—a judicial separation. She had settled in Paris, brought up

her daughter, steered her boat. It was no very pleasant boat—especially

there—to be in; but Marie de Vionnet would have headed straight. She

would have friends, certainly—and very good ones. There she was at all

events—and it was very interesting. Her knowing Mr. Chad didn’t in the

least prove she hadn’t friends; what it proved was what good ones _he_

had. “I saw that,” said Miss Gostrey, “that night at the Français; it

came out for me in three minutes. I saw _her_—or somebody like her. And

so,” she immediately added, “did you.”

“Oh no—not anybody like her!” Strether laughed. “But you mean,” he as

promptly went on, “that she has had such an influence on him?”

Miss Gostrey was on her feet; it was time for them to go. “She has

brought him up for her daughter.”

Their eyes, as so often, in candid conference, through their settled

glasses, met over it long; after which Strether’s again took in the

whole place. They were quite alone there now. “Mustn’t she rather—in

the time then—have rushed it?”

“Ah she won’t of course have lost an hour. But that’s just the good

mother—the good French one. You must remember that of her—that as a

mother she’s French, and that for them there’s a special providence. It

precisely however—that she mayn’t have been able to begin as far back

as she’d have liked—makes her grateful for aid.”

Strether took this in as they slowly moved to the house on their way

out. “She counts on me then to put the thing through?”

“Yes—she counts on you. Oh and first of all of course,” Miss Gostrey

added, “on her—well, convincing you.”

“Ah,” her friend returned, “she caught Chad young!”

“Yes, but there are women who are for all your ‘times of life.’ They’re

the most wonderful sort.”

She had laughed the words out, but they brought her companion, the next

thing, to a stand. “Is what you mean that she’ll try to make a fool of

me?”

“Well, I’m wondering what she _will_—with an opportunity—make.”

“What do you call,” Strether asked, “an opportunity? My going to see

her?”

“Ah you must go to see her”—Miss Gostrey was a trifle evasive. “You

can’t not do that. You’d have gone to see the other woman. I mean if

there had been one—a different sort. It’s what you came out for.”

It might be; but Strether distinguished. “I didn’t come out to see

_this_ sort.”

She had a wonderful look at him now. “Are you disappointed she isn’t

worse?”

He for a moment entertained the question, then found for it the

frankest of answers. “Yes. If she were worse she’d be better for our

purpose. It would be simpler.”

“Perhaps,” she admitted. “But won’t this be pleasanter?”

“Ah you know,” he promptly replied, “I didn’t come out—wasn’t that just

what you originally reproached me with?—for the pleasant.”

“Precisely. Therefore I say again what I said at first. You must take

things as they come. Besides,” Miss Gostrey added, “I’m not afraid for

myself.”

“For yourself—?”

“Of your seeing her. I trust her. There’s nothing she’ll say about me.

In fact there’s nothing she _can_.”

Strether wondered—little as he had thought of this. Then he broke out.

“Oh you women!”

There was something in it at which she flushed. “Yes—there we are.

We’re abysses.” At last she smiled. “But I risk her!”

He gave himself a shake. “Well then so do I!” But he added as they

passed into the house that he would see Chad the first thing in the

morning.

This was the next day the more easily effected that the young man, as

it happened, even before he was down, turned up at his hotel. Strether

took his coffee, by habit, in the public room; but on his descending

for this purpose Chad instantly proposed an adjournment to what he

called greater privacy. He had himself as yet had nothing—they would

sit down somewhere together; and when after a few steps and a turn into

the Boulevard they had, for their greater privacy, sat down among

twenty others, our friend saw in his companion’s move a fear of the

advent of Waymarsh. It was the first time Chad had to that extent given

this personage “away”; and Strether found himself wondering of what it

was symptomatic. He made out in a moment that the youth was in earnest

as he hadn’t yet seen him; which in its turn threw a ray perhaps a

trifle startling on what they had each up to that time been treating as

earnestness. It was sufficiently flattering however that the real

thing—if this _was_ at last the real thing—should have been determined,

as appeared, precisely by an accretion of Strether’s importance. For

this was what it quickly enough came to—that Chad, rising with the

lark, had rushed down to let him know while his morning consciousness

was yet young that he had literally made the afternoon before a

tremendous impression. Madame de Vionnet wouldn’t, couldn’t rest till

she should have some assurance from him that he _would_ consent again

to see her. The announcement was made, across their marble-topped

table, while the foam of the hot milk was in their cups and its plash

still in the air, with the smile of Chad’s easiest urbanity; and this

expression of his face caused our friend’s doubts to gather on the spot

into a challenge of the lips. “See here”—that was all; he only for the

moment said again “See here.” Chad met it with all his air of straight

intelligence, while Strether remembered again that fancy of the first

impression of him, the happy young Pagan, handsome and hard but oddly

indulgent, whose mysterious measure he had under the street-lamp tried

mentally to take. The young Pagan, while a long look passed between

them, sufficiently understood. Strether scarce needed at last to say

the rest—“I want to know where I am.” But he said it, adding before any

answer something more. “Are you engaged to be married—is that your

secret?—to the young lady?”

Chad shook his head with the slow amenity that was one of his ways of

conveying that there was time for everything. “I have no secret—though

I may have secrets! I haven’t at any rate that one. We’re not engaged.

No.”

“Then where’s the hitch?”

“Do you mean why I haven’t already started with you?” Chad, beginning

his coffee and buttering his roll, was quite ready to explain. “Nothing

would have induced me—nothing will still induce me—not to try to keep

you here as long as you can be made to stay. It’s too visibly good for

you.” Strether had himself plenty to say about this, but it was amusing

also to measure the march of Chad’s tone. He had never been more a man

of the world, and it was always in his company present to our friend

that one was seeing how in successive connexions a man of the world

acquitted himself. Chad kept it up beautifully. “My idea—_voyons!_—is

simply that you should let Madame de Vionnet know you, simply that you

should consent to know _her_. I don’t in the least mind telling you

that, clever and charming as she is, she’s ever so much in my

confidence. All I ask of you is to let her talk to you. You’ve asked me

about what you call my hitch, and so far as it goes she’ll explain it

to you. She’s herself my hitch, hang it—if you must really have it all

out. But in a sense,” he hastened in the most wonderful manner to add,

“that you’ll quite make out for yourself. She’s too good a friend,

confound her. Too good, I mean, for me to leave without—without—” It

was his first hesitation.

“Without what?”

“Well, without my arranging somehow or other the damnable terms of my

sacrifice.”

“It _will_ be a sacrifice then?”

“It will be the greatest loss I ever suffered. I owe her so much.”

It was beautiful, the way Chad said these things, and his plea was now

confessedly—oh quite flagrantly and publicly—interesting. The moment

really took on for Strether an intensity. Chad owed Madame de Vionnet

so much? What _did_ that do then but clear up the whole mystery? He was

indebted for alterations, and she was thereby in a position to have

sent in her bill for expenses incurred in reconstruction. What was this

at bottom but what had been to be arrived at? Strether sat there

arriving at it while he munched toast and stirred his second cup. To do

this with the aid of Chad’s pleasant earnest face was also to do more

besides. No, never before had he been so ready to take him as he was.

What was it that had suddenly so cleared up? It was just everybody’s

character; that is everybody’s but—in a measure—his own. Strether felt

_his_ character receive for the instant a smutch from all the wrong

things he had suspected or believed. The person to whom Chad owed it

that he could positively turn out such a comfort to other persons—such

a person was sufficiently raised above any “breath” by the nature of

her work and the young man’s steady light. All of which was vivid

enough to come and go quickly; though indeed in the midst of it

Strether could utter a question. “Have I your word of honour that if I

surrender myself to Madame de Vionnet you’ll surrender yourself to

_me?_”

Chad laid his hand firmly on his friend’s. “My dear man, you have it.”

There was finally something in his felicity almost embarrassing and

oppressive—Strether had begun to fidget under it for the open air and

the erect posture. He had signed to the waiter that he wished to pay,

and this transaction took some moments, during which he thoroughly

felt, while he put down money and pretended—it was quite hollow—to

estimate change, that Chad’s higher spirit, his youth, his practice,

his paganism, his felicity, his assurance, his impudence, whatever it

might be, had consciously scored a success. Well, that was all right so

far as it went; his sense of the thing in question covered our friend

for a minute like a veil through which—as if he had been muffled—he

heard his interlocutor ask him if he mightn’t take him over about five.

“Over” was over the river, and over the river was where Madame de

Vionnet lived, and five was that very afternoon. They got at last out

of the place—got out before he answered. He lighted, in the street, a

cigarette, which again gave him more time. But it was already sharp for

him that there was no use in time. “What does she propose to do to me?”

he had presently demanded.

Chad had no delays. “Are you afraid of her?”

“Oh immensely. Don’t you see it?”

“Well,” said Chad, “she won’t do anything worse to you than make you

like her.”

“It’s just of that I’m afraid.”

“Then it’s not fair to me.”

Strether cast about. “It’s fair to your mother.”

“Oh,” said Chad, “are you afraid of _her?_”

“Scarcely less. Or perhaps even more. But is this lady against your

interests at home?” Strether went on.

“Not directly, no doubt; but she’s greatly in favour of them here.”

“And what—‘here’—does she consider them to be?”

“Well, good relations!”

“With herself?”

“With herself.”

“And what is it that makes them so good?”

“What? Well, that’s exactly what you’ll make out if you’ll only go, as

I’m supplicating you, to see her.”

Strether stared at him with a little of the wanness, no doubt, that the

vision of more to “make out” could scarce help producing. “I mean _how_

good are they?”

“Oh awfully good.”

Again Strether had faltered, but it was brief. It was all very well,

but there was nothing now he wouldn’t risk. “Excuse me, but I must

really—as I began by telling you—know where I am. Is she bad?”

“‘Bad’?”—Chad echoed it, but without a shock. “Is that what’s

implied—?”

“When relations are good?” Strether felt a little silly, and was even

conscious of a foolish laugh, at having it imposed on him to have

appeared to speak so. What indeed was he talking about? His stare had

relaxed; he looked now all round him. But something in him brought him

back, though he still didn’t know quite how to turn it. The two or

three ways he thought of, and one of them in particular, were, even

with scruples dismissed, too ugly. He none the less at last found

something. “Is her life without reproach?”

It struck him, directly he had found it, as pompous and priggish; so

much so that he was thankful to Chad for taking it only in the right

spirit. The young man spoke so immensely to the point that the effect

was practically of positive blandness. “Absolutely without reproach. A

beautiful life. _Allez donc voir!_”

These last words were, in the liberality of their confidence, so

imperative that Strether went through no form of assent; but before

they separated it had been confirmed that he should be picked up at a

quarter to five.

Book Sixth

I

It was quite by half-past five—after the two men had been together in

Madame de Vionnet’s drawing-room not more than a dozen minutes—that

Chad, with a look at his watch and then another at their hostess, said

genially, gaily: “I’ve an engagement, and I know you won’t complain if

I leave him with you. He’ll interest you immensely; and as for her,” he

declared to Strether, “I assure you, if you’re at all nervous, she’s

perfectly safe.”

He had left them to be embarrassed or not by this guarantee, as they

could best manage, and embarrassment was a thing that Strether wasn’t

at first sure Madame de Vionnet escaped. He escaped it himself, to his

surprise; but he had grown used by this time to thinking of himself as

brazen. She occupied, his hostess, in the Rue de Bellechasse, the first

floor of an old house to which our visitors had had access from an old

clean court. The court was large and open, full of revelations, for our

friend, of the habit of privacy, the peace of intervals, the dignity of

distances and approaches; the house, to his restless sense, was in the

high homely style of an elder day, and the ancient Paris that he was

always looking for—sometimes intensely felt, sometimes more acutely

missed—was in the immemorial polish of the wide waxed staircase and in

the fine _boiseries_, the medallions, mouldings, mirrors, great clear

spaces, of the greyish-white salon into which he had been shown. He

seemed at the very outset to see her in the midst of possessions not

vulgarly numerous, but hereditary cherished charming. While his eyes

turned after a little from those of his hostess and Chad freely

talked—not in the least about _him_, but about other people, people he

didn’t know, and quite as if he did know them—he found himself making

out, as a background of the occupant, some glory, some prosperity of

the First Empire, some Napoleonic glamour, some dim lustre of the great

legend; elements clinging still to all the consular chairs and

mythological brasses and sphinxes’ heads and faded surfaces of satin

striped with alternate silk.

The place itself went further back—that he guessed, and how old Paris

continued in a manner to echo there; but the post-revolutionary period,

the world he vaguely thought of as the world of Châteaubriand, of

Madame de Staël, even of the young Lamartine, had left its stamp of

harps and urns and torches, a stamp impressed on sundry small objects,

ornaments and relics. He had never before, to his knowledge, had

present to him relics, of any special dignity, of a private

order—little old miniatures, medallions, pictures, books; books in

leather bindings, pinkish and greenish, with gilt garlands on the back,

ranged, together with other promiscuous properties, under the glass of

brass-mounted cabinets. His attention took them all tenderly into

account. They were among the matters that marked Madame de Vionnet’s

apartment as something quite different from Miss Gostrey’s little

museum of bargains and from Chad’s lovely home; he recognised it as

founded much more on old accumulations that had possibly from time to

time shrunken than on any contemporary method of acquisition or form of

curiosity. Chad and Miss Gostrey had rummaged and purchased and picked

up and exchanged, sifting, selecting, comparing; whereas the mistress

of the scene before him, beautifully passive under the spell of

transmission—transmission from her father’s line, he quite made up his

mind—had only received, accepted and been quiet. When she hadn’t been

quiet she had been moved at the most to some occult charity for some

fallen fortune. There had been objects she or her predecessors might

even conceivably have parted with under need, but Strether couldn’t

suspect them of having sold old pieces to get “better” ones. They would

have felt no difference as to better or worse. He could but imagine

their having felt—perhaps in emigration, in proscription, for his

sketch was slight and confused—the pressure of want or the obligation

of sacrifice.

The pressure of want—whatever might be the case with the other

force—was, however, presumably not active now, for the tokens of a

chastened ease still abounded after all, many marks of a taste whose

discriminations might perhaps have been called eccentric. He guessed at

intense little preferences and sharp little exclusions, a deep

suspicion of the vulgar and a personal view of the right. The general

result of this was something for which he had no name on the spot quite

ready, but something he would have come nearest to naming in speaking

of it as the air of supreme respectability, the consciousness, small,

still, reserved, but none the less distinct and diffused, of private

honour. The air of supreme respectability—that was a strange blank wall

for his adventure to have brought him to break his nose against. It had

in fact, as he was now aware, filled all the approaches, hovered in the

court as he passed, hung on the staircase as he mounted, sounded in the

grave rumble of the old bell, as little electric as possible, of which

Chad, at the door, had pulled the ancient but neatly-kept tassel; it

formed in short the clearest medium of its particular kind that he had

ever breathed. He would have answered for it at the end of a quarter of

an hour that some of the glass cases contained swords and epaulettes of

ancient colonels and generals; medals and orders once pinned over

hearts that had long since ceased to beat; snuff-boxes bestowed on

ministers and envoys; copies of works presented, with inscriptions, by

authors now classic. At bottom of it all for him was the sense of her

rare unlikeness to the women he had known. This sense had grown, since

the day before, the more he recalled her, and had been above all

singularly fed by his talk with Chad in the morning. Everything in fine

made her immeasurably new, and nothing so new as the old house and the

old objects. There were books, two or three, on a small table near his

chair, but they hadn’t the lemon-coloured covers with which his eye had

begun to dally from the hour of his arrival and to the opportunity of a

further acquaintance with which he had for a fortnight now altogether

succumbed. On another table, across the room, he made out the great

_Revue_; but even that familiar face, conspicuous in Mrs. Newsome’s

parlours, scarce counted here as a modern note. He was sure on the

spot—and he afterwards knew he was right—that this was a touch of

Chad’s own hand. What would Mrs. Newsome say to the circumstance that

Chad’s interested “influence” kept her paper-knife in the _Revue_? The

interested influence at any rate had, as we say, gone straight to the

point—had in fact soon left it quite behind.

She was seated, near the fire, on a small stuffed and fringed chair one

of the few modern articles in the room, and she leaned back in it with

her hands clasped in her lap and no movement, in all her person, but

the fine prompt play of her deep young face. 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. “What can I do,” he finally asked, “but listen to you as I

promised Chadwick?”

“Ah but what I’m asking you,” she quickly said, “isn’t what Mr. Newsome

had in mind.” She spoke at present, he saw, as if to take courageously

_all_ her risk. “This is my own idea and a different thing.”

It gave poor Strether in truth—uneasy as it made him too—something of

the thrill of a bold perception justified. “Well,” he answered kindly

enough, “I was sure a moment since that some idea of your own had come

to you.”

She seemed still to look up at him, but now more serenely. “I made out

you were sure—and that helped it to come. So you see,” she continued,

“we do get on.”

“Oh but it appears to me I don’t at all meet your request. How can I

when I don’t understand it?”

“It isn’t at all necessary you should understand; it will do quite well

enough if you simply remember it. Only feel I trust you—and for nothing

so tremendous after all. Just,” she said with a wonderful smile, “for

common civility.”

Strether had a long pause while they sat again face to face, as they

had sat, scarce less conscious, before the poor lady had crossed the

stream. She was the poor lady for Strether now because clearly she had

some trouble, and her appeal to him could only mean that her trouble

was deep. He couldn’t help it; it wasn’t his fault; he had done

nothing; but by a turn of the hand she had somehow made their encounter

a relation. And the relation profited by a mass of things that were not

strictly in it or of it; by the very air in which they sat, by the high

cold delicate room, by the world outside and the little plash in the

court, by the First Empire and the relics in the stiff cabinets, by

matters as far off as those and by others as near as the unbroken clasp

of her hands in her lap and the look her expression had of being most

natural when her eyes were most fixed. “You count upon me of course for

something really much greater than it sounds.”

“Oh it sounds great enough too!” she laughed at this.

He found himself in time on the point of telling her that she was, as

Miss Barrace called it, wonderful; but, catching himself up, he said

something else instead. “What was it Chad’s idea then that you should

say to me?”

“Ah his idea was simply what a man’s idea always is—to put every effort

off on the woman.”

“The ‘woman’—?” Strether slowly echoed.

“The woman he likes—and just in proportion as he likes her. In

proportion too—for shifting the trouble—as she likes _him_.”

Strether followed it; then with an abruptness of his own: “How much do

you like Chad?”

“Just as much as _that_—to take all, with you, on myself.” But she got

at once again away from this. “I’ve been trembling as if we were to

stand or fall by what you may think of me; and I’m even now,” she went

on wonderfully, “drawing a long breath—and, yes, truly taking a great

courage—from the hope that I don’t in fact strike you as impossible.”

“That’s at all events, clearly,” he observed after an instant, “the way

I don’t strike _you_.”

“Well,” she so far assented, “as you haven’t yet said you _won’t_ have

the little patience with me I ask for—”

“You draw splendid conclusions? Perfectly. But I don’t understand

them,” Strether pursued. “You seem to me to ask for much more than you

need. What, at the worst for you, what at the best for myself, can I

after all do? I can use no pressure that I haven’t used. You come

really late with your request. I’ve already done all that for myself

the case admits of. I’ve said my say, and here I am.”

“Yes, here you are, fortunately!” Madame de Vionnet laughed. “Mrs.

Newsome,” she added in another tone, “didn’t think you can do so

little.”

He had an hesitation, but he brought the words out. “Well, she thinks

so now.”

“Do you mean by that—?” But she also hung fire.

“Do I mean what?”

She still rather faltered. “Pardon me if I touch on it, but if I’m

saying extraordinary things, why, perhaps, mayn’t I? Besides, doesn’t

it properly concern us to know?”

“To know what?” he insisted as after thus beating about the bush she

had again dropped.

She made the effort. “Has she given you up?”

He was amazed afterwards to think how simply and quietly he had met it.

“Not yet.” It was almost as if he were a trifle disappointed—had

expected still more of her freedom. But he went straight on. “Is that

what Chad has told you will happen to me?”

She was evidently charmed with the way he took it. “If you mean if

we’ve talked of it—most certainly. And the question’s not what has had

least to do with my wishing to see you.”

“To judge if I’m the sort of man a woman _can_—?”

“Precisely,” she exclaimed—“you wonderful gentleman! I do judge—I

_have_ judged. A woman can’t. You’re safe—with every right to be. You’d

be much happier if you’d only believe it.”

Strether was silent a little; then he found himself speaking with a

cynicism of confidence of which even at the moment the sources were

strange to him. “I try to believe it. But it’s a marvel,” he exclaimed,

“how _you_ already get at it!”

Oh she was able to say. “Remember how much I was on the way to it

through Mr. Newsome—before I saw you. He thinks everything of your

strength.”

“Well, I can bear almost anything!” our friend briskly interrupted.

Deep and beautiful on this her smile came back, and with the effect of

making him hear what he had said just as she had heard it. He easily

enough felt that it gave him away, but what in truth had everything

done but that? It had been all very well to think at moments that he

was holding her nose down and that he had coerced her: what had he by

this time done but let her practically see that he accepted their

relation? What was their relation moreover—though light and brief

enough in form as yet—but whatever she might choose to make it? Nothing

could prevent her—certainly he couldn’t—from making it pleasant. At the

back of his head, behind everything, was the sense that she was—there,

before him, close to him, in vivid imperative form—one of the rare

women he had so often heard of, read of, thought of, but never met,

whose very presence, look, voice, the mere contemporaneous _fact_ of

whom, from the moment it was at all presented, made a relation of mere

recognition. That was not the kind of woman he had ever found Mrs.

Newsome, a contemporaneous fact who had been distinctly slow to

establish herself; and at present, confronted with Madame de Vionnet,

he felt the simplicity of his original impression of Miss Gostrey. She

certainly had been a fact of rapid growth; but the world was wide, each

day was more and more a new lesson. There were at any rate even among

the stranger ones relations and relations. “Of course I suit Chad’s

grand way,” he quickly added. “He hasn’t had much difficulty in working

me in.”

She seemed to deny a little, on the young man’s behalf, by the rise of

her eyebrows, an intention of any process at all inconsiderate. “You

must know how grieved he’d be if you were to lose anything. He believes

you can keep his mother patient.”

Strether wondered with his eyes on her. “I see. _That’s_ then what you

really want of me. And how am I to do it? Perhaps you’ll tell me that.”

“Simply tell her the truth.”

“And what do you call the truth?”

“Well, _any_ truth—about us all—that you see yourself. I leave it to

you.”

“Thank you very much. I like,” Strether laughed with a slight

harshness, “the way you leave things!”

But she insisted kindly, gently, as if it wasn’t so bad. “Be perfectly

honest. Tell her all.”

“All?” he oddly echoed.

“Tell her the simple truth,” Madame de Vionnet again pleaded.

“But what _is_ the simple truth? The simple truth is exactly what I’m

trying to discover.”

She looked about a while, but presently she came back to him. “Tell

her, fully and clearly, about _us_.”

Strether meanwhile had been staring. “You and your daughter?”

“Yes—little Jeanne and me. Tell her,” she just slightly quavered, “you

like us.”

“And what good will that do me? Or rather”—he caught himself up—“what

good will it do _you?_”

She looked graver. “None, you believe, really?”

Strether debated. “She didn’t send me out to ‘like’ you.”

“Oh,” she charmingly contended, “she sent you out to face the facts.”

He admitted after an instant that there was something in that. “But how

can I face them till I know what they are? Do you want him,” he then

braced himself to ask, “to marry your daughter?”

She gave a headshake as noble as it was prompt. “No—not that.”

“And he really doesn’t want to himself?”

She repeated the movement, but now with a strange light in her face.

“He likes her too much.”

Strether wondered. “To be willing to consider, you mean, the question

of taking her to America?”

“To be willing to do anything with her but be immensely kind and

nice—really tender of her. We watch over her, and you must help us. You

must see her again.”

Strether felt awkward. “Ah with pleasure—she’s so remarkably

attractive.”

The mother’s eagerness with which Madame de Vionnet jumped at this was

to come back to him later as beautiful in its grace. “The dear thing

_did_ please you?” Then as he met it with the largest “Oh!” of

enthusiasm: “She’s perfect. She’s my joy.”

“Well, I’m sure that—if one were near her and saw more of her—she’d be

mine.”

“Then,” said Madame de Vionnet, “tell Mrs. Newsome that!”

He wondered the more. “What good will that do you?” As she appeared

unable at once to say, however, he brought out something else. “Is your

daughter in love with our friend?”

“Ah,” she rather startlingly answered, “I wish you’d find out!”

He showed his surprise. “I? A stranger?”

“Oh you won’t be a stranger—presently. You shall see her quite, I

assure you, as if you weren’t.”

It remained for him none the less an extraordinary notion. “It seems to

me surely that if her mother can’t—”

“Ah little girls and their mothers to-day!” she rather inconsequently

broke in. But she checked herself with something she seemed to give out

as after all more to the point. “Tell her I’ve been good for him. Don’t

you think I have?”

It had its effect on him—more than at the moment he quite measured. Yet

he was consciously enough touched. “Oh if it’s all _you_—!”

“Well, it may not be ‘all,’” she interrupted, “but it’s to a great

extent. Really and truly,” she added in a tone that was to take its

place with him among things remembered.

“Then it’s very wonderful.” He smiled at her from a face that he felt

as strained, and her own face for a moment kept him so. At last she

also got up. “Well, don’t you think that for that—”

“I ought to save you?” So it was that the way to meet her—and the way,

as well, in a manner, to get off—came over him. He heard himself use

the exorbitant word, the very sound of which helped to determine his

flight. “I’ll save you if I can.”

II

In Chad’s lovely home, however, one evening ten days later, he felt

himself present at the collapse of the question of Jeanne de Vionnet’s

shy secret. He had been dining there in the company of that young lady

and her mother, as well as of other persons, and he had gone into the

_petit salon_, at Chad’s request, on purpose to talk with her. The

young man had put this to him as a favour—“I should like so awfully to

know what you think of her. It will really be a chance for you,” he had

said, “to see the _jeune fille_—I mean the type—as she actually is, and

I don’t think that, as an observer of manners, it’s a thing you ought

to miss. It will be an impression that—whatever else you take—you can

carry home with you, where you’ll find again so much to compare it

with.”

Strether knew well enough with what Chad wished him to compare it, and

though he entirely assented he hadn’t yet somehow been so deeply

reminded that he was being, as he constantly though mutely expressed

it, used. He was as far as ever from making out exactly to what end;

but he was none the less constantly accompanied by a sense of the

service he rendered. He conceived only that this service was highly

agreeable to those who profited by it; and he was indeed still waiting

for the moment at which he should catch it in the act of proving

disagreeable, proving in some degree intolerable, to himself. He failed

quite to see how his situation could clear up at all logically except

by some turn of events that would give him the pretext of disgust. He

was building from day to day on the possibility of disgust, but each

day brought forth meanwhile a new and more engaging bend of the road.

That possibility was now ever so much further from sight than on the

eve of his arrival, and he perfectly felt that, should it come at all,

it would have to be at best inconsequent and violent. He struck himself

as a little nearer to it only when he asked himself what service, in

such a life of utility, he was after all rendering Mrs. Newsome. When

he wished to help himself to believe that he was still all right he

reflected—and in fact with wonder—on the unimpaired frequency of their

correspondence; in relation to which what was after all more natural

than that it should become more frequent just in proportion as their

problem became more complicated?

Certain it is at any rate that he now often brought himself balm by the

question, with the rich consciousness of yesterday’s letter, “Well,

what can I do more than that—what can I do more than tell her

everything?” To persuade himself that he did tell her, had told her,

everything, he used to try to think of particular things he hadn’t told

her. When at rare moments and in the watches of the night he pounced on

one it generally showed itself to be—to a deeper scrutiny—not quite

truly of the essence. When anything new struck him as coming up, or

anything already noted as reappearing, he always immediately wrote, as

if for fear that if he didn’t he would miss something; and also that he

might be able to say to himself from time to time “She knows it

_now_—even while I worry.” It was a great comfort to him in general not

to have left past things to be dragged to light and explained; not to

have to produce at so late a stage anything not produced, or anything

even veiled and attenuated, at the moment. She knew it now: that was

what he said to himself to-night in relation to the fresh fact of

Chad’s acquaintance with the two ladies—not to speak of the fresher one

of his own. Mrs. Newsome knew in other words that very night at

Woollett that he himself knew Madame de Vionnet and that he had

conscientiously been to see her; also that he had found her remarkably

attractive and that there would probably be a good deal more to tell.

But she further knew, or would know very soon, that, again

conscientiously, he hadn’t repeated his visit; and that when Chad had

asked him on the Countess’s behalf—Strether made her out vividly, with

a thought at the back of his head, a Countess—if he wouldn’t name a day

for dining with her, he had replied lucidly: “Thank you very

much—impossible.” He had begged the young man would present his excuses

and had trusted him to understand that it couldn’t really strike one as

quite the straight thing. He hadn’t reported to Mrs. Newsome that he

had promised to “save” Madame de Vionnet; but, so far as he was

concerned with that reminiscence, he hadn’t at any rate promised to

haunt her house. What Chad had understood could only, in truth, be

inferred from Chad’s behaviour, which had been in this connexion as

easy as in every other. He was easy, always, when he understood; he was

easier still, if possible, when he didn’t; he had replied that he would

make it all right; and he had proceeded to do this by substituting the

present occasion—as he was ready to substitute others—for any, for

every occasion as to which his old friend should have a funny scruple.

“Oh but I’m not a little foreign girl; I’m just as English as I can

be,” Jeanne de Vionnet had said to him as soon as, in the _petit

salon_, he sank, shyly enough on his own side, into the place near her

vacated by Madame Gloriani at his approach. Madame Gloriani, who was in

black velvet, with white lace and powdered hair, and whose somewhat

massive majesty melted, at any contact, into the graciousness of some

incomprehensible tongue, moved away to make room for the vague

gentleman, after benevolent greetings to him which embodied, as he

believed, in baffling accents, some recognition of his face from a

couple of Sundays before. Then he had remarked—making the most of the

advantage of his years—that it frightened him quite enough to find

himself dedicated to the entertainment of a little foreign girl. There

were girls he wasn’t afraid of—he was quite bold with little Americans.

Thus it was that she had defended herself to the end—“Oh but I’m almost

American too. That’s what mamma has wanted me to be—I mean _like_ that;

for she has wanted me to have lots of freedom. She has known such good

results from it.”

She was fairly beautiful to him—a faint pastel in an oval frame: he

thought of her already as of some lurking image in a long gallery, the

portrait of a small old-time princess of whom nothing was known but

that she had died young. Little Jeanne wasn’t, doubtless, to die young,

but one couldn’t, all the same, bear on her lightly enough. It was

bearing hard, it was bearing as _he_, in any case, wouldn’t bear, to

concern himself, in relation to her, with the question of a young man.

Odious really the question of a young man; one didn’t treat such a

person as a maid-servant suspected of a “follower.” And then young men,

young men—well, the thing was their business simply, or was at all

events hers. She was fluttered, fairly fevered—to the point of a little

glitter that came and went in her eyes and a pair of pink spots that

stayed in her cheeks—with the great adventure of dining out and with

the greater one still, possibly, of finding a gentleman whom she must

think of as very, very old, a gentleman with eye-glasses, wrinkles, a

long grizzled moustache. She spoke the prettiest English, our friend

thought, that he had ever heard spoken, just as he had believed her a

few minutes before to be speaking the prettiest French. He wondered

almost wistfully if such a sweep of the lyre didn’t react on the spirit

itself; and his fancy had in fact, before he knew it, begun so to stray

and embroider that he finally found himself, absent and extravagant,

sitting with the child in a friendly silence. Only by this time he felt

her flutter to have fortunately dropped and that she was more at her

ease. She trusted him, liked him, and it was to come back to him

afterwards that she had told him things. She had dipped into the

waiting medium at last and found neither surge nor chill—nothing but

the small splash she could herself make in the pleasant warmth, nothing

but the safety of dipping and dipping again. At the end of the ten

minutes he was to spend with her his impression—with all it had thrown

off and all it had taken in—was complete. She had been free, as she

knew freedom, partly to show him that, unlike other little persons she

knew, she had imbibed that ideal. She was delightfully quaint about

herself, but the vision of what she had imbibed was what most held him.

It really consisted, he was soon enough to feel, in just one great

little matter, the fact that, whatever her nature, she was

thoroughly—he had to cast about for the word, but it came—bred. He

couldn’t of course on so short an acquaintance speak for her nature,

but the idea of breeding was what she had meanwhile dropped into his

mind. He had never yet known it so sharply presented. Her mother gave

it, no doubt; but her mother, to make that less sensible, gave so much

else besides, and on neither of the two previous occasions,

extraordinary woman, Strether felt, anything like what she was giving

tonight. Little Jeanne was a case, an exquisite case of education;

whereas the Countess, whom it so amused him to think of by that

denomination, was a case, also exquisite, of—well, he didn’t know what.

“He has wonderful taste, _notre jeune homme_”: this was what Gloriani

said to him on turning away from the inspection of a small picture

suspended near the door of the room. The high celebrity in question had

just come in, apparently in search of Mademoiselle de Vionnet, but

while Strether had got up from beside her their fellow guest, with his

eye sharply caught, had paused for a long look. The thing was a

landscape, of no size, but of the French school, as our friend was glad

to feel he knew, and also of a quality—which he liked to think he

should also have guessed; its frame was large out of proportion to the

canvas, and he had never seen a person look at anything, he thought,

just as Gloriani, with his nose very near and quick movements of the

head from side to side and bottom to top, examined this feature of

Chad’s collection. The artist used that word the next moment smiling

courteously, wiping his nippers and looking round him further—paying

the place in short by the very manner of his presence and by something

Strether fancied he could make out in this particular glance, such a

tribute as, to the latter’s sense, settled many things once for all.

Strether was conscious at this instant, for that matter, as he hadn’t

yet been, of how, round about him, quite without him, they _were_

consistently settled. Gloriani’s smile, deeply Italian, he considered,

and finely inscrutable, had had for him, during dinner, at which they

were not neighbours, an indefinite greeting; but the quality in it was

gone that had appeared on the other occasion to turn him inside out; it

was as if even the momentary link supplied by the doubt between them

had snapped. He was conscious now of the final reality, which was that

there wasn’t so much a doubt as a difference altogether; all the more

that over the difference the famous sculptor seemed to signal almost

condolingly, yet oh how vacantly! as across some great flat sheet of

water. He threw out the bridge of a charming hollow civility on which

Strether wouldn’t have trusted his own full weight a moment. That idea,

even though but transient and perhaps belated, had performed the office

of putting Strether more at his ease, and the blurred picture had

already dropped—dropped with the sound of something else said and with

his becoming aware, by another quick turn, that Gloriani was now on the

sofa talking with Jeanne, while he himself had in his ears again the

familiar friendliness and the elusive meaning of the “Oh, oh, oh!” that

had made him, a fortnight before, challenge Miss Barrace in vain. She

had always the air, this picturesque and original lady, who struck him,

so oddly, as both antique and modern—she had always the air of taking

up some joke that one had already had out with her. The point itself,

no doubt, was what was antique, and the use she made of it what was

modern. He felt just now that her good-natured irony did bear on

something, and it troubled him a little that she wouldn’t be more

explicit only assuring him, with the pleasure of observation so visible

in her, that she wouldn’t tell him more for the world. He could take

refuge but in asking her what she had done with Waymarsh, though it

must be added that he felt himself a little on the way to a clue after

she had answered that this personage was, in the other room, engaged in

conversation with Madame de Vionnet. He stared a moment at the image of

such a conjunction; then, for Miss Barrace’s benefit, he wondered. “Is

she too then under the charm—?”

“No, not a bit”—Miss Barrace was prompt. “She makes nothing of him.

She’s bored. She won’t help you with him.”

“Oh,” Strether laughed, “she can’t do everything.

“Of course not—wonderful as she is. Besides, he makes nothing of _her_.

She won’t take him from me—though she wouldn’t, no doubt, having other

affairs in hand, even if she could. I’ve never,” said Miss Barrace,

“seen her fail with any one before. And to-night, when she’s so

magnificent, it would seem to her strange—if she minded. So at any rate

I have him all. _Je suis tranquille!_”

Strether understood, so far as that went; but he was feeling for his

clue. “She strikes you to-night as particularly magnificent?”

“Surely. Almost as I’ve never seen her. Doesn’t she you? Why it’s _for_

you.”

He persisted in his candour. “‘For’ me—?”

“Oh, oh, oh!” cried Miss Barrace, who persisted in the opposite of that

quality.

“Well,” he acutely admitted, “she _is_ different. She’s gay.”

“She’s gay!” Miss Barrace laughed. “And she has beautiful

shoulders—though there’s nothing different in that.”

“No,” said Strether, “one was sure of her shoulders. It isn’t her

shoulders.”

His companion, with renewed mirth and the finest sense, between the

puffs of her cigarette, of the drollery of things, appeared to find

their conversation highly delightful. “Yes, it isn’t her shoulders.”

“What then is it?” Strether earnestly enquired.

“Why, it’s _she_—simply. It’s her mood. It’s her charm.”

“Of course it’s her charm, but we’re speaking of the difference.”

“Well,” Miss Barrace explained, “she’s just brilliant, as we used to

say. That’s all. She’s various. She’s fifty women.”

“Ah but only one”—Strether kept it clear—“at a time.”

“Perhaps. But in fifty times—!”

“Oh we shan’t come to that,” our friend declared; and the next moment

he had moved in another direction. “Will you answer me a plain

question? Will she ever divorce?”

Miss Barrace looked at him through all her tortoise-shell. “Why should

she?”

It wasn’t what he had asked for, he signified; but he met it well

enough. “To marry Chad.”

“Why should she marry Chad?”

“Because I’m convinced she’s very fond of him. She has done wonders for

him.”

“Well then, how could she do more? Marrying a man, or woman either,”

Miss Barrace sagely went on, “is never the wonder for any Jack and Jill

can bring _that_ off. The wonder is their doing such things without

marrying.”

Strether considered a moment this proposition. “You mean it’s so

beautiful for our friends simply to go on so?”

But whatever he said made her laugh. “Beautiful.”

He nevertheless insisted. “And _that_ because it’s disinterested?”

She was now, however, suddenly tired of the question. “Yes then—call it

that. Besides, she’ll never divorce. Don’t, moreover,” she added,

“believe everything you hear about her husband.”

“He’s not then,” Strether asked, “a wretch?”

“Oh yes. But charming.”

“Do you know him?”

“I’ve met him. He’s _bien aimable_.”

“To every one but his wife?”

“Oh for all I know, to her too—to any, to every woman. I hope you at

any rate,” she pursued with a quick change, “appreciate the care I take

of Mr. Waymarsh.”

“Oh immensely.” But Strether was not yet in line. “At all events,” he

roundly brought out, “the attachment’s an innocent one.”

“Mine and his? Ah,” she laughed, “don’t rob it of _all_ interest!”

“I mean our friend’s here—to the lady we’ve been speaking of.” That was

what he had settled to as an indirect but none the less closely

involved consequence of his impression of Jeanne. That was where he

meant to stay. “It’s innocent,” he repeated—“I see the whole thing.”

Mystified by his abrupt declaration, she had glanced over at Gloriani

as at the unnamed subject of his allusion, but the next moment she had

understood; though indeed not before Strether had noticed her momentary

mistake and wondered what might possibly be behind that too. He already

knew that the sculptor admired Madame de Vionnet; but did this

admiration also represent an attachment of which the innocence was

discussable? He was moving verily in a strange air and on ground not of

the firmest. He looked hard for an instant at Miss Barrace, but she had

already gone on. “All right with Mr. Newsome? Why of course she

is!”—and she got gaily back to the question of her own good friend. “I

dare say you’re surprised that I’m not worn out with all I see—it being

so much!—of Sitting Bull. But I’m not, you know—I don’t mind him; I

bear up, and we get on beautifully. I’m very strange; I’m like that;

and often I can’t explain. There are people who are supposed

interesting or remarkable or whatever, and who bore me to death; and

then there are others as to whom nobody can understand what anybody

sees in them—in whom I see no end of things.” Then after she had smoked

a moment, “He’s touching, you know,” she said.

“‘Know’?” Strether echoed—“don’t I, indeed? We must move you almost to

tears.”

“Oh but I don’t mean _you!_” she laughed.

“You ought to then, for the worst sign of all—as I must have it for

you—is that you can’t help me. That’s when a woman pities.”

“Ah but I do help you!” she cheerfully insisted.

Again he looked at her hard, and then after a pause: “No you don’t!”

Her tortoise-shell, on its long chain, rattled down. “I help you with

Sitting Bull. That’s a good deal.”

“Oh that, yes.” But Strether hesitated. “Do you mean he talks of me?”

“So that I have to defend you? No, never.’

“I see,” Strether mused. “It’s too deep.”

“That’s his only fault,” she returned—“that everything, with him, is

too deep. He has depths of silence—which he breaks only at the longest

intervals by a remark. And when the remark comes it’s always something

he has seen or felt for himself—never a bit banal. _That_ would be what

one might have feared and what would kill me. But never.” She smoked

again as she thus, with amused complacency, appreciated her

acquisition. “And never about you. We keep clear of you. We’re

wonderful. But I’ll tell you what he does do,” she continued: “he tries

to make me presents.”

“Presents?” poor Strether echoed, conscious with a pang that _he_

hadn’t yet tried that in any quarter.

“Why you see,” she explained, “he’s as fine as ever in the victoria; so

that when I leave him, as I often do almost for hours—he likes it so—at

the doors of shops, the sight of him there helps me, when I come out,

to know my carriage away off in the rank. But sometimes, for a change,

he goes with me into the shops, and then I’ve all I can do to prevent

his buying me things.”

“He wants to ‘treat’ you?” Strether almost gasped at all he himself

hadn’t thought of. He had a sense of admiration. “Oh he’s much more in

the real tradition than I. Yes,” he mused, “it’s the sacred rage.”

“The sacred rage, exactly!”—and Miss Barrace, who hadn’t before heard

this term applied, recognised its bearing with a clap of her gemmed

hands. “Now I do know why he’s not banal. But I do prevent him all the

same—and if you saw what he sometimes selects—from buying. I save him

hundreds and hundreds. I only take flowers.”

“Flowers?” Strether echoed again with a rueful reflexion. How many

nosegays had her present converser sent?

“Innocent flowers,” she pursued, “as much as he likes. And he sends me

splendours; he knows all the best places—he has found them for himself;

he’s wonderful.”

“He hasn’t told them to _me_,” her friend smiled, “he has a life of his

own.” But Strether had swung back to the consciousness that for himself

after all it never would have done. Waymarsh hadn’t Mrs. Waymarsh in

the least to consider, whereas Lambert Strether had constantly, in the

inmost honour of his thoughts, to consider Mrs. Newsome. He liked

moreover to feel how much his friend was in the real tradition. Yet he

had his conclusion. “_What_ a rage it is!” He had worked it out. “It’s

an opposition.”

She followed, but at a distance. “That’s what I feel. Yet to what?”

“Well, he thinks, you know, that _I’ve_ a life of my own. And I

haven’t!”

“You haven’t?” She showed doubt, and her laugh confirmed it. “Oh, oh,

oh!”

“No—not for myself. I seem to have a life only for other people.”

“Ah for them and _with_ them! Just now for instance with—”

“Well, with whom?” he asked before she had had time to say.

His tone had the effect of making her hesitate and even, as he guessed,

speak with a difference. “Say with Miss Gostrey. What do you do for

_her?_” It really made him wonder. “Nothing at all!”

III

Madame de Vionnet, having meanwhile come in, was at present close to

them, and Miss Barrace hereupon, instead of risking a rejoinder, became

again with a look that measured her from top to toe all mere

long-handled appreciative tortoise-shell. She had struck our friend,

from the first of her appearing, as dressed for a great occasion, and

she met still more than on either of the others the conception

reawakened in him at their garden-party, the idea of the _femme du

monde_ in her habit as she lived. Her bare shoulders and arms were

white and beautiful; the materials of her dress, a mixture, as he

supposed, of silk and crape, were of a silvery grey so artfully

composed as to give an impression of warm splendour; and round her neck

she wore a collar of large old emeralds, the green note of which was

more dimly repeated, at other points of her apparel, in embroidery, in

enamel, in satin, in substances and textures vaguely rich. Her head,

extremely fair and exquisitely festal, was like a happy fancy, a notion

of the antique, on an old precious medal, some silver coin of the

Renaissance; while her slim lightness and brightness, her gaiety, her

expression, her decision, contributed to an effect that might have been

felt by a poet as half mythological and half conventional. He could

have compared her to a goddess still partly engaged in a morning cloud,

or to a sea-nymph waist-high in the summer surge. Above all she

suggested to him the reflexion that the _femme du monde_—in these

finest developments of the type—was, like Cleopatra in the play, indeed

various and multifold. She had aspects, characters, days, nights—or had

them at least, showed them by a mysterious law of her own, when in

addition to everything she happened also to be a woman of genius. She

was an obscure person, a muffled person one day, and a showy person, an

uncovered person the next. He thought of Madame de Vionnet to-night as

showy and uncovered, though he felt the formula rough, because, thanks

to one of the short-cuts of genius she had taken all his categories by

surprise. Twice during dinner he had met Chad’s eyes in a longish look;

but these communications had in truth only stirred up again old

ambiguities—so little was it clear from them whether they were an

appeal or an admonition. “You see how I’m fixed,” was what they

appeared to convey; yet how he was fixed was exactly what Strether

didn’t see. However, perhaps he should see now.

“Are you capable of the very great kindness of going to relieve

Newsome, for a few minutes, of the rather crushing responsibility of

Madame Gloriani, while I say a word, if he’ll allow me, to Mr.

Strether, of whom I’ve a question to ask? Our host ought to talk a bit

to those other ladies, and I’ll come back in a minute to your rescue.”

She made this proposal to Miss Barrace as if her consciousness of a

special duty had just flickered-up, but that lady’s recognition of

Strether’s little start at it—as at a betrayal on the speaker’s part of

a domesticated state—was as mute as his own comment; and after an

instant, when their fellow guest had good-naturedly left them, he had

been given something else to think of. “Why has Maria so suddenly gone?

Do you know?” That was the question Madame de Vionnet had brought with

her.

“I’m afraid I’ve no reason to give you but the simple reason I’ve had

from her in a note—the sudden obligation to join in the south a sick

friend who has got worse.”

“Ah then she has been writing you?”

“Not since she went—I had only a brief explanatory word before she

started. I went to see her,” Strether explained—“it was the day after I

called on you—but she was already on her way, and her concierge told me

that in case of my coming I was to be informed she had written to me. I

found her note when I got home.”

Madame de Vionnet listened with interest and with her eyes on

Strether’s face; then her delicately decorated head had a small

melancholy motion. “She didn’t write to _me_. I went to see her,” she

added, “almost immediately after I had seen you, and as I assured her I

would do when I met her at Gloriani’s. She hadn’t then told me she was

to be absent, and I felt at her door as if I understood. She’s

absent—with all respect to her sick friend, though I know indeed she

has plenty—so that I may not see her. She doesn’t want to meet me

again. Well,” she continued with a beautiful conscious mildness, “I

liked and admired her beyond every one in the old time, and she knew

it—perhaps that’s precisely what has made her go—and I dare say I

haven’t lost her for ever.” Strether still said nothing; he had a

horror, as he now thought of himself, of being in question between

women—was in fact already quite enough on his way to that, and there

was moreover, as it came to him, perceptibly, something behind these

allusions and professions that, should he take it in, would square but

ill with his present resolve to simplify. It was as if, for him, all

the same, her softness and sadness were sincere. He felt that not less

when she soon went on: “I’m extremely glad of her happiness.” But it

also left him mute—sharp and fine though the imputation it conveyed.

What it conveyed was that _he_ was Maria Gostrey’s happiness, and for

the least little instant he had the impulse to challenge the thought.

He could have done so however only by saying “What then do you suppose

to be between us?” and he was wonderfully glad a moment later not to

have spoken. He would rather seem stupid any day than fatuous, and he

drew back as well, with a smothered inward shudder, from the

consideration of what women—of highly-developed type in

particular—might think of each other. Whatever he had come out for he

hadn’t come to go into that; so that he absolutely took up nothing his

interlocutress had now let drop. Yet, though he had kept away from her

for days, had laid wholly on herself the burden of their meeting again,

she hadn’t a gleam of irritation to show him. “Well, about Jeanne now?”

she smiled—it had the gaiety with which she had originally come in. He

felt it on the instant to represent her motive and real errand. But he

had been schooling her of a truth to say much in proportion to his

little. “_Do_ you make out that she has a sentiment? I mean for Mr.

Newsome.”

Almost resentful, Strether could at last be prompt. “How can I make out

such things?”

She remained perfectly good-natured. “Ah but they’re beautiful little

things, and you make out—don’t pretend—everything in the world. Haven’t

you,” she asked, “been talking with her?”

“Yes, but not about Chad. At least not much.”

“Oh you don’t require ‘much’!” she reassuringly declared. But she

immediately changed her ground. “I hope you remember your promise of

the other day.”

“To ‘save’ you, as you called it?”

“I call it so still. You _will?_” she insisted. “You haven’t repented?”

He wondered. “No—but I’ve been thinking what I meant.”

She kept it up. “And not, a little, what _I_ did?”

“No—that’s not necessary. It will be enough if I know what I meant

myself.”

“And don’t you know,” she asked, “by this time?”

Again he had a pause. “I think you ought to leave it to me. But how

long,” he added, “do you give me?”

“It seems to me much more a question of how long you give _me_. Doesn’t

our friend here himself, at any rate,” she went on, “perpetually make

me present to you?”

“Not,” Strether replied, “by ever speaking of you to me.”

“He never does that?”

“Never.”

She considered, and, if the fact was disconcerting to her, effectually

concealed it. The next minute indeed she had recovered. “No, he

wouldn’t. But do you _need_ that?”

Her emphasis was wonderful, and though his eyes had been wandering he

looked at her longer now. “I see what you mean.”

“Of course you see what I mean.”

Her triumph was gentle, and she really had tones to make justice weep.

“I’ve before me what he owes you.”

“Admit then that that’s something,” she said, yet still with the same

discretion in her pride.

He took in this note but went straight on. “You’ve made of him what I

see, but what I don’t see is how in the world you’ve done it.”

“Ah that’s another question!” she smiled. “The point is of what use is

your declining to know me when to know Mr. Newsome—as you do me the

honour to find him—_is_ just to know me.”

“I see,” he mused, still with his eyes on her. “I shouldn’t have met

you to-night.”

She raised and dropped her linked hands. “It doesn’t matter. If I trust

you why can’t you a little trust me too? And why can’t you also,” she

asked in another tone, “trust yourself?” But she gave him no time to

reply. “Oh I shall be so easy for you! And I’m glad at any rate you’ve

seen my child.”

“I’m glad too,” he said; “but she does you no good.”

“No good?”—Madame de Vionnet had a clear stare. “Why she’s an angel of

light.”

“That’s precisely the reason. Leave her alone. Don’t try to find out. I

mean,” he explained, “about what you spoke to me of—the way she feels.”

His companion wondered. “Because one really won’t?”

“Well, because I ask you, as a favour to myself, not to. She’s the most

charming creature I’ve ever seen. Therefore don’t touch her. Don’t

know—don’t want to know. And moreover—yes—you _won’t_.”

It was an appeal, of a sudden, and she took it in. “As a favour to

you?”

“Well—since you ask me.”

“Anything, everything you ask,” she smiled. “I shan’t know then—never.

Thank you,” she added with peculiar gentleness as she turned away.

The sound of it lingered with him, making him fairly feel as if he had

been tripped up and had a fall. In the very act of arranging with her

for his independence he had, under pressure from a particular

perception, inconsistently, quite stupidly, committed himself, and,

with her subtlety sensitive on the spot to an advantage, she had driven

in by a single word a little golden nail, the sharp intention of which

he signally felt. He hadn’t detached, he had more closely connected

himself, and his eyes, as he considered with some intensity this

circumstance, met another pair which had just come within their range

and which struck him as reflecting his sense of what he had done. He

recognised them at the same moment as those of little Bilham, who had

apparently drawn near on purpose to speak to him, and little Bilham

wasn’t, in the conditions, the person to whom his heart would be most

closed. They were seated together a minute later at the angle of the

room obliquely opposite the corner in which Gloriani was still engaged

with Jeanne de Vionnet, to whom at first and in silence their attention

had been benevolently given. “I can’t see for my life,” Strether had

then observed, “how a young fellow of any spirit—such a one as you for

instance—can be admitted to the sight of that young lady without being

hard hit. Why don’t you go in, little Bilham?” He remembered the tone

into which he had been betrayed on the garden-bench at the sculptor’s

reception, and this might make up for that by being much more the right

sort of thing to say to a young man worthy of any advice at all. “There

_would_ be some reason.”

“Some reason for what?”

“Why for hanging on here.”

“To offer my hand and fortune to Mademoiselle de Vionnet?”

“Well,” Strether asked, “to what lovelier apparition _could_ you offer

them? She’s the sweetest little thing I’ve ever seen.”

“She’s certainly immense. I mean she’s the real thing. I believe the

pale pink petals are folded up there for some wondrous efflorescence in

time; to open, that is, to some great golden sun. _I’m_ unfortunately

but a small farthing candle. What chance in such a field for a poor

little painter-man?”

“Oh you’re good enough,” Strether threw out.

“Certainly I’m good enough. We’re good enough, I consider, _nous

autres_, for anything. But she’s _too_ good. There’s the difference.

They wouldn’t look at me.”

Strether, lounging on his divan and still charmed by the young girl,

whose eyes had consciously strayed to him, he fancied, with a vague

smile—Strether, enjoying the whole occasion as with dormant pulses at

last awake and in spite of new material thrust upon him, thought over

his companion’s words. “Whom do you mean by ‘they’? She and her

mother?”

“She and her mother. And she has a father too, who, whatever else he

may be, certainly can’t be indifferent to the possibilities she

represents. Besides, there’s Chad.”

Strether was silent a little. “Ah but he doesn’t care for her—not, I

mean, it appears, after all, in the sense I’m speaking of. He’s _not_

in love with her.”

“No—but he’s her best friend; after her mother. He’s very fond of her.

He has his ideas about what can be done for her.”

“Well, it’s very strange!” Strether presently remarked with a sighing

sense of fulness.

“Very strange indeed. That’s just the beauty of it. Isn’t it very much

the kind of beauty you had in mind,” little Bilham went on, “when you

were so wonderful and so inspiring to me the other day? Didn’t you

adjure me, in accents I shall never forget, to see, while I’ve a

chance, everything I can?—and _really_ to see, for it must have been

that only you meant. Well, you did me no end of good, and I’m doing my

best. I _do_ make it out a situation.”

“So do I!” Strether went on after a moment. But he had the next minute

an inconsequent question. “How comes Chad so mixed up, anyway?”

“Ah, ah, ah!”—and little Bilham fell back on his cushions.

It reminded our friend of Miss Barrace, and he felt again the brush of

his sense of moving in a maze of mystic closed allusions. Yet he kept

hold of his thread. “Of course I understand really; only the general

transformation makes me occasionally gasp. Chad with such a voice in

the settlement of the future of a little countess—no,” he declared, “it

takes more time! You say moreover,” he resumed, “that we’re inevitably,

people like you and me, out of the running. The curious fact remains

that Chad himself isn’t. The situation doesn’t make for it, but in a

different one he could have her if he would.”

“Yes, but that’s only because he’s rich and because there’s a

possibility of his being richer. They won’t think of anything but a

great name or a great fortune.”

“Well,” said Strether, “he’ll have no great fortune on _these_ lines.

He must stir his stumps.”

“Is that,” little Bilham enquired, “what you were saying to Madame de

Vionnet?”

“No—I don’t say much to her. Of course, however,” Strether continued,

“he can make sacrifices if he likes.”

Little Bilham had a pause. “Oh he’s not keen for sacrifices; or thinks,

that is, possibly, that he has made enough.”

“Well, it _is_ virtuous,” his companion observed with some decision.

“That’s exactly,” the young man dropped after a moment, “what I mean.”

It kept Strether himself silent a little. “I’ve made it out for

myself,” he then went on; “I’ve really, within the last half-hour, got

hold of it. I understand it in short at last; which at first—when you

originally spoke to me—I didn’t. Nor when Chad originally spoke to me

either.”

“Oh,” said little Bilham, “I don’t think that at that time you believed

me.”

“Yes—I did; and I believed Chad too. It would have been odious and

unmannerly—as well as quite perverse—if I hadn’t. What interest have

you in deceiving me?”

The young man cast about. “What interest have I?”

“Yes. Chad _might_ have. But you?”

“Ah, ah, ah!” little Bilham exclaimed.

It might, on repetition, as a mystification, have irritated our friend

a little, but he knew, once more, as we have seen, where he was, and

his being proof against everything was only another attestation that he

meant to stay there. “I couldn’t, without my own impression, realise.

She’s a tremendously clever brilliant capable woman, and with an

extraordinary charm on top of it all—the charm we surely all of us this

evening know what to think of. It isn’t every clever brilliant capable

woman that has it. In fact it’s rare with any woman. So there you are,”

Strether proceeded as if not for little Bilham’s benefit alone. “I

understand what a relation with such a woman—what such a high fine

friendship—may be. It can’t be vulgar or coarse, anyway—and that’s the

point.”

“Yes, that’s the point,” said little Bilham. “It can’t be vulgar or

coarse. And, bless us and save us, it _isn’t!_ It’s, upon my word, the

very finest thing I ever saw in my life, and the most distinguished.”

Strether, from beside him and leaning back with him as he leaned,

dropped on him a momentary look which filled a short interval and of

which he took no notice. He only gazed before him with intent

participation. “Of course what it has done for him,” Strether at all

events presently pursued, “of course what it has done for him—that is

as to _how_ it has so wonderfully worked—isn’t a thing I pretend to

understand. I’ve to take it as I find it. There he is.”

“There he is!” little Bilham echoed. “And it’s really and truly she. I

don’t understand either, even with my longer and closer opportunity.

But I’m like you,” he added; “I can admire and rejoice even when I’m a

little in the dark. You see I’ve watched it for some three years, and

especially for this last. He wasn’t so bad before it as I seem to have

made out that you think—”

“Oh I don’t think anything now!” Strether impatiently broke in: “that

is but what I _do_ think! I mean that originally, for her to have cared

for him—”

“There must have been stuff in him? Oh yes, there was stuff indeed, and

much more of it than ever showed, I dare say, at home. Still, you

know,” the young man in all fairness developed, “there was room for

her, and that’s where she came in. She saw her chance and took it.

That’s what strikes me as having been so fine. But of course,” he wound

up, “he liked her first.”

“Naturally,” said Strether.

“I mean that they first met somehow and somewhere—I believe in some

American house—and she, without in the least then intending it, made

her impression. Then with time and opportunity he made his; and after

_that_ she was as bad as he.”

Strether vaguely took it up. “As ‘bad’?”

“She began, that is, to care—to care very much. Alone, and in her

horrid position, she found it, when once she had started, an interest.

It was, it is, an interest, and it did—it continues to do—a lot for

herself as well. So she still cares. She cares in fact,” said little

Bilham thoughtfully “more.”

Strether’s theory that it was none of his business was somehow not

damaged by the way he took this. “More, you mean, than he?” On which

his companion looked round at him, and now for an instant their eyes

met. “More than he?” he repeated.

Little Bilham, for as long, hung fire. “Will you never tell any one?”

Strether thought. “Whom should I tell?”

“Why I supposed you reported regularly—”

“To people at home?”—Strether took him up. “Well, I won’t tell them

this.”

The young man at last looked away. “Then she does now care more than

he.”

“Oh!” Strether oddly exclaimed.

But his companion immediately met it. “Haven’t you after all had your

impression of it? That’s how you’ve got hold of him.”

“Ah but I haven’t got hold of him!”

“Oh I say!” But it was all little Bilham said.

“It’s at any rate none of my business. I mean,” Strether explained,

“nothing else than getting hold of him is.” It appeared, however, to

strike him as his business to add: “The fact remains nevertheless that

she has saved him.”

Little Bilham just waited. “I thought that was what _you_ were to do.”

But Strether had his answer ready. “I’m speaking—in connexion with

her—of his manners and morals, his character and life. I’m speaking of

him as a person to deal with and talk with and live with—speaking of

him as a social animal.”

“And isn’t it as a social animal that you also want him?”

“Certainly; so that it’s as if she had saved him _for_ us.”

“It strikes you accordingly then,” the young man threw out, “as for you

all to save _her?_”

“Oh for us ‘all’—!” Strether could but laugh at that. It brought him

back, however, to the point he had really wished to make. “They’ve

accepted their situation—hard as it is. They’re not free—at least she’s

not; but they take what’s left to them. It’s a friendship, of a

beautiful sort; and that’s what makes them so strong. They’re straight,

they feel; and they keep each other up. It’s doubtless she, however,

who, as you yourself have hinted, feels it most.”

Little Bilham appeared to wonder what he had hinted. “Feels most that

they’re straight?”

“Well, feels that _she_ is, and the strength that comes from it. She

keeps _him_ up—she keeps the whole thing up. When people are able to

it’s fine. She’s wonderful, wonderful, as Miss Barrace says; and he is,

in his way, too; however, as a mere man, he may sometimes rebel and not

feel that he finds his account in it. She has simply given him an

immense moral lift, and what that can explain is prodigious. That’s why

I speak of it as a situation. It _is_ one, if there ever was.” And

Strether, with his head back and his eyes on the ceiling, seemed to

lose himself in the vision of it.

His companion attended deeply. “You state it much better than I could.”

“Oh you see it doesn’t concern you.”

Little Bilham considered. “I thought you said just now that it doesn’t

concern you either.”

“Well, it doesn’t a bit as Madame de Vionnet’s affair. But as we were

again saying just now, what did I come out for but to save him?”

“Yes—to remove him.”

“To save him _by_ removal; to win him over to _himself_ thinking it

best he shall take up business—thinking he must immediately do

therefore what’s necessary to that end.”

“Well,” said little Bilham after a moment, “you _have_ won him over. He

does think it best. He has within a day or two again said to me as

much.”

“And that,” Strether asked, “is why you consider that he cares less

than she?”

“Cares less for her than she for him? Yes, that’s one of the reasons.

But other things too have given me the impression. A man, don’t you

think?” little Bilham presently pursued, “_Can’t_, in such conditions,

care so much as a woman. It takes different conditions to make him, and

then perhaps he cares more. Chad,” he wound up, “has his possible

future before him.”

“Are you speaking of his business future?”

“No—on the contrary; of the other, the future of what you so justly

call their situation. M. de Vionnet may live for ever.”

“So that they can’t marry?”

The young man waited a moment. “Not being able to marry is all they’ve

with any confidence to look forward to. A woman—a particular woman—may

stand that strain. But can a man?” he propounded.

Strether’s answer was as prompt as if he had already, for himself,

worked it out. “Not without a very high ideal of conduct. But that’s

just what we’re attributing to Chad. And how, for that matter,” he

mused, “does his going to America diminish the particular strain?

Wouldn’t it seem rather to add to it?”

“Out of sight out of mind!” his companion laughed. Then more bravely:

“Wouldn’t distance lessen the torment?” But before Strether could

reply, “The thing is, you see, Chad ought to marry!” he wound up.

Strether, for a little, appeared to think of it. “If you talk of

torments you don’t diminish mine!” he then broke out. The next moment

he was on his feet with a question. “He ought to marry whom?”

Little Bilham rose more slowly. “Well, some one he _can_—some

thoroughly nice girl.”

Strether’s eyes, as they stood together, turned again to Jeanne. “Do

you mean _her?_”

His friend made a sudden strange face. “After being in love with her

mother? No.”

“But isn’t it exactly your idea that he _isn’t_ in love with her

mother?”

His friend once more had a pause. “Well, he isn’t at any rate in love

with Jeanne.”

“I dare say not.”

“How _can_ he be with any other woman?”

“Oh that I admit. But being in love isn’t, you know, here”—little

Bilham spoke in friendly reminder—“thought necessary, in strictness,

for marriage.”

“And what torment—to call a torment—can there ever possibly be with a

woman like that?” As if from the interest of his own question Strether

had gone on without hearing. “Is it for her to have turned a man out so

wonderfully, too, only for somebody else?” He appeared to make a point

of this, and little Bilham looked at him now. “When it’s for each other

that people give things up they don’t miss them.” Then he threw off as

with an extravagance of which he was conscious: “Let them face the

future together!”

Little Bilham looked at him indeed. “You mean that after all he

shouldn’t go back?”

“I mean that if he gives her up—!”

“Yes?”

“Well, he ought to be ashamed of himself.” But Strether spoke with a

sound that might have passed for a laugh.