Volume II

Book Seventh

I

It wasn’t the first time Strether had sat alone in the great dim

church—still less was it the first of his giving himself up, so far as

conditions permitted, to its beneficent action on his nerves. He had

been to Notre Dame with Waymarsh, he had been there with Miss Gostrey,

he had been there with Chad Newsome, and had found the place, even in

company, such a refuge from the obsession of his problem that, with

renewed pressure from that source, he had not unnaturally recurred to a

remedy meeting the case, for the moment, so indirectly, no doubt, but

so relievingly. He was conscious enough that it was only for the

moment, but good moments—if he could call them good—still had their

value for a man who by this time struck himself as living almost

disgracefully from hand to mouth. Having so well learnt the way, he had

lately made the pilgrimage more than once by himself—had quite stolen

off, taking an unnoticed chance and making no point of speaking of the

adventure when restored to his friends.

His great friend, for that matter, was still absent, as well as

remarkably silent; even at the end of three weeks Miss Gostrey hadn’t

come back. She wrote to him from Mentone, admitting that he must judge

her grossly inconsequent—perhaps in fact for the time odiously

faithless; but asking for patience, for a deferred sentence, throwing

herself in short on his generosity. For her too, she could assure him,

life was complicated—more complicated than he could have guessed; she

had moreover made certain of him—certain of not wholly missing him on

her return—before her disappearance. If furthermore she didn’t burden

him with letters it was frankly because of her sense of the other great

commerce he had to carry on. He himself, at the end of a fortnight, had

written twice, to show how his generosity could be trusted; but he

reminded himself in each case of Mrs. Newsome’s epistolary manner at

the times when Mrs. Newsome kept off delicate ground. He sank his

problem, he talked of Waymarsh and Miss Barrace, of little Bilham and

the set over the river, with whom he had again had tea, and he was

easy, for convenience, about Chad and Madame de Vionnet and Jeanne. He

admitted that he continued to see them, he was decidedly so confirmed a

haunter of Chad’s premises and that young man’s practical intimacy with

them was so undeniably great; but he had his reason for not attempting

to render for Miss Gostrey’s benefit the impression of these last days.

That would be to tell her too much about himself—it being at present

just from himself he was trying to escape.

This small struggle sprang not a little, in its way, from the same

impulse that had now carried him across to Notre Dame; the impulse to

let things be, to give them time to justify themselves or at least to

pass. He was aware of having no errand in such a place but the desire

not to be, for the hour, in certain other places; a sense of safety, of

simplification, which each time he yielded to it he amused himself by

thinking of as a private concession to cowardice. The great church had

no altar for his worship, no direct voice for his soul; but it was none

the less soothing even to sanctity; for he could feel while there what

he couldn’t elsewhere, that he was a plain tired man taking the holiday

he had earned. He was tired, but he wasn’t plain—that was the pity and

the trouble of it; he was able, however, to drop his problem at the

door very much as if it had been the copper piece that he deposited, on

the threshold, in the receptacle of the inveterate blind beggar. He

trod the long dim nave, sat in the splendid choir, paused before the

cluttered chapels of the east end, and the mighty monument laid upon

him its spell. He might have been a student under the charm of a

museum—which was exactly what, in a foreign town, in the afternoon of

life, he would have liked to be free to be. This form of sacrifice did

at any rate for the occasion as well as another; it made him quite

sufficiently understand how, within the precinct, for the real refugee,

the things of the world could fall into abeyance. That was the

cowardice, probably—to dodge them, to beg the question, not to deal

with it in the hard outer light; but his own oblivions were too brief,

too vain, to hurt any one but himself, and he had a vague and fanciful

kindness for certain persons whom he met, figures of mystery and

anxiety, and whom, with observation for his pastime, he ranked as those

who were fleeing from justice. Justice was outside, in the hard light,

and injustice too; but one was as absent as the other from the air of

the long aisles and the brightness of the many altars.

Thus it was at all events that, one morning some dozen days after the

dinner in the Boulevard Malesherbes at which Madame de Vionnet had been

present with her daughter, he was called upon to play his part in an

encounter that deeply stirred his imagination. He had the habit, in

these contemplations, of watching a fellow visitant, here and there,

from a respectable distance, remarking some note of behaviour, of

penitence, of prostration, of the absolved, relieved state; this was

the manner in which his vague tenderness took its course, the degree of

demonstration to which it naturally had to confine itself. It hadn’t

indeed so felt its responsibility as when on this occasion he suddenly

measured the suggestive effect of a lady whose supreme stillness, in

the shade of one of the chapels, he had two or three times noticed as

he made, and made once more, his slow circuit. She wasn’t prostrate—not

in any degree bowed, but she was strangely fixed, and her prolonged

immobility showed her, while he passed and paused, as wholly given up

to the need, whatever it was, that had brought her there. She only sat

and gazed before her, as he himself often sat; but she had placed

herself, as he never did, within the focus of the shrine, and she had

lost herself, he could easily see, as he would only have liked to do.

She was not a wandering alien, keeping back more than she gave, but one

of the familiar, the intimate, the fortunate, for whom these dealings

had a method and a meaning. She reminded our friend—since it was the

way of nine tenths of his current impressions to act as recalls of

things imagined—of some fine firm concentrated heroine of an old story,

something he had heard, read, something that, had he had a hand for

drama, he might himself have written, renewing her courage, renewing

her clearness, in splendidly-protected meditation. Her back, as she

sat, was turned to him, but his impression absolutely required that she

should be young and interesting, and she carried her head moreover,

even in the sacred shade, with a discernible faith in herself, a kind

of implied conviction of consistency, security, impunity. But what had

such a woman come for if she hadn’t come to pray? Strether’s reading of

such matters was, it must be owned, confused; but he wondered if her

attitude were some congruous fruit of absolution, of “indulgence.” He

knew but dimly what indulgence, in such a place, might mean; yet he

had, as with a soft sweep, a vision of how it might indeed add to the

zest of active rites. All this was a good deal to have been denoted by

a mere lurking figure who was nothing to him; but, the last thing

before leaving the church, he had the surprise of a still deeper

quickening.

He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in the

museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft, to

reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms of

Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once in a way

to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes, a

miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the shopman, at

the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked, doubtless, while he

played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms, sufficiently rapt in

reverence; but what his thought had finally bumped against was the

question of where, among packed accumulations, so multiform a wedge

would be able to enter. Were seventy volumes in red-and-gold to be

perhaps what he should most substantially have to show at Woollett as

the fruit of his mission? It was a possibility that held him a

minute—held him till he happened to feel that some one, unnoticed, had

approached him and paused. Turning, he saw that a lady stood there as

for a greeting, and he sprang up as he next took her, securely, for

Madame de Vionnet, who appeared to have recognised him as she passed

near him on her way to the door. She checked, quickly and gaily, a

certain confusion in him, came to meet it, turned it back, by an art of

her own; the confusion having threatened him as he knew her for the

person he had lately been observing. She was the lurking figure of the

dim chapel; she had occupied him more than she guessed; but it came to

him in time, luckily, that he needn’t tell her and that no harm, after

all, had been done. She herself, for that matter, straightway showing

she felt their encounter as the happiest of accidents, had for him a

“You come here too?” that despoiled surprise of every awkwardness.

“I come often,” she said. “I love this place, but I’m terrible, in

general, for churches. The old women who live in them all know me; in

fact I’m already myself one of the old women. It’s like that, at all

events, that I foresee I shall end.” Looking about for a chair, so that

he instantly pulled one nearer, she sat down with him again to the

sound of an “Oh, I like so much your also being fond—!”

He confessed the extent of his feeling, though she left the object

vague; and he was struck with the tact, the taste of her vagueness,

which simply took for granted in him a sense of beautiful things. He

was conscious of how much it was affected, this sense, by something

subdued and discreet in the way she had arranged herself for her

special object and her morning walk—he believed her to have come on

foot; the way her slightly thicker veil was drawn—a mere touch, but

everything; the composed gravity of her dress, in which, here and

there, a dull wine-colour seemed to gleam faintly through black; the

charming discretion of her small compact head; the quiet note, as she

sat, of her folded, grey-gloved hands. It was, to Strether’s mind, as

if she sat on her own ground, the light honours of which, at an open

gate, she thus easily did him, while all the vastness and mystery of

the domain stretched off behind. When people were so completely in

possession they could be extraordinarily civil; and our friend had

indeed at this hour a kind of revelation of her heritage. She was

romantic for him far beyond what she could have guessed, and again he

found his small comfort in the conviction that, subtle though she was,

his impression must remain a secret from her. The thing that, once

more, made him uneasy for secrets in general was this particular

patience she could have with his own want of colour; albeit that on the

other hand his uneasiness pretty well dropped after he had been for ten

minutes as colourless as possible and at the same time as responsive.

The moments had already, for that matter, drawn their deepest tinge

from the special interest excited in him by his vision of his

companion’s identity with the person whose attitude before the

glimmering altar had so impressed him. This attitude fitted admirably

into the stand he had privately taken about her connexion with Chad on

the last occasion of his seeing them together. It helped him to stick

fast at the point he had then reached; it was there he had resolved

that he _would_ stick, and at no moment since had it seemed as easy to

do so. Unassailably innocent was a relation that could make one of the

parties to it so carry herself. If it wasn’t innocent why did she haunt

the churches?—into which, given the woman he could believe he made out,

she would never have come to flaunt an insolence of guilt. She haunted

them for continued help, for strength, for peace—sublime support which,

if one were able to look at it so, she found from day to day. They

talked, in low easy tones and with lifted lingering looks, about the

great monument and its history and its beauty—all of which, Madame de

Vionnet professed, came to her most in the other, the outer view.

“We’ll presently, after we go,” she said, “walk round it again if you

like. I’m not in a particular hurry, and it will be pleasant to look at

it well with you.” He had spoken of the great romancer and the great

romance, and of what, to his imagination, they had done for the whole,

mentioning to her moreover the exorbitance of his purchase, the seventy

blazing volumes that were so out of proportion.

“Out of proportion to what?”

“Well, to any other plunge.” Yet he felt even as he spoke how at that

instant he was plunging. He had made up his mind and was impatient to

get into the air; for his purpose was a purpose to be uttered outside,

and he had a fear that it might with delay still slip away from him.

She however took her time; she drew out their quiet gossip as if she

had wished to profit by their meeting, and this confirmed precisely an

interpretation of her manner, of her mystery. While she rose, as he

would have called it, to the question of Victor Hugo, her voice itself,

the light low quaver of her deference to the solemnity about them,

seemed to make her words mean something that they didn’t mean openly.

Help, strength, peace, a sublime support—she hadn’t found so much of

these things as that the amount wouldn’t be sensibly greater for any

scrap his appearance of faith in her might enable her to feel in her

hand. Every little, in a long strain, helped, and if he happened to

affect her as a firm object she could hold on by, he wouldn’t jerk

himself out of her reach. People in difficulties held on by what was

nearest, and he was perhaps after all not further off than sources of

comfort more abstract. It was as to this he had made up his mind; he

had made it up, that is, to give her a sign. The sign would be

that—though it was her own affair—he understood; the sign would be

that—though it was her own affair—she was free to clutch. Since she

took him for a firm object—much as he might to his own sense appear at

times to rock—he would do his best to _be_ one.

The end of it was that half an hour later they were seated together for

an early luncheon at a wonderful, a delightful house of entertainment

on the left bank—a place of pilgrimage for the knowing, they were both

aware, the knowing who came, for its great renown, the homage of

restless days, from the other end of the town. Strether had already

been there three times—first with Miss Gostrey, then with Chad, then

with Chad again and with Waymarsh and little Bilham, all of whom he had

himself sagaciously entertained; and his pleasure was deep now on

learning that Madame de Vionnet hadn’t yet been initiated. When he had

said as they strolled round the church, by the river, acting at last on

what, within, he had made up his mind to, “Will you, if you have time,

come to déjeuner with me somewhere? For instance, if you know it, over

there on the other side, which is so easy a walk”—and then had named

the place; when he had done this she stopped short as for quick

intensity, and yet deep difficulty, of response. She took in the

proposal as if it were almost too charming to be true; and there had

perhaps never yet been for her companion so unexpected a moment of

pride—so fine, so odd a case, at any rate, as his finding himself thus

able to offer to a person in such universal possession a new, a rare

amusement. She had heard of the happy spot, but she asked him in reply

to a further question how in the world he could suppose her to have

been there. He supposed himself to have supposed that Chad might have

taken her, and she guessed this the next moment to his no small

discomfort.

“Ah, let me explain,” she smiled, “that I don’t go about with him in

public; I never have such chances—not having them otherwise—and it’s

just the sort of thing that, as a quiet creature living in my hole, I

adore.” It was more than kind of him to have thought of it—though,

frankly, if he asked whether she had time she hadn’t a single minute.

That however made no difference—she’d throw everything over. Every duty

at home, domestic, maternal, social, awaited her; but it was a case for

a high line. Her affairs would go to smash, but hadn’t one a right to

one’s snatch of scandal when one was prepared to pay? It was on this

pleasant basis of costly disorder, consequently, that they eventually

seated themselves, on either side of a small table, at a window

adjusted to the busy quay and the shining barge-burdened Seine; where,

for an hour, in the matter of letting himself go, of diving deep,

Strether was to feel he had touched bottom. He was to feel many things

on this occasion, and one of the first of them was that he had

travelled far since that evening in London, before the theatre, when

his dinner with Maria Gostrey, between the pink-shaded candles, had

struck him as requiring so many explanations. He had at that time

gathered them in, the explanations—he had stored them up; but it was at

present as if he had either soared above or sunk below them—he couldn’t

tell which; he could somehow think of none that didn’t seem to leave

the appearance of collapse and cynicism easier for him than lucidity.

How could he wish it to be lucid for others, for any one, that he, for

the hour, saw reasons enough in the mere way the bright clean ordered

water-side life came in at the open window?—the mere way Madame de

Vionnet, opposite him over their intensely white table-linen, their

_omelette aux tomates_, their bottle of straw-coloured Chablis, thanked

him for everything almost with the smile of a child, while her grey

eyes moved in and out of their talk, back to the quarter of the warm

spring air, in which early summer had already begun to throb, and then

back again to his face and their human questions.

Their human questions became many before they had done—many more, as

one after the other came up, than our friend’s free fancy had at all

foreseen. The sense he had had before, the sense he had had repeatedly,

the sense that the situation was running away with him, had never been

so sharp as now; and all the more that he could perfectly put his

finger on the moment it had taken the bit in its teeth. That accident

had definitely occurred, the other evening, after Chad’s dinner; it had

occurred, as he fully knew, at the moment when he interposed between

this lady and her child, when he suffered himself so to discuss with

her a matter closely concerning them that her own subtlety, marked by

its significant “Thank you!” instantly sealed the occasion in her

favour. Again he had held off for ten days, but the situation had

continued out of hand in spite of that; the fact that it was running so

fast being indeed just _why_ he had held off. What had come over him as

he recognised her in the nave of the church was that holding off could

be but a losing game from the instant she was worked for not only by

her subtlety, but by the hand of fate itself. If all the accidents were

to fight on her side—and by the actual showing they loomed large—he

could only give himself up. This was what he had done in privately

deciding then and there to propose she should breakfast with him. What

did the success of his proposal in fact resemble but the smash in which

a regular runaway properly ends? The smash was their walk, their

déjeuner, their omelette, the Chablis, the place, the view, their

present talk and his present pleasure in it—to say nothing, wonder of

wonders, of her own. To this tune and nothing less, accordingly, was

his surrender made good. It sufficiently lighted up at least the folly

of holding off. Ancient proverbs sounded, for his memory, in the tone

of their words and the clink of their glasses, in the hum of the town

and the plash of the river. It _was_ clearly better to suffer as a

sheep than as a lamb. One might as well perish by the sword as by

famine.

“Maria’s still away?”—that was the first thing she had asked him; and

when he had found the frankness to be cheerful about it in spite of the

meaning he knew her to attach to Miss Gostrey’s absence, she had gone

on to enquire if he didn’t tremendously miss her. There were reasons

that made him by no means sure, yet he nevertheless answered

“Tremendously”; which she took in as if it were all she had wished to

prove. Then, “A man in trouble _must_ be possessed somehow of a woman,”

she said; “if she doesn’t come in one way she comes in another.”

“Why do you call me a man in trouble?”

“Ah because that’s the way you strike me.” She spoke ever so gently and

as if with all fear of wounding him while she sat partaking of his

bounty. “_Aren’t_ you in trouble?”

He felt himself colour at the question, and then hated that—hated to

pass for anything so idiotic as woundable. Woundable by Chad’s lady, in

respect to whom he had come out with such a fund of indifference—was he

already at that point? Perversely, none the less, his pause gave a

strange air of truth to her supposition; and what was he in fact but

disconcerted at having struck her just in the way he had most dreamed

of not doing? “I’m not in trouble yet,” he at last smiled. “I’m not in

trouble now.”

“Well, I’m always so. But that you sufficiently know.” She was a woman

who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

It was a posture unknown to Mrs. Newsome, but it was easy for a _femme

du monde_. “Yes—I am ‘now’!”

“There was a question you put to me,” he presently returned, “the night

of Chad’s dinner. I didn’t answer it then, and it has been very

handsome of you not to have sought an occasion for pressing me about it

since.”

She was instantly all there. “Of course I know what you allude to. I

asked you what you had meant by saying, the day you came to see me,

just before you left me, that you’d save me. And you then said—at our

friend’s—that you’d have really to wait to see, for yourself, what you

did mean.”

“Yes, I asked for time,” said Strether. “And it sounds now, as you put

it, like a very ridiculous speech.”

“Oh!” she murmured—she was full of attenuation. But she had another

thought. “If it does sound ridiculous why do you deny that you’re in

trouble?”

“Ah if I were,” he replied, “it wouldn’t be the trouble of fearing

ridicule. I don’t fear it.”

“What then do you?”

“Nothing—now.” And he leaned back in his chair.

“I like your ‘now’!” she laughed across at him.

“Well, it’s precisely that it fully comes to me at present that I’ve

kept you long enough. I know by this time, at any rate, what I meant by

my speech; and I really knew it the night of Chad’s dinner.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it was difficult at the moment. I had already at that moment

done something for you, in the sense of what I had said the day I went

to see you; but I wasn’t then sure of the importance I might represent

this as having.”

She was all eagerness. “And you’re sure now?”

“Yes; I see that, practically, I’ve done for you—had done for you when

you put me your question—all that it’s as yet possible to me to do. I

feel now,” he went on, “that it may go further than I thought. What I

did after my visit to you,” he explained, “was to write straight off to

Mrs. Newsome about you, and I’m at last, from one day to the other,

expecting her answer. It’s this answer that will represent, as I

believe, the consequences.”

Patient and beautiful was her interest. “I see—the consequences of your

speaking for me.” And she waited as if not to hustle him.

He acknowledged it by immediately going on. “The question, you

understand, was _how_ I should save you. Well, I’m trying it by thus

letting her know that I consider you worth saving.”

“I see—I see.” Her eagerness broke through.

“How can I thank you enough?” He couldn’t tell her that, however, and

she quickly pursued. “You do really, for yourself, consider it?”

His only answer at first was to help her to the dish that had been

freshly put before them. “I’ve written to her again since then—I’ve

left her in no doubt of what I think. I’ve told her all about you.”

“Thanks—not so much. ‘All about’ me,” she went on—“yes.”

“All it seems to me you’ve done for him.”

“Ah and you might have added all it seems to _me!_” She laughed again,

while she took up her knife and fork, as in the cheer of these

assurances. “But you’re not sure how she’ll take it.”

“No, I’ll not pretend I’m sure.”

“Voilà.” And she waited a moment. “I wish you’d tell me about her.”

“Oh,” said Strether with a slightly strained smile, “all that need

concern you about her is that she’s really a grand person.”

Madame de Vionnet seemed to demur. “Is that all that need concern me

about her?”

But Strether neglected the question. “Hasn’t Chad talked to you?”

“Of his mother? Yes, a great deal—immensely. But not from your point of

view.”

“He can’t,” our friend returned, “have said any ill of her.”

“Not the least bit. He has given me, like you, the assurance that she’s

really grand. But her being really grand is somehow just what hasn’t

seemed to simplify our case. Nothing,” she continued, “is further from

me than to wish to say a word against her; but of course I feel how

little she can like being told of her owing me anything. No woman ever

enjoys such an obligation to another woman.”

This was a proposition Strether couldn’t contradict. “And yet what

other way could I have expressed to her what I felt? It’s what there

was most to say about you.”

“Do you mean then that she _will_ be good to me?”

“It’s what I’m waiting to see. But I’ve little doubt she would,” he

added, “if she could comfortably see you.”

It seemed to strike her as a happy, a beneficent thought. “Oh then

couldn’t that be managed? Wouldn’t she come out? Wouldn’t she if you so

put it to her? _Did_ you by any possibility?” she faintly quavered.

“Oh no”—he was prompt. “Not that. It would be, much more, to give an

account of you that—since there’s no question of _your_ paying the

visit—I should go home first.”

It instantly made her graver. “And are you thinking of that?”

“Oh all the while, naturally.”

“Stay with us—stay with us!” she exclaimed on this. “That’s your only

way to make sure.”

“To make sure of what?”

“Why that he doesn’t break up. You didn’t come out to do that to him.”

“Doesn’t it depend,” Strether returned after a moment, “on what you

mean by breaking up?”

“Oh you know well enough what I mean!”

His silence seemed again for a little to denote an understanding. “You

take for granted remarkable things.”

“Yes, I do—to the extent that I don’t take for granted vulgar ones.

You’re perfectly capable of seeing that what you came out for wasn’t

really at all to do what you’d now have to do.”

“Ah it’s perfectly simple,” Strether good-humouredly pleaded. “I’ve had

but one thing to do—to put our case before him. To put it as it could

only be put here on the spot—by personal pressure. My dear lady,” he

lucidly pursued, “my work, you see, is really done, and my reasons for

staying on even another day are none of the best. Chad’s in possession

of our case and professes to do it full justice. What remains is with

himself. I’ve had my rest, my amusement and refreshment; I’ve had, as

we say at Woollett, a lovely time. Nothing in it has been more lovely

than this happy meeting with you—in these fantastic conditions to which

you’ve so delightfully consented. I’ve a sense of success. It’s what I

wanted. My getting all this good is what Chad has waited for, and I

gather that if I’m ready to go he’s the same.”

She shook her head with a finer deeper wisdom. “You’re not ready. If

you’re ready why did you write to Mrs. Newsome in the sense you’ve

mentioned to me?”

Strether considered. “I shan’t go before I hear from her. You’re too

much afraid of her,” he added.

It produced between them a long look from which neither shrank. “I

don’t think you believe that—believe I’ve not really reason to fear

her.”

“She’s capable of great generosity,” Strether presently stated.

“Well then let her trust me a little. That’s all I ask. Let her

recognise in spite of everything what I’ve done.”

“Ah remember,” our friend replied, “that she can’t effectually

recognise it without seeing it for herself. Let Chad go over and show

her what you’ve done, and let him plead with her there for it and, as

it were, for _you_.”

She measured the depth of this suggestion. “Do you give me your word of

honour that if she once has him there she won’t do her best to marry

him?”

It made her companion, this enquiry, look again a while out at the

view; after which he spoke without sharpness. “When she sees for

herself what he is—”

But she had already broken in. “It’s when she sees for herself what he

is that she’ll want to marry him most.”

Strether’s attitude, that of due deference to what she said, permitted

him to attend for a minute to his luncheon. “I doubt if that will come

off. It won’t be easy to make it.”

“It will be easy if he remains there—and he’ll remain for the money.

The money appears to be, as a probability, so hideously much.”

“Well,” Strether presently concluded, “nothing _could_ really hurt you

but his marrying.”

She gave a strange light laugh. “Putting aside what may really hurt

_him_.”

But her friend looked at her as if he had thought of that too. “The

question will come up, of course, of the future that you yourself offer

him.”

She was leaning back now, but she fully faced him. “Well, let it come

up!”

“The point is that it’s for Chad to make of it what he can. His being

proof against marriage will show what he does make.”

“If he _is_ proof, yes”—she accepted the proposition. “But for myself,”

she added, “the question is what _you_ make.”

“Ah I make nothing. It’s not my affair.”

“I beg your pardon. It’s just there that, since you’ve taken it up and

are committed to it, it most intensely becomes yours. You’re not saving

me, I take it, for your interest in myself, but for your interest in

our friend. The one’s at any rate wholly dependent on the other. You

can’t in honour not see me through,” she wound up, “because you can’t

in honour not see _him_.”

Strange and beautiful to him was her quiet soft acuteness. The thing

that most moved him was really that she was so deeply serious. She had

none of the portentous forms of it, but he had never come in contact,

it struck him, with a force brought to so fine a head. Mrs. Newsome,

goodness knew, was serious; but it was nothing to this. He took it all

in, he saw it all together. “No,” he mused, “I can’t in honour not see

him.”

Her face affected him as with an exquisite light. “You _will_ then?”

“I will.”

At this she pushed back her chair and was the next moment on her feet.

“Thank you!” she said with her hand held out to him across the table

and with no less a meaning in the words than her lips had so

particularly given them after Chad’s dinner. The golden nail she had

then driven in pierced a good inch deeper. Yet he reflected that he

himself had only meanwhile done what he had made up his mind to on the

same occasion. So far as the essence of the matter went he had simply

stood fast on the spot on which he had then planted his feet.

II

He received three days after this a communication from America, in the

form of a scrap of blue paper folded and gummed, not reaching him

through his bankers, but delivered at his hotel by a small boy in

uniform, who, under instructions from the concierge, approached him as

he slowly paced the little court. It was the evening hour, but daylight

was long now and Paris more than ever penetrating. The scent of flowers

was in the streets, he had the whiff of violets perpetually in his

nose; and he had attached himself to sounds and suggestions, vibrations

of the air, human and dramatic, he imagined, as they were not in other

places, that came out for him more and more as the mild afternoons

deepened—a far-off hum, a sharp near click on the asphalt, a voice

calling, replying, somewhere and as full of tone as an actor’s in a

play. He was to dine at home, as usual, with Waymarsh—they had settled

to that for thrift and simplicity; and he now hung about before his

friend came down.

He read his telegram in the court, standing still a long time where he

had opened it and giving five minutes afterwards to the renewed study

of it. At last, quickly, he crumpled it up as if to get it out of the

way; in spite of which, however, he kept it there—still kept it when,

at the end of another turn, he had dropped into a chair placed near a

small table. Here, with his scrap of paper compressed in his fist and

further concealed by his folding his arms tight, he sat for some time

in thought, gazed before him so straight that Waymarsh appeared and

approached him without catching his eye. The latter in fact, struck

with his appearance, looked at him hard for a single instant and then,

as if determined to that course by some special vividness in it,

dropped back into the _salon de lecture_ without addressing him. But

the pilgrim from Milrose permitted himself still to observe the scene

from behind the clear glass plate of that retreat. Strether ended, as

he sat, by a fresh scrutiny of his compressed missive, which he

smoothed out carefully again as he placed it on his table. There it

remained for some minutes, until, at last looking up, he saw Waymarsh

watching him from within. It was on this that their eyes met—met for a

moment during which neither moved. But Strether then got up, folding

his telegram more carefully and putting it into his waistcoat pocket.

A few minutes later the friends were seated together at dinner; but

Strether had meanwhile said nothing about it, and they eventually

parted, after coffee in the court, with nothing said on either side.

Our friend had moreover the consciousness that even less than usual was

on this occasion said between them, so that it was almost as if each

had been waiting for something from the other. Waymarsh had always more

or less the air of sitting at the door of his tent, and silence, after

so many weeks, had come to play its part in their concert. This note

indeed, to Strether’s sense, had lately taken a fuller tone, and it was

his fancy to-night that they had never quite so drawn it out. Yet it

befell, none the less that he closed the door to confidence when his

companion finally asked him if there were anything particular the

matter with him. “Nothing,” he replied, “more than usual.”

On the morrow, however, at an early hour, he found occasion to give an

answer more in consonance with the facts. What was the matter had

continued to be so all the previous evening, the first hours of which,

after dinner, in his room, he had devoted to the copious composition of

a letter. He had quitted Waymarsh for this purpose, leaving him to his

own resources with less ceremony than their wont, but finally coming

down again with his letter unconcluded and going forth into the streets

without enquiry for his comrade. He had taken a long vague walk, and

one o’clock had struck before his return and his re-ascent to his room

by the aid of the glimmering candle-end left for him on the shelf

outside the porter’s lodge. He had possessed himself, on closing his

door, of the numerous loose sheets of his unfinished composition, and

then, without reading them over, had torn them into small pieces. He

had thereupon slept—as if it had been in some measure thanks to that

sacrifice—the sleep of the just, and had prolonged his rest

considerably beyond his custom. Thus it was that when, between nine and

ten, the tap of the knob of a walking-stick sounded on his door, he had

not yet made himself altogether presentable. Chad Newsome’s bright deep

voice determined quickly enough none the less the admission of the

visitor. The little blue paper of the evening before, plainly an object

the more precious for its escape from premature destruction, now lay on

the sill of the open window, smoothed out afresh and kept from blowing

away by the superincumbent weight of his watch. Chad, looking about

with careless and competent criticism, as he looked wherever he went

immediately espied it and permitted himself to fix it for a moment

rather hard. After which he turned his eyes to his host. “It has come

then at last?”

Strether paused in the act of pinning his necktie. “Then you know—?

You’ve had one too?”

“No, I’ve had nothing, and I only know what I see. I see that thing and

I guess. Well,” he added, “it comes as pat as in a play, for I’ve

precisely turned up this morning—as I would have done yesterday, but it

was impossible—to take you.”

“To take me?” Strether had turned again to his glass.

“Back, at last, as I promised. I’m ready—I’ve really been ready this

month. I’ve only been waiting for you—as was perfectly right. But

you’re better now; you’re safe—I see that for myself; you’ve got all

your good. You’re looking, this morning, as fit as a flea.”

Strether, at his glass, finished dressing; consulting that witness

moreover on this last opinion. _Was_ he looking preternaturally fit?

There was something in it perhaps for Chad’s wonderful eye, but he had

felt himself for hours rather in pieces. Such a judgement, however, was

after all but a contribution to his resolve; it testified unwittingly

to his wisdom. He was still firmer, apparently—since it shone in him as

a light—than he had flattered himself. His firmness indeed was slightly

compromised, as he faced about to his friend, by the way this very

personage looked—though the case would of course have been worse hadn’t

the secret of personal magnificence been at every hour Chad’s unfailing

possession. There he was in all the pleasant morning freshness of

it—strong and sleek and gay, easy and fragrant and fathomless, with

happy health in his colour, and pleasant silver in his thick young

hair, and the right word for everything on the lips that his clear

brownness caused to show as red. He had never struck Strether as

personally such a success; it was as if now, for his definite

surrender, he had gathered himself vividly together. This, sharply and

rather strangely, was the form in which he was to be presented to

Woollett. Our friend took him in again—he was always taking him in and

yet finding that parts of him still remained out; though even thus his

image showed through a mist of other things. “I’ve had a cable,”

Strether said, “from your mother.”

“I dare say, my dear man. I hope she’s well.”

Strether hesitated. “No—she’s not well, I’m sorry to have to tell you.”

“Ah,” said Chad, “I must have had the instinct of it. All the more

reason then that we should start straight off.”

Strether had now got together hat, gloves and stick, but Chad had

dropped on the sofa as if to show where he wished to make his point. He

kept observing his companion’s things; he might have been judging how

quickly they could be packed. He might even have wished to hint that

he’d send his own servant to assist. “What do you mean,” Strether

enquired, “by ‘straight off’?”

“Oh by one of next week’s boats. Everything at this season goes out so

light that berths will be easy anywhere.”

Strether had in his hand his telegram, which he had kept there after

attaching his watch, and he now offered it to Chad, who, however, with

an odd movement, declined to take it. “Thanks, I’d rather not. Your

correspondence with Mother’s your own affair. I’m only _with_ you both

on it, whatever it is.” Strether, at this, while their eyes met, slowly

folded the missive and put it in his pocket; after which, before he had

spoken again, Chad broke fresh ground. “Has Miss Gostrey come back?”

But when Strether presently spoke it wasn’t in answer. “It’s not, I

gather, that your mother’s physically ill; her health, on the whole,

this spring, seems to have been better than usual. But she’s worried,

she’s anxious, and it appears to have risen within the last few days to

a climax. We’ve tired out, between us, her patience.”

“Oh it isn’t _you!_” Chad generously protested.

“I beg your pardon—it _is_ me.” Strether was mild and melancholy, but

firm. He saw it far away and over his companion’s head. “It’s very

particularly me.”

“Well then all the more reason. _Marchons, marchons!_” said the young

man gaily. His host, however, at this, but continued to stand agaze;

and he had the next thing repeated his question of a moment before.

“Has Miss Gostrey come back?”

“Yes, two days ago.”

“Then you’ve seen her?”

“No—I’m to see her to-day.” But Strether wouldn’t linger now on Miss

Gostrey. “Your mother sends me an ultimatum. If I can’t bring you I’m

to leave you; I’m to come at any rate myself.”

“Ah but you _can_ bring me now,” Chad, from his sofa, reassuringly

replied.

Strether had a pause. “I don’t think I understand you. Why was it that,

more than a month ago, you put it to me so urgently to let Madame de

Vionnet speak for you?”

“‘Why’?” Chad considered, but he had it at his fingers’ ends. “Why but

because I knew how well she’d do it? It was the way to keep you quiet

and, to that extent, do you good. Besides,” he happily and comfortably

explained, “I wanted you really to know her and to get the impression

of her—and you see the good that _has_ done you.”

“Well,” said Strether, “the way she has spoken for you, all the same—so

far as I’ve given her a chance—has only made me feel how much she

wishes to keep you. If you make nothing of that I don’t see why you

wanted me to listen to her.”

“Why my dear man,” Chad exclaimed, “I make everything of it! How can

you doubt—?”

“I doubt only because you come to me this morning with your signal to

start.”

Chad stared, then gave a laugh. “And isn’t my signal to start just what

you’ve been waiting for?”

Strether debated; he took another turn. “This last month I’ve been

awaiting, I think, more than anything else, the message I have here.”

“You mean you’ve been afraid of it?”

“Well, I was doing my business in my own way. And I suppose your

present announcement,” Strether went on, “isn’t merely the result of

your sense of what I’ve expected. Otherwise you wouldn’t have put me in

relation—” But he paused, pulling up.

At this Chad rose. “Ah _her_ wanting me not to go has nothing to do

with it! It’s only because she’s afraid—afraid of the way that, over

there, I may get caught. But her fear’s groundless.”

He had met again his companion’s sufficiently searching look. “Are you

tired of her?”

Chad gave him in reply to this, with a movement of the head, the

strangest slow smile he had ever had from him. “Never.”

It had immediately, on Strether’s imagination, so deep and soft an

effect that our friend could only for the moment keep it before him.

“Never?”

“Never,” Chad obligingly and serenely repeated.

It made his companion take several more steps. “Then _you’re_ not

afraid.”

“Afraid to go?”

Strether pulled up again. “Afraid to stay.”

The young man looked brightly amazed. “You want me now to ‘stay’?”

“If I don’t immediately sail the Pococks will immediately come out.

That’s what I mean,” said Strether, “by your mother’s ultimatum.”

Chad showed a still livelier, but not an alarmed interest. “She has

turned on Sarah and Jim?”

Strether joined him for an instant in the vision. “Oh and you may be

sure Mamie. _That’s_ whom she’s turning on.”

This also Chad saw—he laughed out. “Mamie—to corrupt me?”

“Ah,” said Strether, “she’s very charming.”

“So you’ve already more than once told me. I should like to see her.”

Something happy and easy, something above all unconscious, in the way

he said this, brought home again to his companion the facility of his

attitude and the enviability of his state. “See her then by all means.

And consider too,” Strether went on, “that you really give your sister

a lift in letting her come to you. You give her a couple of months of

Paris, which she hasn’t seen, if I’m not mistaken, since just after she

was married, and which I’m sure she wants but the pretext to visit.”

Chad listened, but with all his own knowledge of the world. “She has

had it, the pretext, these several years, yet she has never taken it.”

“Do you mean _you?_” Strether after an instant enquired.

“Certainly—the lone exile. And whom do you mean?” said Chad.

“Oh I mean _me_. I’m her pretext. That is—for it comes to the same

thing—I’m your mother’s.”

“Then why,” Chad asked, “doesn’t Mother come herself?”

His friend gave him a long look. “Should you like her to?” And as he

for the moment said nothing: “It’s perfectly open to you to cable for

her.”

Chad continued to think. “Will she come if I do?”

“Quite possibly. But try, and you’ll see.”

“Why don’t _you_ try?” Chad after a moment asked.

“Because I don’t want to.”

Chad thought. “Don’t desire her presence here?”

Strether faced the question, and his answer was the more emphatic.

“Don’t put it off, my dear boy, on _me!_”

“Well—I see what you mean. I’m sure you’d behave beautifully but you

_don’t_ want to see her. So I won’t play you that trick.’

“Ah,” Strether declared, “I shouldn’t call it a trick. You’ve a perfect

right, and it would be perfectly straight of you.” Then he added in a

different tone: “You’d have moreover, in the person of Madame de

Vionnet, a very interesting relation prepared for her.”

Their eyes, on this proposition, continued to meet, but Chad’s pleasant

and bold, never flinched for a moment. He got up at last and he said

something with which Strether was struck. “She wouldn’t understand her,

but that makes no difference. Madame de Vionnet would like to see her.

She’d like to be charming to her. She believes she could work it.”

Strether thought a moment, affected by this, but finally turning away.

“She couldn’t!”

“You’re quite sure?” Chad asked.

“Well, risk it if you like!”

Strether, who uttered this with serenity, had urged a plea for their

now getting into the air; but the young man still waited. “Have you

sent your answer?”

“No, I’ve done nothing yet.”

“Were you waiting to see me?”

“No, not that.”

“Only waiting”—and Chad, with this, had a smile for him—“to see Miss

Gostrey?”

“No—not even Miss Gostrey. I wasn’t waiting to see any one. I had only

waited, till now, to make up my mind—in complete solitude; and, since I

of course absolutely owe you the information, was on the point of going

out with it quite made up. Have therefore a little more patience with

me. Remember,” Strether went on, “that that’s what you originally asked

_me_ to have. I’ve had it, you see, and you see what has come of it.

Stay on with me.”

Chad looked grave. “How much longer?”

“Well, till I make you a sign. I can’t myself, you know, at the best,

or at the worst, stay for ever. Let the Pococks come,” Strether

repeated.

“Because it gains you time?”

“Yes—it gains me time.”

Chad, as if it still puzzled him, waited a minute. “You don’t want to

get back to Mother?”

“Not just yet. I’m not ready.”

“You feel,” Chad asked in a tone of his own, “the charm of life over

here?”

“Immensely.” Strether faced it. “You’ve helped me so to feel it that

that surely needn’t surprise you.”

“No, it doesn’t surprise me, and I’m delighted. But what, my dear man,”

Chad went on with conscious queerness, “does it all lead to for you?”

The change of position and of relation, for each, was so oddly betrayed

in the question that Chad laughed out as soon as he had uttered

it—which made Strether also laugh. “Well, to my having a certitude that

has been tested—that has passed through the fire. But oh,” he couldn’t

help breaking out, “if within my first month here you had been willing

to move with me—!”

“Well?” said Chad, while he broke down as for weight of thought.

“Well, we should have been over there by now.”

“Ah but you wouldn’t have had your fun!”

“I should have had a month of it; and I’m having now, if you want to

know,” Strether continued, “enough to last me for the rest of my days.”

Chad looked amused and interested, yet still somewhat in the dark;

partly perhaps because Strether’s estimate of fun had required of him

from the first a good deal of elucidation. “It wouldn’t do if I left

you—?”

“Left me?”—Strether remained blank.

“Only for a month or two—time to go and come. Madame de Vionnet,” Chad

smiled, “would look after you in the interval.”

“To go back by yourself, I remaining here?” Again for an instant their

eyes had the question out; after which Strether said: “Grotesque!”

“But I want to see Mother,” Chad presently returned. “Remember how long

it is since I’ve seen Mother.”

“Long indeed; and that’s exactly why I was originally so keen for

moving you. Hadn’t you shown us enough how beautifully you could do

without it?”

“Oh but,” said Chad wonderfully, “I’m better now.”

There was an easy triumph in it that made his friend laugh out again.

“Oh if you were worse I _should_ know what to do with you. In that case

I believe I’d have you gagged and strapped down, carried on board

resisting, kicking. How _much_,” Strether asked, “do you want to see

Mother?”

“How much?”—Chad seemed to find it in fact difficult to say.

“How much.”

“Why as much as you’ve made me. I’d give anything to see her. And

you’ve left me,” Chad went on, “in little enough doubt as to how much

_she_ wants it.”

Strether thought a minute. “Well then if those things are really your

motive catch the French steamer and sail to-morrow. Of course, when it

comes to that, you’re absolutely free to do as you choose. From the

moment you can’t hold yourself I can only accept your flight.”

“I’ll fly in a minute then,” said Chad, “if you’ll stay here.”

“I’ll stay here till the next steamer—then I’ll follow you.”

“And do you call that,” Chad asked, “accepting my flight?”

“Certainly—it’s the only thing to call it. The only way to keep me

here, accordingly,” Strether explained, “is by staying yourself.”

Chad took it in. “All the more that I’ve really dished you, eh?”

“Dished me?” Strether echoed as inexpressively as possible.

“Why if she sends out the Pococks it will be that she doesn’t trust

you, and if she doesn’t trust you, that bears upon—well, you know

what.”

Strether decided after a moment that he did know what, and in

consonance with this he spoke. “You see then all the more what you owe

me.”

“Well, if I do see, how can I pay?”

“By not deserting me. By standing by me.”

“Oh I say—!” But Chad, as they went downstairs, clapped a firm hand, in

the manner of a pledge, upon his shoulder. They descended slowly

together and had, in the court of the hotel, some further talk, of

which the upshot was that they presently separated. Chad Newsome

departed, and Strether, left alone, looked about, superficially, for

Waymarsh. But Waymarsh hadn’t yet, it appeared, come down, and our

friend finally went forth without sight of him.

III

At four o’clock that afternoon he had still not seen him, but he was

then, as to make up for this, engaged in talk about him with Miss

Gostrey. Strether had kept away from home all day, given himself up to

the town and to his thoughts, wandered and mused, been at once restless

and absorbed—and all with the present climax of a rich little welcome

in the Quartier Marbœuf. “Waymarsh has been, ‘unbeknown’ to me, I’m

convinced”—for Miss Gostrey had enquired—“in communication with

Woollett: the consequence of which was, last night, the loudest

possible call for me.”

“Do you mean a letter to bring you home?”

“No—a cable, which I have at this moment in my pocket: a ‘Come back by

the first ship.’”

Strether’s hostess, it might have been made out, just escaped changing

colour. Reflexion arrived but in time and established a provisional

serenity. It was perhaps exactly this that enabled her to say with

duplicity: “And you’re going—?”

“You almost deserve it when you abandon me so.”

She shook her head as if this were not worth taking up. “My absence has

helped you—as I’ve only to look at you to see. It was my calculation,

and I’m justified. You’re not where you were. And the thing,” she

smiled, “was for me not to be there either. You can go of yourself.”

“Oh but I feel to-day,” he comfortably declared, “that I shall want you

yet.”

She took him all in again. “Well, I promise you not again to leave you,

but it will only be to follow you. You’ve got your momentum and can

toddle alone.”

He intelligently accepted it. “Yes—I suppose I can toddle. It’s the

sight of that in fact that has upset Waymarsh. He can bear it—the way I

strike him as going—no longer. That’s only the climax of his original

feeling. He wants me to quit; and he must have written to Woollett that

I’m in peril of perdition.”

“Ah good!” she murmured. “But is it only your supposition?”

“I make it out—it explains.”

“Then he denies?—or you haven’t asked him?”

“I’ve not had time,” Strether said; “I made it out but last night,

putting various things together, and I’ve not been since then face to

face with him.”

She wondered. “Because you’re too disgusted? You can’t trust yourself?”

He settled his glasses on his nose. “Do I look in a great rage?”

“You look divine!”

“There’s nothing,” he went on, “to be angry about. He has done me on

the contrary a service.”

She made it out. “By bringing things to a head?”

“How well you understand!” he almost groaned. “Waymarsh won’t in the

least, at any rate, when I have it out with him, deny or extenuate. He

has acted from the deepest conviction, with the best conscience and

after wakeful nights. He’ll recognise that he’s fully responsible, and

will consider that he has been highly successful; so that any

discussion we may have will bring us quite together again—bridge the

dark stream that has kept us so thoroughly apart. We shall have at

last, in the consequences of his act, something we can definitely talk

about.”

She was silent a little. “How wonderfully you take it! But you’re

always wonderful.”

He had a pause that matched her own; then he had, with an adequate

spirit, a complete admission. “It’s quite true. I’m extremely wonderful

just now. I dare say in fact I’m quite fantastic, and I shouldn’t be at

all surprised if I were mad.”

“Then tell me!” she earnestly pressed. As he, however, for the time

answered nothing, only returning the look with which she watched him,

she presented herself where it was easier to meet her. “What will Mr.

Waymarsh exactly have done?”

“Simply have written a letter. One will have been quite enough. He has

told them I want looking after.”

“And _do_ you?”—she was all interest.

“Immensely. And I shall get it.”

“By which you mean you don’t budge?”

“I don’t budge.”

“You’ve cabled?”

“No—I’ve made Chad do it.”

“That you decline to come?”

“That _he_ declines. We had it out this morning and I brought him

round. He had come in, before I was down, to tell me he was

ready—ready, I mean, to return. And he went off, after ten minutes with

me, to say he wouldn’t.”

Miss Gostrey followed with intensity. “Then you’ve _stopped_ him?”

Strether settled himself afresh in his chair. “I’ve stopped him. That

is for the time. That”—he gave it to her more vividly—“is where I am.”

“I see, I see. But where’s Mr. Newsome? He was ready,” she asked, “to

go?”

“All ready.”

“And sincerely—believing _you’d_ be?”

“Perfectly, I think; so that he was amazed to find the hand I had laid

on him to pull him over suddenly converted into an engine for keeping

him still.”

It was an account of the matter Miss Gostrey could weigh. “Does he

think the conversion sudden?”

“Well,” said Strether, “I’m not altogether sure what he thinks. I’m not

sure of anything that concerns him, except that the more I’ve seen of

him the less I’ve found him what I originally expected. He’s obscure,

and that’s why I’m waiting.”

She wondered. “But for what in particular?”

“For the answer to his cable.”

“And what was his cable?”

“I don’t know,” Strether replied; “it was to be, when he left me,

according to his own taste. I simply said to him: ‘I want to stay, and

the only way for me to do so is for _you_ to.’ That I wanted to stay

seemed to interest him, and he acted on that.”

Miss Gostrey turned it over. “He wants then himself to stay.”

“He half wants it. That is he half wants to go. My original appeal has

to that extent worked in him. Nevertheless,” Strether pursued, “he

won’t go. Not, at least, so long as I’m here.”

“But you can’t,” his companion suggested, “stay here always. I wish you

could.”

“By no means. Still, I want to see him a little further. He’s not in

the least the case I supposed, he’s quite another case. And it’s as

such that he interests me.” It was almost as if for his own

intelligence that, deliberate and lucid, our friend thus expressed the

matter. “I don’t want to give him up.”

Miss Gostrey but desired to help his lucidity. She had however to be

light and tactful. “Up, you mean—a—to his mother?”

“Well, I’m not thinking of his mother now. I’m thinking of the plan of

which I was the mouthpiece, which, as soon as we met, I put before him

as persuasively as I knew how, and which was drawn up, as it were, in

complete ignorance of all that, in this last long period, has been

happening to him. It took no account whatever of the impression I was

here on the spot immediately to begin to receive from him—impressions

of which I feel sure I’m far from having had the last.”

Miss Gostrey had a smile of the most genial criticism. “So your idea

is—more or less—to stay out of curiosity?”

“Call it what you like! I don’t care what it’s called—”

“So long as you do stay? Certainly not then. I call it, all the same,

immense fun,” Maria Gostrey declared; “and to see you work it out will

be one of the sensations of my life. It _is_ clear you can toddle

alone!”

He received this tribute without elation. “I shan’t be alone when the

Pococks have come.”

Her eyebrows went up. “The Pococks are coming?”

“That, I mean, is what will happen—and happen as quickly as possible—in

consequence of Chad’s cable. They’ll simply embark. Sarah will come to

speak for her mother—with an effect different from _my_ muddle.”

Miss Gostrey more gravely wondered. “_She_ then will take him back?”

“Very possibly—and we shall see. She must at any rate have the chance,

and she may be trusted to do all she can.”

“And do you _want_ that?”

“Of course,” said Strether, “I want it. I want to play fair.”

But she had lost for a moment the thread. “If it devolves on the

Pococks why do you stay?”

“Just to see that I _do_ play fair—and a little also, no doubt, that

they do.” Strether was luminous as he had never been. “I came out to

find myself in presence of new facts—facts that have kept striking me

as less and less met by our old reasons. The matter’s perfectly simple.

New reasons—reasons as new as the facts themselves—are wanted; and of

this our friends at Woollett—Chad’s and mine—were at the earliest

moment definitely notified. If any are producible Mrs. Pocock will

produce them; she’ll bring over the whole collection. They’ll be,” he

added with a pensive smile “a part of the ‘fun’ you speak of.”

She was quite in the current now and floating by his side. “It’s

Mamie—so far as I’ve had it from you—who’ll be their great card.” And

then as his contemplative silence wasn’t a denial she significantly

added: “I think I’m sorry for her.”

“I think _I_ am!”—and Strether sprang up, moving about a little as her

eyes followed him. “But it can’t be helped.”

“You mean her coming out can’t be?”

He explained after another turn what he meant. “The only way for her

not to come is for me to go home—as I believe that on the spot I could

prevent it. But the difficulty as to that is that if I do go home—”

“I see, I see”—she had easily understood. “Mr. Newsome will do the

same, and that’s not”—she laughed out now—“to be thought of.”

Strether had no laugh; he had only a quiet comparatively placid look

that might have shown him as proof against ridicule. “Strange, isn’t

it?”

They had, in the matter that so much interested them, come so far as

this without sounding another name—to which however their present

momentary silence was full of a conscious reference. Strether’s

question was a sufficient implication of the weight it had gained with

him during the absence of his hostess; and just for that reason a

single gesture from her could pass for him as a vivid answer. Yet he

was answered still better when she said in a moment: “Will Mr. Newsome

introduce his sister—?”

“To Madame de Vionnet?” Strether spoke the name at last. “I shall be

greatly surprised if he doesn’t.”

She seemed to gaze at the possibility. “You mean you’ve thought of it

and you’re prepared.”

“I’ve thought of it and I’m prepared.”

It was to her visitor now that she applied her consideration. “Bon! You

_are_ magnificent!”

“Well,” he answered after a pause and a little wearily, but still

standing there before her—“well, that’s what, just once in all my dull

days, I think I shall like to have been!”

Two days later he had news from Chad of a communication from Woollett

in response to their determinant telegram, this missive being addressed

to Chad himself and announcing the immediate departure for France of

Sarah and Jim and Mamie. Strether had meanwhile on his own side cabled;

he had but delayed that act till after his visit to Miss Gostrey, an

interview by which, as so often before, he felt his sense of things

cleared up and settled. His message to Mrs. Newsome, in answer to her

own, had consisted of the words: “Judge best to take another month, but

with full appreciation of all re-enforcements.” He had added that he

was writing, but he was of course always writing; it was a practice

that continued, oddly enough, to relieve him, to make him come nearer

than anything else to the consciousness of doing something: so that he

often wondered if he hadn’t really, under his recent stress, acquired

some hollow trick, one of the specious arts of make-believe. Wouldn’t

the pages he still so freely dispatched by the American post have been

worthy of a showy journalist, some master of the great new science of

beating the sense out of words? Wasn’t he writing against time, and

mainly to show he was kind?—since it had become quite his habit not to

like to read himself over. On those lines he could still be liberal,

yet it was at best a sort of whistling in the dark. It was

unmistakeable moreover that the sense of being in the dark now pressed

on him more sharply—creating thereby the need for a louder and livelier

whistle. He whistled long and hard after sending his message; he

whistled again and again in celebration of Chad’s news; there was an

interval of a fortnight in which this exercise helped him. He had no

great notion of what, on the spot, Sarah Pocock would have to say,

though he had indeed confused premonitions; but it shouldn’t be in her

power to say—it shouldn’t be in any one’s anywhere to say—that he was

neglecting her mother. He might have written before more freely, but he

had never written more copiously; and he frankly gave for a reason at

Woollett that he wished to fill the void created there by Sarah’s

departure.

The increase of his darkness, however, and the quickening, as I have

called it, of his tune, resided in the fact that he was hearing almost

nothing. He had for some time been aware that he was hearing less than

before, and he was now clearly following a process by which Mrs.

Newsome’s letters could but logically stop. He hadn’t had a line for

many days, and he needed no proof—though he was, in time, to have

plenty—that she wouldn’t have put pen to paper after receiving the hint

that had determined her telegram. She wouldn’t write till Sarah should

have seen him and reported on him. It was strange, though it might well

be less so than his own behaviour appeared at Woollett. It was at any

rate significant, and what _was_ remarkable was the way his friend’s

nature and manner put on for him, through this very drop of

demonstration, a greater intensity. It struck him really that he had

never so lived with her as during this period of her silence; the

silence was a sacred hush, a finer clearer medium, in which her

idiosyncrasies showed. He walked about with her, sat with her, drove

with her and dined face-to-face with her—a rare treat “in his life,” as

he could perhaps have scarce escaped phrasing it; and if he had never

seen her so soundless he had never, on the other hand, felt her so

highly, so almost austerely, herself: pure and by the vulgar estimate

“cold,” but deep devoted delicate sensitive noble. Her vividness in

these respects became for him, in the special conditions, almost an

obsession; and though the obsession sharpened his pulses, adding really

to the excitement of life, there were hours at which, to be less on the

stretch, he directly sought forgetfulness. He knew it for the queerest

of adventures—a circumstance capable of playing such a part only for

Lambert Strether—that in Paris itself, of all places, he should find

this ghost of the lady of Woollett more importunate than any other

presence.

When he went back to Maria Gostrey it was for the change to something

else. And yet after all the change scarcely operated for he talked to

her of Mrs. Newsome in these days as he had never talked before. He had

hitherto observed in that particular a discretion and a law;

considerations that at present broke down quite as if relations had

altered. They hadn’t _really_ altered, he said to himself, so much as

that came to; for if what had occurred was of course that Mrs. Newsome

had ceased to trust him, there was nothing on the other hand to prove

that he shouldn’t win back her confidence. It was quite his present

theory that he would leave no stone unturned to do so; and in fact if

he now told Maria things about her that he had never told before this

was largely because it kept before him the idea of the honour of such a

woman’s esteem. His relation with Maria as well was, strangely enough,

no longer quite the same; this truth—though not too disconcertingly—had

come up between them on the renewal of their meetings. It was all

contained in what she had then almost immediately said to him; it was

represented by the remark she had needed but ten minutes to make and

that he hadn’t been disposed to gainsay. He could toddle alone, and the

difference that showed was extraordinary. The turn taken by their talk

had promptly confirmed this difference; his larger confidence on the

score of Mrs. Newsome did the rest; and the time seemed already far off

when he had held out his small thirsty cup to the spout of her pail.

Her pail was scarce touched now, and other fountains had flowed for

him; she fell into her place as but one of his tributaries; and there

was a strange sweetness—a melancholy mildness that touched him—in her

acceptance of the altered order.

It marked for himself the flight of time, or at any rate what he was

pleased to think of with irony and pity as the rush of experience; it

having been but the day before yesterday that he sat at her feet and

held on by her garment and was fed by her hand. It was the proportions

that were changed, and the proportions were at all times, he

philosophised, the very conditions of perception, the terms of thought.

It was as if, with her effective little _entresol_ and and her wide

acquaintance, her activities, varieties, promiscuities, the duties and

devotions that took up nine tenths of her time and of which he got,

guardedly, but the side-wind—it was as if she had shrunk to a secondary

element and had consented to the shrinkage with the perfection of tact.

This perfection had never failed her; it had originally been greater

than his prime measure for it; it had kept him quite apart, kept him

out of the shop, as she called her huge general acquaintance, made

their commerce as quiet, as much a thing of the home alone—the opposite

of the shop—as if she had never another customer. She had been

wonderful to him at first, with the memory of her little _entresol_,

the image to which, on most mornings at that time, his eyes directly

opened; but now she mainly figured for him as but part of the bristling

total—though of course always as a person to whom he should never cease

to be indebted. It would never be given to him certainly to inspire a

greater kindness. She had decked him out for others, and he saw at this

point at least nothing she would ever ask for. She only wondered and

questioned and listened, rendering him the homage of a wistful

speculation. She expressed it repeatedly; he was already far beyond

her, and she must prepare herself to lose him. There was but one little

chance for her.

Often as she had said it he met it—for it was a touch he liked—each

time the same way. “My coming to grief?”

“Yes—then I might patch you up.”

“Oh for my real smash, if it takes place, there will be no patching.”

“But you surely don’t mean it will kill you.”

“No—worse. It will make me old.”

“Ah nothing can do that! The wonderful and special thing about you is

that you _are_, at this time of day, youth.” Then she always made,

further, one of those remarks that she had completely ceased to adorn

with hesitations or apologies, and that had, by the same token, in

spite of their extreme straightness, ceased to produce in Strether the

least embarrassment. She made him believe them, and they became thereby

as impersonal as truth itself. “It’s just your particular charm.”

His answer too was always the same. “Of course I’m youth—youth for the

trip to Europe. I began to be young, or at least to get the benefit of

it, the moment I met you at Chester, and that’s what has been taking

place ever since. I never had the benefit at the proper time—which

comes to saying that I never had the thing itself. I’m having the

benefit at this moment; I had it the other day when I said to Chad

‘Wait’; I shall have it still again when Sarah Pocock arrives. It’s a

benefit that would make a poor show for many people; and I don’t know

who else but you and I, frankly, could begin to see in it what I feel.

I don’t get drunk; I don’t pursue the ladies; I don’t spend money; I

don’t even write sonnets. But nevertheless I’m making up late for what

I didn’t have early. I cultivate my little benefit in my own little

way. It amuses me more than anything that has happened to me in all my

life. They may say what they like—it’s my surrender, it’s my tribute,

to youth. One puts that in where one can—it has to come in somewhere,

if only out of the lives, the conditions, the feelings of other

persons. Chad gives me the sense of it, for all his grey hairs, which

merely make it solid in him and safe and serene; and _she_ does the

same, for all her being older than he, for all her marriageable

daughter, her separated husband, her agitated history. Though they’re

young enough, my pair, I don’t say they’re, in the freshest way, their

_own_ absolutely prime adolescence; for that has nothing to do with it.

The point is that they’re mine. Yes, they’re my youth; since somehow at

the right time nothing else ever was. What I meant just now therefore

is that it would all go—go before doing its work—if they were to fail

me.”

On which, just here, Miss Gostrey inveterately questioned. “What do

you, in particular, call its work?”

“Well, to see me through.”

“But through what?”—she liked to get it all out of him.

“Why through this experience.” That was all that would come.

It regularly gave her none the less the last word. “Don’t you remember

how in those first days of our meeting it was _I_ who was to see you

through?”

“Remember? Tenderly, deeply”—he always rose to it. “You’re just doing

your part in letting me maunder to you thus.”

“Ah don’t speak as if my part were small; since whatever else fails

you—”

“_You_ won’t, ever, ever, ever?”—he thus took her up. “Oh I beg your

pardon; you necessarily, you inevitably _will_. Your conditions—that’s

what I mean—won’t allow me anything to do for you.”

“Let alone—I see what you mean—that I’m drearily dreadfully old. I

_am_, but there’s a service—possible for you to render—that I know, all

the same, I shall think of.”

“And what will it be?”

This, in fine, however, she would never tell him. “You shall hear only

if your smash takes place. As that’s really out of the question, I

won’t expose myself”—a point at which, for reasons of his own, Strether

ceased to press.

He came round, for publicity—it was the easiest thing—to the idea that

his smash _was_ out of the question, and this rendered idle the

discussion of what might follow it. He attached an added importance, as

the days elapsed, to the arrival of the Pococks; he had even a shameful

sense of waiting for it insincerely and incorrectly. He accused himself

of making believe to his own mind that Sarah’s presence, her

impression, her judgement would simplify and harmonise, he accused

himself of being so afraid of what they _might_ do that he sought

refuge, to beg the whole question, in a vain fury. He had abundantly

seen at home what they were in the habit of doing, and he had not at

present the smallest ground. His clearest vision was when he made out

that what he most desired was an account more full and free of Mrs.

Newsome’s state of mind than any he felt he could now expect from

herself; that calculation at least went hand in hand with the sharp

consciousness of wishing to prove to himself that he was not afraid to

look his behaviour in the face. If he was by an inexorable logic to pay

for it he was literally impatient to know the cost, and he held himself

ready to pay in instalments. The first instalment would be precisely

this entertainment of Sarah; as a consequence of which moreover, he

should know vastly better how he stood.

Book Eighth

I

Strether rambled alone during these few days, the effect of the

incident of the previous week having been to simplify in a marked

fashion his mixed relations with Waymarsh. Nothing had passed between

them in reference to Mrs. Newsome’s summons but that our friend had

mentioned to his own the departure of the deputation actually at

sea—giving him thus an opportunity to confess to the occult

intervention he imputed to him. Waymarsh however in the event confessed

to nothing; and though this falsified in some degree Strether’s

forecast the latter amusedly saw in it the same depth of good

conscience out of which the dear man’s impertinence had originally

sprung. He was patient with the dear man now and delighted to observe

how unmistakeably he had put on flesh; he felt his own holiday so

successfully large and free that he was full of allowances and

charities in respect to those cabined and confined: his instinct toward

a spirit so strapped down as Waymarsh’s was to walk round it on tiptoe

for fear of waking it up to a sense of losses by this time

irretrievable. It was all very funny he knew, and but the difference,

as he often said to himself, of tweedledum and tweedledee—an

emancipation so purely comparative that it was like the advance of the

door-mat on the scraper; yet the present crisis was happily to profit

by it and the pilgrim from Milrose to know himself more than ever in

the right.

Strether felt that when he heard of the approach of the Pococks the

impulse of pity quite sprang up in him beside the impulse of triumph.

That was exactly why Waymarsh had looked at him with eyes in which the

heat of justice was measured and shaded. He had looked very hard, as if

affectionately sorry for the friend—the friend of fifty-five—whose

frivolity had had thus to be recorded; becoming, however, but obscurely

sententious and leaving his companion to formulate a charge. It was in

this general attitude that he had of late altogether taken refuge; with

the drop of discussion they were solemnly sadly superficial; Strether

recognised in him the mere portentous rumination to which Miss Barrace

had so good-humouredly described herself as assigning a corner of her

salon. It was quite as if he knew his surreptitious step had been

divined, and it was also as if he missed the chance to explain the

purity of his motive; but this privation of relief should be precisely

his small penance: it was not amiss for Strether that he should find

himself to that degree uneasy. If he had been challenged or accused,

rebuked for meddling or otherwise pulled up, he would probably have

shown, on his own system, all the height of his consistency, all the

depth of his good faith. Explicit resentment of his course would have

made him take the floor, and the thump of his fist on the table would

have affirmed him as consciously incorruptible. Had what now really

prevailed with Strether been but a dread of that thump—a dread of

wincing a little painfully at what it might invidiously demonstrate?

However this might be, at any rate, one of the marks of the crisis was

a visible, a studied lapse, in Waymarsh, of betrayed concern. As if to

make up to his comrade for the stroke by which he had played providence

he now conspicuously ignored his movements, withdrew himself from the

pretension to share them, stiffened up his sensibility to neglect, and,

clasping his large empty hands and swinging his large restless foot,

clearly looked to another quarter for justice.

This made for independence on Strether’s part, and he had in truth at

no moment of his stay been so free to go and come. The early summer

brushed the picture over and blurred everything but the near; it made a

vast warm fragrant medium in which the elements floated together on the

best of terms, in which rewards were immediate and reckonings

postponed. Chad was out of town again, for the first time since his

visitor’s first view of him; he had explained this necessity—without

detail, yet also without embarrassment, the circumstance was one of

those which, in the young man’s life, testified to the variety of his

ties. Strether wasn’t otherwise concerned with it than for its so

testifying—a pleasant multitudinous image in which he took comfort. He

took comfort, by the same stroke, in the swing of Chad’s pendulum back

from that other swing, the sharp jerk towards Woollett, so stayed by

his own hand. He had the entertainment of thinking that if he had for

that moment stopped the clock it was to promote the next minute this

still livelier motion. He himself did what he hadn’t done before; he

took two or three times whole days off—irrespective of others, of two

or three taken with Miss Gostrey, two or three taken with little

Bilham: he went to Chartres and cultivated, before the front of the

cathedral, a general easy beatitude; he went to Fontainebleau and

imagined himself on the way to Italy; he went to Rouen with a little

handbag and inordinately spent the night.

One afternoon he did something quite different; finding himself in the

neighbourhood of a fine old house across the river, he passed under the

great arch of its doorway and asked at the porter’s lodge for Madame de

Vionnet. He had already hovered more than once about that possibility,

been aware of it, in the course of ostensible strolls, as lurking but

round the corner. Only it had perversely happened, after his morning at

Notre Dame, that his consistency, as he considered and intended it, had

come back to him; whereby he had reflected that the encounter in

question had been none of his making; clinging again intensely to the

strength of his position, which was precisely that there was nothing in

it for himself. From the moment he actively pursued the charming

associate of his adventure, from that moment his position weakened, for

he was then acting in an interested way. It was only within a few days

that he had fixed himself a limit: he promised himself his consistency

should end with Sarah’s arrival. It was arguing correctly to feel the

title to a free hand conferred on him by this event. If he wasn’t to be

let alone he should be merely a dupe to act with delicacy. If he wasn’t

to be trusted he could at least take his ease. If he was to be placed

under control he gained leave to try what his position _might_

agreeably give him. An ideal rigour would perhaps postpone the trial

till after the Pococks had shown their spirit; and it was to an ideal

rigour that he had quite promised himself to conform.

Suddenly, however, on this particular day, he felt a particular fear

under which everything collapsed. He knew abruptly that he was afraid

of himself—and yet not in relation to the effect on his sensibilities

of another hour of Madame de Vionnet. What he dreaded was the effect of

a single hour of Sarah Pocock, as to whom he was visited, in troubled

nights, with fantastic waking dreams. She loomed at him larger than

life; she increased in volume as she drew nearer; she so met his eyes

that, his imagination taking, after the first step, all, and more than

all, the strides, he already felt her come down on him, already burned,

under her reprobation, with the blush of guilt, already consented, by

way of penance, to the instant forfeiture of everything. He saw

himself, under her direction, recommitted to Woollett as juvenile

offenders are committed to reformatories. It wasn’t of course that

Woollett was really a place of discipline; but he knew in advance that

Sarah’s salon at the hotel would be. His danger, at any rate, in such

moods of alarm, was some concession, on this ground, that would involve

a sharp rupture with the actual; therefore if he waited to take leave

of that actual he might wholly miss his chance. It was represented with

supreme vividness by Madame de Vionnet, and that is why, in a word, he

waited no longer. He had seen in a flash that he must anticipate Mrs.

Pocock. He was accordingly much disappointed on now learning from the

portress that the lady of his quest was not in Paris. She had gone for

some days to the country. There was nothing in this accident but what

was natural; yet it produced for poor Strether a drop of all

confidence. It was suddenly as if he should never see her again, and as

if moreover he had brought it on himself by not having been quite kind

to her.

It was the advantage of his having let his fancy lose itself for a

little in the gloom that, as by reaction, the prospect began really to

brighten from the moment the deputation from Woollett alighted on the

platform of the station. They had come straight from Havre, having

sailed from New York to that port, and having also, thanks to a happy

voyage, made land with a promptitude that left Chad Newsome, who had

meant to meet them at the dock, belated. He had received their

telegram, with the announcement of their immediate further advance,

just as he was taking the train for Havre, so that nothing had remained

for him but to await them in Paris. He hastily picked up Strether, at

the hotel, for this purpose, and he even, with easy pleasantry,

suggested the attendance of Waymarsh as well—Waymarsh, at the moment

his cab rattled up, being engaged, under Strether’s contemplative

range, in a grave perambulation of the familiar court. Waymarsh had

learned from his companion, who had already had a note, delivered by

hand, from Chad, that the Pococks were due, and had ambiguously,

though, as always, impressively, glowered at him over the circumstance;

carrying himself in a manner in which Strether was now expert enough to

recognise his uncertainty, in the premises, as to the best tone. The

only tone he aimed at with confidence was a full tone—which was

necessarily difficult in the absence of a full knowledge. The Pococks

were a quantity as yet unmeasured, and, as he had practically brought

them over, so this witness had to that extent exposed himself. He

wanted to feel right about it, but could only, at the best, for the

time, feel vague. “I shall look to you, you know, immensely,” our

friend had said, “to help me with them,” and he had been quite

conscious of the effect of the remark, and of others of the same sort,

on his comrade’s sombre sensibility. He had insisted on the fact that

Waymarsh would quite like Mrs. Pocock—one could be certain he would: he

would be with her about everything, and she would also be with _him_,

and Miss Barrace’s nose, in short, would find itself out of joint.

Strether had woven this web of cheerfulness while they waited in the

court for Chad; he had sat smoking cigarettes to keep himself quiet

while, caged and leonine, his fellow traveller paced and turned before

him. Chad Newsome was doubtless to be struck, when he arrived, with the

sharpness of their opposition at this particular hour; he was to

remember, as a part of it, how Waymarsh came with him and with Strether

to the street and stood there with a face half-wistful and half-rueful.

They talked of him, the two others, as they drove, and Strether put

Chad in possession of much of his own strained sense of things. He had

already, a few days before, named to him the wire he was convinced

their friend had pulled—a confidence that had made on the young man’s

part quite hugely for curiosity and diversion. The action of the

matter, moreover, Strether could see, was to penetrate; he saw that is,

how Chad judged a system of influence in which Waymarsh had served as a

determinant—an impression just now quickened again; with the whole

bearing of such a fact on the youth’s view of his relatives. As it came

up between them that they might now take their friend for a feature of

the control of these latter now sought to be exerted from Woollett,

Strether felt indeed how it would be stamped all over him, half an hour

later for Sarah Pocock’s eyes, that he was as much on Chad’s “side” as

Waymarsh had probably described him. He was letting himself at present,

go; there was no denying it; it might be desperation, it might be

confidence; he should offer himself to the arriving travellers

bristling with all the lucidity he had cultivated.

He repeated to Chad what he had been saying in the court to Waymarsh;

how there was no doubt whatever that his sister would find the latter a

kindred spirit, no doubt of the alliance, based on an exchange of

views, that the pair would successfully strike up. They would become as

thick as thieves—which moreover was but a development of what Strether

remembered to have said in one of his first discussions with his mate,

struck as he had then already been with the elements of affinity

between that personage and Mrs. Newsome herself. “I told him, one day,

when he had questioned me on your mother, that she was a person who,

when he should know her, would rouse in him, I was sure, a special

enthusiasm; and that hangs together with the conviction we now

feel—this certitude that Mrs. Pocock will take him into her boat. For

it’s your mother’s own boat that she’s pulling.”

“Ah,” said Chad, “Mother’s worth fifty of Sally!”

“A thousand; but when you presently meet her, all the same you’ll be

meeting your mother’s representative—just as I shall. I feel like the

outgoing ambassador,” said Strether, “doing honour to his appointed

successor.” A moment after speaking as he had just done he felt he had

inadvertently rather cheapened Mrs. Newsome to her son; an impression

audibly reflected, as at first seen, in Chad’s prompt protest. He had

recently rather failed of apprehension of the young man’s attitude and

temper—remaining principally conscious of how little worry, at the

worst, he wasted, and he studied him at this critical hour with renewed

interest. Chad had done exactly what he had promised him a fortnight

previous—had accepted without another question his plea for delay. He

was waiting cheerfully and handsomely, but also inscrutably and with a

slight increase perhaps of the hardness originally involved in his

acquired high polish. He was neither excited nor depressed; was easy

and acute and deliberate—unhurried unflurried unworried, only at most a

little less amused than usual. Strether felt him more than ever a

justification of the extraordinary process of which his own absurd

spirit had been the arena; he knew as their cab rolled along, knew as

he hadn’t even yet known, that nothing else than what Chad had done and

had been would have led to his present showing. They had made him,

these things, what he was, and the business hadn’t been easy; it had

taken time and trouble, it had cost, above all, a price. The result at

any rate was now to be offered to Sally; which Strether, so far as that

was concerned, was glad to be there to witness. Would she in the least

make it out or take it in, the result, or would she in the least care

for it if she did? He scratched his chin as he asked himself by what

name, when challenged—as he was sure he should be—he could call it for

her. Oh those were determinations she must herself arrive at; since she

wanted so much to see, let her see then and welcome. She had come out

in the pride of her competence, yet it hummed in Strether’s inner sense

that she practically wouldn’t see.

That this was moreover what Chad shrewdly suspected was clear from a

word that next dropped from him. “They’re children; they play at

life!”—and the exclamation was significant and reassuring. It implied

that he hadn’t then, for his companion’s sensibility, appeared to give

Mrs. Newsome away; and it facilitated our friend’s presently asking him

if it were his idea that Mrs. Pocock and Madame de Vionnet should

become acquainted. Strether was still more sharply struck, hereupon,

with Chad’s lucidity. “Why, isn’t that exactly—to get a sight of the

company I keep—what she has come out for?”

“Yes—I’m afraid it is,” Strether unguardedly replied.

Chad’s quick rejoinder lighted his precipitation. “Why do you say

you’re afraid?”

“Well, because I feel a certain responsibility. It’s my testimony, I

imagine, that will have been at the bottom of Mrs. Pocock’s curiosity.

My letters, as I’ve supposed you to understand from the beginning, have

spoken freely. I’ve certainly said my little say about Madame de

Vionnet.”

All that, for Chad, was beautifully obvious. “Yes, but you’ve only

spoken handsomely.”

“Never more handsomely of any woman. But it’s just that tone—!”

“That tone,” said Chad, “that has fetched her? I dare say; but I’ve no

quarrel with you about it. And no more has Madame de Vionnet. Don’t you

know by this time how she likes you?”

“Oh!”—and Strether had, with his groan, a real pang of melancholy. “For

all I’ve done for her!”

“Ah you’ve done a great deal.”

Chad’s urbanity fairly shamed him, and he was at this moment absolutely

impatient to see the face Sarah Pocock would present to a sort of

thing, as he synthetically phrased it to himself, with no adequate

forecast of which, despite his admonitions, she would certainly arrive.

“I’ve done _this!_”

“Well, this is all right. She likes,” Chad comfortably remarked, “to be

liked.”

It gave his companion a moment’s thought. “And she’s sure Mrs. Pocock

_will_—?”

“No, I say that for you. She likes your liking her; it’s so much, as it

were,” Chad laughed, “to the good. However, she doesn’t despair of

Sarah either, and is prepared, on her own side, to go all lengths.”

“In the way of appreciation?”

“Yes, and of everything else. In the way of general amiability,

hospitality and welcome. She’s under arms,” Chad laughed again; “she’s

prepared.”

Strether took it in; then as if an echo of Miss Barrace were in the

air: “She’s wonderful.”

“You don’t begin to know _how_ wonderful!”

There was a depth in it, to Strether’s ear, of confirmed luxury—almost

a kind of unconscious insolence of proprietorship; but the effect of

the glimpse was not at this moment to foster speculation: there was

something so conclusive in so much graceful and generous assurance. It

was in fact a fresh evocation; and the evocation had before many

minutes another consequence. “Well, I shall see her oftener now. I

shall see her as much as I like—by your leave; which is what I hitherto

haven’t done.”

“It has been,” said Chad, but without reproach, “only your own fault. I

tried to bring you together, and _she_, my dear fellow—I never saw her

more charming to any man. But you’ve got your extraordinary ideas.”

“Well, I _did_ have,” Strether murmured, while he felt both how they

had possessed him and how they had now lost their authority. He

couldn’t have traced the sequence to the end, but it was all because of

Mrs. Pocock. Mrs. Pocock might be because of Mrs. Newsome, but that was

still to be proved. What came over him was the sense of having stupidly

failed to profit where profit would have been precious. It had been

open to him to see so much more of her, and he had but let the good

days pass. Fierce in him almost was the resolve to lose no more of

them, and he whimsically reflected, while at Chad’s side he drew nearer

to his destination, that it was after all Sarah who would have

quickened his chance. What her visit of inquisition might achieve in

other directions was as yet all obscure—only not obscure that it would

do supremely much to bring two earnest persons together. He had but to

listen to Chad at this moment to feel it; for Chad was in the act of

remarking to him that they of course both counted on him—he himself and

the other earnest person—for cheer and support. It was brave to

Strether to hear him talk as if the line of wisdom they had struck out

was to make things ravishing to the Pococks. No, if Madame de Vionnet

compassed _that_, compassed the ravishment of the Pococks, Madame de

Vionnet would be prodigious. It would be a beautiful plan if it

succeeded, and it all came to the question of Sarah’s being really

bribeable. The precedent of his own case helped Strether perhaps but

little to consider she might prove so; it being distinct that her

character would rather make for every possible difference. This idea of

his own bribeability set him apart for himself; with the further mark

in fact that his case was absolutely proved. He liked always, where

Lambert Strether was concerned, to know the worst, and what he now

seemed to know was not only that he was bribeable, but that he had been

effectually bribed. The only difficulty was that he couldn’t quite have

said with what. It was as if he had sold himself, but hadn’t somehow

got the cash. That, however, was what, characteristically, _would_

happen to him. It would naturally be his kind of traffic. While he

thought of these things he reminded Chad of the truth they mustn’t lose

sight of—the truth that, with all deference to her susceptibility to

new interests, Sarah would have come out with a high firm definite

purpose. “She hasn’t come out, you know, to be bamboozled. We may all

be ravishing—nothing perhaps can be more easy for us; but she hasn’t

come out to be ravished. She has come out just simply to take you

home.”

“Oh well, with _her_ I’ll go,” said Chad good-humouredly. “I suppose

you’ll allow _that_.” And then as for a minute Strether said nothing:

“Or is your idea that when I’ve seen her I shan’t want to go?” As this

question, however, again left his friend silent he presently went on:

“My own idea at any rate is that they shall have while they’re here the

best sort of time.”

It was at this that Strether spoke. “Ah there you are! I think if you

really wanted to go—!”

“Well?” said Chad to bring it out.

“Well, you wouldn’t trouble about our good time. You wouldn’t care what

sort of a time we have.”

Chad could always take in the easiest way in the world any ingenious

suggestion. “I see. But can I help it? I’m too decent.”

“Yes, you’re too decent!” Strether heavily sighed. And he felt for the

moment as if it were the preposterous end of his mission.

It ministered for the time to this temporary effect that Chad made no

rejoinder. But he spoke again as they came in sight of the station. “Do

you mean to introduce her to Miss Gostrey?”

As to this Strether was ready. “No.”

“But haven’t you told me they know about her?”

“I think I’ve told you your mother knows.”

“And won’t she have told Sally?”

“That’s one of the things I want to see.”

“And if you find she _has_—?”

“Will I then, you mean, bring them together?”

“Yes,” said Chad with his pleasant promptness: “to show her there’s

nothing in it.”

Strether hesitated. “I don’t know that I care very much what she may

think there’s in it.”

“Not if it represents what Mother thinks?”

“Ah what _does_ your mother think?” There was in this some sound of

bewilderment.

But they were just driving up, and help, of a sort, might after all be

quite at hand. “Isn’t that, my dear man, what we’re both just going to

make out?”

II

Strether quitted the station half an hour later in different company.

Chad had taken charge, for the journey to the hotel, of Sarah, Mamie,

the maid and the luggage, all spaciously installed and conveyed; and it

was only after the four had rolled away that his companion got into a

cab with Jim. A strange new feeling had come over Strether, in

consequence of which his spirits had risen; it was as if what had

occurred on the alighting of his critics had been something other than

his fear, though his fear had yet not been of an instant scene of

violence. His impression had been nothing but what was inevitable—he

said that to himself; yet relief and reassurance had softly dropped

upon him. Nothing could be so odd as to be indebted for these things to

the look of faces and the sound of voices that had been with him to

satiety, as he might have said, for years; but he now knew, all the

same, how uneasy he had felt; that was brought home to him by his

present sense of a respite. It had come moreover in the flash of an

eye, it had come in the smile with which Sarah, whom, at the window of

her compartment, they had effusively greeted from the platform, rustled

down to them a moment later, fresh and handsome from her cool June

progress through the charming land. It was only a sign, but enough: she

was going to be gracious and unallusive, she was going to play the

larger game—which was still more apparent, after she had emerged from

Chad’s arms, in her direct greeting to the valued friend of her family.

Strether _was_ then as much as ever the valued friend of her family, it

was something he could at all events go on with; and the manner of his

response to it expressed even for himself how little he had enjoyed the

prospect of ceasing to figure in that likeness. He had always seen

Sarah gracious—had in fact rarely seen her shy or dry, her marked

thin-lipped smile, intense without brightness and as prompt to act as

the scrape of a safety-match; the protrusion of her rather remarkably

long chin, which in her case represented invitation and urbanity, and

not, as in most others, pugnacity and defiance; the penetration of her

voice to a distance, the general encouragement and approval of her

manner, were all elements with which intercourse had made him familiar,

but which he noted today almost as if she had been a new acquaintance.

This first glimpse of her had given a brief but vivid accent to her

resemblance to her mother; he could have taken her for Mrs. Newsome

while she met his eyes as the train rolled into the station. It was an

impression that quickly dropped; Mrs. Newsome was much handsomer, and

while Sarah inclined to the massive her mother had, at an age, still

the girdle of a maid; also the latter’s chin was rather short, than

long, and her smile, by good fortune, much more, oh ever so much more,

mercifully vague. Strether had seen Mrs. Newsome reserved; he had

literally heard her silent, though he had never known her unpleasant.

It was the case with Mrs. Pocock that he had known _her_ unpleasant,

even though he had never known her not affable. She had forms of

affability that were in a high degree assertive; nothing for instance

had ever been more striking than that she was affable to Jim.

What had told in any case at the window of the train was her high clear

forehead, that forehead which her friends, for some reason, always

thought of as a “brow”; the long reach of her eyes—it came out at this

juncture in such a manner as to remind him, oddly enough, also of that

of Waymarsh’s; and the unusual gloss of her dark hair, dressed and

hatted, after her mother’s refined example, with such an avoidance of

extremes that it was always spoken of at Woollett as “their own.”

Though this analogy dropped as soon as she was on the platform it had

lasted long enough to make him feel all the advantage, as it were, of

his relief. The woman at home, the woman to whom he was attached, was

before him just long enough to give him again the measure of the

wretchedness, in fact really of the shame, of their having to recognise

the formation, between them, of a “split.” He had taken this measure in

solitude and meditation: but the catastrophe, as Sarah steamed up,

looked for its seconds unprecedentedly dreadful—or proved, more

exactly, altogether unthinkable; so that his finding something free and

familiar to respond to brought with it an instant renewal of his

loyalty. He had suddenly sounded the whole depth, had gasped at what he

might have lost.

Well, he could now, for the quarter of an hour of their detention hover

about the travellers as soothingly as if their direct message to him

was that he had lost nothing. He wasn’t going to have Sarah write to

her mother that night that he was in any way altered or strange. There

had been times enough for a month when it had seemed to him that he was

strange, that he was altered, in every way; but that was a matter for

himself; he knew at least whose business it was _not_; it was not at

all events such a circumstance as Sarah’s own unaided lights would help

her to. Even if she had come out to flash those lights more than yet

appeared she wouldn’t make much headway against mere pleasantness. He

counted on being able to be merely pleasant to the end, and if only

from incapacity moreover to formulate anything different. He couldn’t

even formulate to himself his being changed and queer; it had taken

place, the process, somewhere deep down; Maria Gostrey had caught

glimpses of it; but how was he to fish it up, even if he desired, for

Mrs. Pocock? This was then the spirit in which he hovered, and with the

easier throb in it much indebted furthermore to the impression of high

and established adequacy as a pretty girl promptly produced in him by

Mamie. He had wondered vaguely—turning over many things in the fidget

of his thoughts—if Mamie _were_ as pretty as Woollett published her; as

to which issue seeing her now again was to be so swept away by

Woollett’s opinion that this consequence really let loose for the

imagination an avalanche of others. There were positively five minutes

in which the last word seemed of necessity to abide with a Woollett

represented by a Mamie. This was the sort of truth the place itself

would feel; it would send her forth in confidence; it would point to

her with triumph; it would take its stand on her with assurance; it

would be conscious of no requirements she didn’t meet, of no question

she couldn’t answer.

Well, it was right, Strether slipped smoothly enough into the

cheerfulness of saying: granted that a community _might_ be best

represented by a young lady of twenty-two, Mamie perfectly played the

part, played it as if she were used to it, and looked and spoke and

dressed the character. He wondered if she mightn’t, in the high light

of Paris, a cool full studio-light, becoming yet treacherous, show as

too conscious of these matters; but the next moment he felt satisfied

that her consciousness was after all empty for its size, rather too

simple than too mixed, and that the kind way with her would be not to

take many things out of it, but to put as many as possible in. She was

robust and conveniently tall; just a trifle too bloodlessly fair

perhaps, but with a pleasant public familiar radiance that affirmed her

vitality. She might have been “receiving” for Woollett, wherever she

found herself, and there was something in her manner, her tone, her

motion, her pretty blue eyes, her pretty perfect teeth and her very

small, too small, nose, that immediately placed her, to the fancy,

between the windows of a hot bright room in which voices were high—up

at that end to which people were brought to be “presented.” They were

there to congratulate, these images, and Strether’s renewed vision, on

this hint, completed the idea. What Mamie was like was the happy bride,

the bride after the church and just before going away. She wasn’t the

mere maiden, and yet was only as much married as that quantity came to.

She was in the brilliant acclaimed festal stage. Well, might it last

her long!

Strether rejoiced in these things for Chad, who was all genial

attention to the needs of his friends, besides having arranged that his

servant should reinforce him; the ladies were certainly pleasant to

see, and Mamie would be at any time and anywhere pleasant to exhibit.

She would look extraordinarily like his young wife—the wife of a

honeymoon, should he go about with her; but that was his own affair—or

perhaps it was hers; it was at any rate something she couldn’t help.

Strether remembered how he had seen him come up with Jeanne de Vionnet

in Gloriani’s garden, and the fancy he had had about that—the fancy

obscured now, thickly overlaid with others; the recollection was during

these minutes his only note of trouble. He had often, in spite of

himself, wondered if Chad but too probably were not with Jeanne the

object of a still and shaded flame. It was on the cards that the child

_might_ be tremulously in love, and this conviction now flickered up

not a bit the less for his disliking to think of it, for its being, in

a complicated situation, a complication the more, and for something

indescribable in Mamie, something at all events straightway lent her by

his own mind, something that gave her value, gave her intensity and

purpose, as the symbol of an opposition. Little Jeanne wasn’t really at

all in question—how _could_ she be?—yet from the moment Miss Pocock had

shaken her skirts on the platform, touched up the immense bows of her

hat and settled properly over her shoulder the strap of her

morocco-and-gilt travelling-satchel, from that moment little Jeanne was

opposed.

It was in the cab with Jim that impressions really crowded on Strether,

giving him the strangest sense of length of absence from people among

whom he had lived for years. Having them thus come out to him was as if

he had returned to find them: and the droll promptitude of Jim’s mental

reaction threw his own initiation far back into the past. Whoever might

or mightn’t be suited by what was going on among them, Jim, for one,

would certainly be: his instant recognition—frank and whimsical—of what

the affair was for _him_ gave Strether a glow of pleasure. “I say, you

know, this _is_ about my shape, and if it hadn’t been for _you_—!” so

he broke out as the charming streets met his healthy appetite; and he

wound up, after an expressive nudge, with a clap of his companion’s

knee and an “Oh you, you—you _are_ doing it!” that was charged with

rich meaning. Strether felt in it the intention of homage, but, with a

curiosity otherwise occupied, postponed taking it up. What he was

asking himself for the time was how Sarah Pocock, in the opportunity

already given her, had judged her brother—from whom he himself, as they

finally, at the station, separated for their different conveyances, had

had a look into which he could read more than one message. However

Sarah was judging her brother, Chad’s conclusion about his sister, and

about her husband and her husband’s sister, was at the least on the way

not to fail of confidence. Strether felt the confidence, and that, as

the look between them was an exchange, what he himself gave back was

relatively vague. This comparison of notes however could wait;

everything struck him as depending on the effect produced by Chad.

Neither Sarah nor Mamie had in any way, at the station—where they had

had after all ample time—broken out about it; which, to make up for

this, was what our friend had expected of Jim as soon as they should

find themselves together.

It was queer to him that he had that noiseless brush with Chad; an

ironic intelligence with this youth on the subject of his relatives, an

intelligence carried on under their nose and, as might be said, at

their expense—such a matter marked again for him strongly the number of

stages he had come; albeit that if the number seemed great the time

taken for the final one was but the turn of a hand. He had before this

had many moments of wondering if he himself weren’t perhaps changed

even as Chad was changed. Only what in Chad was conspicuous

improvement—well, he had no name ready for the working, in his own

organism, of his own more timid dose. He should have to see first what

this action would amount to. And for his occult passage with the young

man, after all, the directness of it had no greater oddity than the

fact that the young man’s way with the three travellers should have

been so happy a manifestation. Strether liked him for it, on the spot,

as he hadn’t yet liked him; it affected him while it lasted as he might

have been affected by some light pleasant perfect work of art: to that

degree that he wondered if they were really worthy of it, took it in

and did it justice; to that degree that it would have been scarce a

miracle if, there in the luggage-room, while they waited for their

things, Sarah had pulled his sleeve and drawn him aside. “You’re right;

we haven’t quite known what you mean, Mother and I, but now we see.

Chad’s magnificent; what can one want more? If _this_ is the kind of

thing—!” On which they might, as it were, have embraced and begun to

work together.

Ah how much, as it was, for all her bridling brightness—which was

merely general and noticed nothing—_would_ they work together? Strether

knew he was unreasonable; he set it down to his being nervous: people

couldn’t notice everything and speak of everything in a quarter of an

hour. Possibly, no doubt, also, he made too much of Chad’s display.

Yet, none the less, when, at the end of five minutes, in the cab, Jim

Pocock had said nothing either—hadn’t said, that is, what Strether

wanted, though he had said much else—it all suddenly bounced back to

their being either stupid or wilful. It was more probably on the whole

the former; so that that would be the drawback of the bridling

brightness. Yes, they would bridle and be bright; they would make the

best of what was before them, but their observation would fail; it

would be beyond them; they simply wouldn’t understand. Of what use

would it be then that they had come?—if they weren’t to be intelligent

up to _that_ point: unless indeed he himself were utterly deluded and

extravagant? Was he, on this question of Chad’s improvement, fantastic

and away from the truth? Did he live in a false world, a world that had

grown simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritation—in the

face now of Jim’s silence in particular—but the alarm of the vain thing

menaced by the touch of the real? Was this contribution of the real

possibly the mission of the Pococks?—had they come to make the work of

observation, as _he_ had practised observation, crack and crumble, and

to reduce Chad to the plain terms in which honest minds could deal with

him? Had they come in short to be sane where Strether was destined to

feel that he himself had only been silly?

He glanced at such a contingency, but it failed to hold him long when

once he had reflected that he would have been silly, in this case, with

Maria Gostrey and little Bilham, with Madame de Vionnet and little

Jeanne, with Lambert Strether, in fine, and above all with Chad Newsome

himself. Wouldn’t it be found to have made more for reality to be silly

with these persons than sane with Sarah and Jim? Jim in fact, he

presently made up his mind, was individually out of it; Jim didn’t

care; Jim hadn’t come out either for Chad or for him; Jim in short left

the moral side to Sally and indeed simply availed himself now, for the

sense of recreation, of the fact that he left almost everything to

Sally. He was nothing compared to Sally, and not so much by reason of

Sally’s temper and will as by that of her more developed type and

greater acquaintance with the world. He quite frankly and serenely

confessed, as he sat there with Strether, that he felt his type hang

far in the rear of his wife’s and still further, if possible, in the

rear of his sister’s. Their types, he well knew, were recognised and

acclaimed; whereas the most a leading Woollett business-man could hope

to achieve socially, and for that matter industrially, was a certain

freedom to play into this general glamour.

The impression he made on our friend was another of the things that

marked our friend’s road. It was a strange impression, especially as so

soon produced; Strether had received it, he judged, all in the twenty

minutes; it struck him at least as but in a minor degree the work of

the long Woollett years. Pocock was normally and consentingly though

not quite wittingly out of the question. It was despite his being

normal; it was despite his being cheerful; it was despite his being a

leading Woollett business-man; and the determination of his fate left

him thus perfectly usual—as everything else about it was clearly, to

his sense, not less so. He seemed to say that there was a whole side of

life on which the perfectly usual _was_ for leading Woollett

business-men to be out of the question. He made no more of it than

that, and Strether, so far as Jim was concerned, desired to make no

more. Only Strether’s imagination, as always, worked, and he asked

himself if this side of life were not somehow connected, for those who

figured on it with the fact of marriage. Would _his_ relation to it,

had he married ten years before, have become now the same as Pocock’s?

Might it even become the same should he marry in a few months? Should

he ever know himself as much out of the question for Mrs. Newsome as

Jim knew himself—in a dim way—for Mrs. Jim?

To turn his eyes in that direction was to be personally reassured; he

was different from Pocock; he had affirmed himself differently and was

held after all in higher esteem. What none the less came home to him,

however, at this hour, was that the society over there, that of which

Sarah and Mamie—and, in a more eminent way, Mrs. Newsome herself—were

specimens, was essentially a society of women, and that poor Jim wasn’t

in it. He himself Lambert Strether, _was_ as yet in some degree—which

was an odd situation for a man; but it kept coming back to him in a

whimsical way that he should perhaps find his marriage had cost him his

place. This occasion indeed, whatever that fancy represented, was not a

time of sensible exclusion for Jim, who was in a state of manifest

response to the charm of his adventure. Small and fat and constantly

facetious, straw-coloured and destitute of marks, he would have been

practically indistinguishable hadn’t his constant preference for

light-grey clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and very little

stories, done what it could for his identity. There were signs in him,

though none of them plaintive, of always paying for others; and the

principal one perhaps was just this failure of type. It was with this

that he paid, rather than with fatigue or waste; and also doubtless a

little with the effort of humour—never irrelevant to the conditions, to

the relations, with which he was acquainted.

He gurgled his joy as they rolled through the happy streets; he

declared that his trip was a regular windfall, and that he wasn’t

there, he was eager to remark, to hang back from anything: he didn’t

know quite what Sally had come for, but _he_ had come for a good time.

Strether indulged him even while wondering if what Sally wanted her

brother to go back for was to become like her husband. He trusted that

a good time was to be, out and out, the programme for all of them; and

he assented liberally to Jim’s proposal that, disencumbered and

irresponsible—his things were in the omnibus with those of the

others—they should take a further turn round before going to the hotel.

It wasn’t for _him_ to tackle Chad—it was Sally’s job; and as it would

be like her, he felt, to open fire on the spot, it wouldn’t be amiss of

them to hold off and give her time. Strether, on his side, only asked

to give her time; so he jogged with his companion along boulevards and

avenues, trying to extract from meagre material some forecast of his

catastrophe. He was quick enough to see that Jim Pocock declined

judgement, had hovered quite round the outer edge of discussion and

anxiety, leaving all analysis of their question to the ladies alone and

now only feeling his way toward some small droll cynicism. It broke out

afresh, the cynicism—it had already shown a flicker—in a but slightly

deferred: “Well, hanged if I would if _I_ were he!”

“You mean you wouldn’t in Chad’s place—?”

“Give up this to go back and boss the advertising!” Poor Jim, with his

arms folded and his little legs out in the open fiacre, drank in the

sparkling Paris noon and carried his eyes from one side of their vista

to the other. “Why I want to come right out and live here myself. And I

want to live while I _am_ here too. I feel with _you_—oh you’ve been

grand, old man, and I’ve twigged—that it ain’t right to worry Chad. _I_

don’t mean to persecute him; I couldn’t in conscience. It’s thanks to

you at any rate that I’m here, and I’m sure I’m much obliged. You’re a

lovely pair.”

There were things in this speech that Strether let pass for the time.

“Don’t you then think it important the advertising should be thoroughly

taken in hand? Chad _will_ be, so far as capacity is concerned,” he

went on, “the man to do it.”

“Where did he get his capacity,” Jim asked, “over here?”

“He didn’t get it over here, and the wonderful thing is that over here

he hasn’t inevitably lost it. He has a natural turn for business, an

extraordinary head. He comes by that,” Strether explained, “honestly

enough. He’s in that respect his father’s son, and also—for she’s

wonderful in her way too—his mother’s. He has other tastes and other

tendencies; but Mrs. Newsome and your wife are quite right about his

having that. He’s very remarkable.”

“Well, I guess he is!” Jim Pocock comfortably sighed. “But if you’ve

believed so in his making us hum, why have you so prolonged the

discussion? Don’t you know we’ve been quite anxious about you?”

These questions were not informed with earnestness, but Strether saw he

must none the less make a choice and take a line. “Because, you see,

I’ve greatly liked it. I’ve liked my Paris, I dare say I’ve liked it

too much.”

“Oh you old wretch!” Jim gaily exclaimed.

“But nothing’s concluded,” Strether went on. “The case is more complex

than it looks from Woollett.”

“Oh well, it looks bad enough from Woollett!” Jim declared.

“Even after all I’ve written?”

Jim bethought himself. “Isn’t it what you’ve written that has made Mrs.

Newsome pack us off? That at least and Chad’s not turning up?”

Strether made a reflexion of his own. “I see. That she should do

something was, no doubt, inevitable, and your wife has therefore of

course come out to act.”

“Oh yes,” Jim concurred—“to act. But Sally comes out to act, you know,”

he lucidly added, “every time she leaves the house. She never comes out

but she _does_ act. She’s acting moreover now for her mother, and that

fixes the scale.” Then he wound up, opening all his senses to it, with

a renewed embrace of pleasant Paris. “We haven’t all the same at

Woollett got anything like this.”

Strether continued to consider. “I’m bound to say for you all that you

strike me as having arrived in a very mild and reasonable frame of

mind. You don’t show your claws. I felt just now in Mrs. Pocock no

symptom of that. She isn’t fierce,” he went on. “I’m such a nervous

idiot that I thought she might be.”

“Oh don’t you know her well enough,” Pocock asked, “to have noticed

that she never gives herself away, any more than her mother ever does?

They ain’t fierce, either of ‘em; they let you come quite close. They

wear their fur the smooth side out—the warm side in. Do you know what

they are?” Jim pursued as he looked about him, giving the question, as

Strether felt, but half his care—“do you know what they are? They’re

about as intense as they can live.”

“Yes”—and Strether’s concurrence had a positive precipitation; “they’re

about as intense as they can live.”

“They don’t lash about and shake the cage,” said Jim, who seemed

pleased with his analogy; “and it’s at feeding-time that they’re

quietest. But they always get there.”

“They do indeed—they always get there!” Strether replied with a laugh

that justified his confession of nervousness. He disliked to be talking

sincerely of Mrs. Newsome with Pocock; he could have talked

insincerely. But there was something he wanted to know, a need created

in him by her recent intermission, by his having given from the first

so much, as now more than ever appeared to him, and got so little. It

was as if a queer truth in his companion’s metaphor had rolled over him

with a rush. She _had_ been quiet at feeding-time; she had fed, and

Sarah had fed with her, out of the big bowl of all his recent free

communication, his vividness and pleasantness, his ingenuity and even

his eloquence, while the current of her response had steadily run thin.

Jim meanwhile however, it was true, slipped characteristically into

shallowness from the moment he ceased to speak out of the experience of

a husband.

“But of course Chad has now the advantage of being there before her. If

he doesn’t work that for all it’s worth—!” He sighed with contingent

pity at his brother-in-law’s possible want of resource. “He has worked

it on _you_, pretty well, eh?” and he asked the next moment if there

were anything new at the Varieties, which he pronounced in the American

manner. They talked about the Varieties—Strether confessing to a

knowledge which produced again on Pocock’s part a play of innuendo as

vague as a nursery-rhyme, yet as aggressive as an elbow in his side;

and they finished their drive under the protection of easy themes.

Strether waited to the end, but still in vain, for any show that Jim

had seen Chad as different; and he could scarce have explained the

discouragement he drew from the absence of this testimony. It was what

he had taken his own stand on, so far as he had taken a stand; and if

they were all only going to see nothing he had only wasted his time. He

gave his friend till the very last moment, till they had come into

sight of the hotel; and when poor Pocock only continued cheerful and

envious and funny he fairly grew to dislike him, to feel him

extravagantly common. If they were _all_ going to see nothing!—Strether

knew, as this came back to him, that he was also letting Pocock

represent for him what Mrs. Newsome wouldn’t see. He went on disliking,

in the light of Jim’s commonness, to talk to him about that lady; yet

just before the cab pulled up he knew the extent of his desire for the

real word from Woollett.

“Has Mrs. Newsome at all given way—?”

“‘Given way’?”—Jim echoed it with the practical derision of his sense

of a long past.

“Under the strain, I mean, of hope deferred, of disappointment repeated

and thereby intensified.”

“Oh is she prostrate, you mean?”—he had his categories in hand. “Why

yes, she’s prostrate—just as Sally is. But they’re never so lively, you

know, as when they’re prostrate.”

“Ah Sarah’s prostrate?” Strether vaguely murmured.

“It’s when they’re prostrate that they most sit up.”

“And Mrs. Newsome’s sitting up?”

“All night, my boy—for _you!_” And Jim fetched him, with a vulgar

little guffaw, a thrust that gave relief to the picture. But he had got

what he wanted. He felt on the spot that this _was_ the real word from

Woollett. “So don’t you go home!” Jim added while he alighted and while

his friend, letting him profusely pay the cabman, sat on in a momentary

muse. Strether wondered if that were the real word too.

III

As the door of Mrs. Pocock’s salon was pushed open for him, the next

day, well before noon, he was reached by a voice with a charming sound

that made him just falter before crossing the threshold. Madame de

Vionnet was already on the field, and this gave the drama a quicker

pace than he felt it as yet—though his suspense had increased—in the

power of any act of his own to do. He had spent the previous evening

with all his old friends together yet he would still have described

himself as quite in the dark in respect to a forecast of their

influence on his situation. It was strange now, none the less, that in

the light of this unexpected note of her presence he felt Madame de

Vionnet a part of that situation as she hadn’t even yet been. She was

alone, he found himself assuming, with Sarah, and there was a bearing

in that—somehow beyond his control—on his personal fate. Yet she was

only saying something quite easy and independent—the thing she had

come, as a good friend of Chad’s, on purpose to say. “There isn’t

anything at all—? I should be so delighted.”

It was clear enough, when they were there before him, how she had been

received. He saw this, as Sarah got up to greet him, from something

fairly hectic in Sarah’s face. He saw furthermore that they weren’t, as

had first come to him, alone together; he was at no loss as to the

identity of the broad high back presented to him in the embrasure of

the window furthest from the door. Waymarsh, whom he had to-day not yet

seen, whom he only knew to have left the hotel before him, and who had

taken part, the night previous, on Mrs. Pocock’s kind invitation,

conveyed by Chad, in the entertainment, informal but cordial, promptly

offered by that lady—Waymarsh had anticipated him even as Madame de

Vionnet had done, and, with his hands in his pockets and his attitude

unaffected by Strether’s entrance, was looking out, in marked

detachment, at the Rue de Rivoli. The latter felt it in the air—it was

immense how Waymarsh could mark things—-that he had remained deeply

dissociated from the overture to their hostess that we have recorded on

Madame de Vionnet’s side. He had, conspicuously, tact, besides a stiff

general view; and this was why he had left Mrs. Pocock to struggle

alone. He would outstay the visitor; he would unmistakeably wait; to

what had he been doomed for months past but waiting? Therefore she was

to feel that she had him in reserve. What support she drew from this

was still to be seen, for, although Sarah was vividly bright, she had

given herself up for the moment to an ambiguous flushed formalism. She

had had to reckon more quickly than she expected; but it concerned her

first of all to signify that she was not to be taken unawares. Strether

arrived precisely in time for her showing it. “Oh you’re too good; but

I don’t think I feel quite helpless. I have my brother—and these

American friends. And then you know I’ve been to Paris. I _know_

Paris,” said Sally Pocock in a tone that breathed a certain chill on

Strether’s heart.

“Ah but a woman, in this tiresome place where everything’s always

changing, a woman of good will,” Madame de Vionnet threw off, “can

always help a woman. I’m sure you ‘know’—but we know perhaps different

things.” She too, visibly, wished to make no mistake; but it was a fear

of a different order and more kept out of sight. She smiled in welcome

at Strether; she greeted him more familiarly than Mrs. Pocock; she put

out her hand to him without moving from her place; and it came to him

in the course of a minute and in the oddest way that—yes,

positively—she was giving him over to ruin. She was all kindness and

ease, but she couldn’t help so giving him; she was exquisite, and her

being just as she was poured for Sarah a sudden rush of meaning into

his own equivocations. How could she know how she was hurting him? She

wanted to show as simple and humble—in the degree compatible with

operative charm; but it was just this that seemed to put him on her

side. She struck him as dressed, as arranged, as prepared infinitely to

conciliate—with the very poetry of good taste in her view of the

conditions of her early call. She was ready to advise about dressmakers

and shops; she held herself wholly at the disposition of Chad’s family.

Strether noticed her card on the table—her coronet and her

“Comtesse”—and the imagination was sharp in him of certain private

adjustments in Sarah’s mind. She had never, he was sure, sat with a

“Comtesse” before, and such was the specimen of that class he had been

keeping to play on her. She had crossed the sea very particularly for a

look at her; but he read in Madame de Vionnet’s own eyes that this

curiosity hadn’t been so successfully met as that she herself wouldn’t

now have more than ever need of him. She looked much as she had looked

to him that morning at Notre Dame; he noted in fact the suggestive

sameness of her discreet and delicate dress. It seemed to speak—perhaps

a little prematurely or too finely—of the sense in which she would help

Mrs. Pocock with the shops. The way that lady took her in, moreover,

added depth to his impression of what Miss Gostrey, by their common

wisdom, had escaped. He winced as he saw himself but for that timely

prudence ushering in Maria as a guide and an example. There was however

a touch of relief for him in his glimpse, so far as he had got it, of

Sarah’s line. She “knew Paris.” Madame de Vionnet had, for that matter,

lightly taken this up. “Ah then you’ve a turn for that, an affinity

that belongs to your family. Your brother, though his long experience

makes a difference, I admit, has become one of us in a marvellous way.”

And she appealed to Strether in the manner of a woman who could always

glide off with smoothness into another subject. Wasn’t _he_ struck with

the way Mr. Newsome had made the place his own, and hadn’t he been in a

position to profit by his friend’s wondrous expertness?

Strether felt the bravery, at the least, of her presenting herself so

promptly to sound that note, and yet asked himself what other note,

after all, she _could_ strike from the moment she presented herself at

all. She could meet Mrs. Pocock only on the ground of the obvious, and

what feature of Chad’s situation was more eminent than the fact that he

had created for himself a new set of circumstances? Unless she hid

herself altogether she could show but as one of these, an illustration

of his domiciled and indeed of his confirmed condition. And the

consciousness of all this in her charming eyes was so clear and fine

that as she thus publicly drew him into her boat she produced in him

such a silent agitation as he was not to fail afterwards to denounce as

pusillanimous. “Ah don’t be so charming to me!—for it makes us

intimate, and after all what _is_ between us when I’ve been so

tremendously on my guard and have seen you but half a dozen times?” He

recognised once more the perverse law that so inveterately governed his

poor personal aspects: it would be exactly _like_ the way things always

turned out for him that he should affect Mrs. Pocock and Waymarsh as

launched in a relation in which he had really never been launched at

all. They were at this very moment—they could only be—attributing to

him the full licence of it, and all by the operation of her own tone

with him; whereas his sole licence had been to cling with intensity to

the brink, not to dip so much as a toe into the flood. But the flicker

of his fear on this occasion was not, as may be added, to repeat

itself; it sprang up, for its moment, only to die down and then go out

for ever. To meet his fellow visitor’s invocation and, with Sarah’s

brilliant eyes on him, answer, _was_ quite sufficiently to step into

her boat. During the rest of the time her visit lasted he felt himself

proceed to each of the proper offices, successively, for helping to

keep the adventurous skiff afloat. It rocked beneath him, but he

settled himself in his place. He took up an oar and, since he was to

have the credit of pulling, pulled.

“That will make it all the pleasanter if it so happens that we _do_

meet,” Madame de Vionnet had further observed in reference to Mrs.

Pocock’s mention of her initiated state; and she had immediately added

that, after all, her hostess couldn’t be in need with the good offices

of Mr. Strether so close at hand. “It’s he, I gather, who has learnt to

know his Paris, and to love it, better than any one ever before in so

short a time; so that between him and your brother, when it comes to

the point, how can you possibly want for good guidance? The great

thing, Mr. Strether will show you,” she smiled, “is just to let one’s

self go.”

“Oh I’ve not let myself go very far,” Strether answered, feeling quite

as if he had been called upon to hint to Mrs. Pocock how Parisians

could talk. “I’m only afraid of showing I haven’t let myself go far

enough. I’ve taken a good deal of time, but I must quite have had the

air of not budging from one spot.” He looked at Sarah in a manner that

he thought she might take as engaging, and he made, under Madame de

Vionnet’s protection, as it were, his first personal point. “What has

really happened has been that, all the while, I’ve done what I came out

for.”

Yet it only at first gave Madame de Vionnet a chance immediately to

take him up. “You’ve renewed acquaintance with your friend—you’ve

learnt to know him again.” She spoke with such cheerful helpfulness

that they might, in a common cause, have been calling together and

pledged to mutual aid.

Waymarsh, at this, as if he had been in question, straightway turned

from the window. “Oh yes, Countess—he has renewed acquaintance with

_me_, and he _has_, I guess, learnt something about me, though I don’t

know how much he has liked it. It’s for Strether himself to say whether

he has felt it justifies his course.”

“Oh but _you_,” said the Countess gaily, “are not in the least what he

came out for—is he really, Strether? and I hadn’t you at all in my

mind. I was thinking of Mr. Newsome, of whom we think so much and with

whom, precisely, Mrs. Pocock has given herself the opportunity to take

up threads. What a pleasure for you both!” Madame de Vionnet, with her

eyes on Sarah, bravely continued.

Mrs. Pocock met her handsomely, but Strether quickly saw she meant to

accept no version of her movements or plans from any other lips. She

required no patronage and no support, which were but other names for a

false position; she would show in her own way what she chose to show,

and this she expressed with a dry glitter that recalled to him a fine

Woollett winter morning. “I’ve never wanted for opportunities to see my

brother. We’ve many things to think of at home, and great

responsibilities and occupations, and our home’s not an impossible

place. We’ve plenty of reasons,” Sarah continued a little piercingly,

“for everything we do”—and in short she wouldn’t give herself the least

little scrap away. But she added as one who was always bland and who

could afford a concession: “I’ve come because—well, because we do

come.”

“Ah then fortunately!”—Madame de Vionnet breathed it to the air. Five

minutes later they were on their feet for her to take leave, standing

together in an affability that had succeeded in surviving a further

exchange of remarks; only with the emphasised appearance on Waymarsh’s

part of a tendency to revert, in a ruminating manner and as with an

instinctive or a precautionary lightening of his tread, to an open

window and his point of vantage. The glazed and gilded room, all red

damask, ormolu, mirrors, clocks, looked south, and the shutters were

bowed upon the summer morning; but the Tuileries garden and what was

beyond it, over which the whole place hung, were things visible through

gaps; so that the far-spreading presence of Paris came up in coolness,

dimness and invitation, in the twinkle of gilt-tipped palings, the

crunch of gravel, the click of hoofs, the crack of whips, things that

suggested some parade of the circus. “I think it probable,” said Mrs.

Pocock, “that I shall have the opportunity of going to my brother’s.

I’ve no doubt it’s very pleasant indeed.” She spoke as to Strether, but

her face was turned with an intensity of brightness to Madame de

Vionnet, and there was a moment during which, while she thus fronted

her, our friend expected to hear her add: “I’m much obliged to you, I’m

sure, for inviting me there.” He guessed that for five seconds these

words were on the point of coming; he heard them as clearly as if they

had been spoken; but he presently knew they had just failed—knew it by

a glance, quick and fine, from Madame de Vionnet, which told him that

she too had felt them in the air, but that the point had luckily not

been made in any manner requiring notice. This left her free to reply

only to what had been said.

“That the Boulevard Malesherbes may be common ground for us offers me

the best prospect I see for the pleasure of meeting you again.”

“Oh I shall come to see you, since you’ve been so good”: and Mrs.

Pocock looked her invader well in the eyes. The flush in Sarah’s cheeks

had by this time settled to a small definite crimson spot that was not

without its own bravery; she held her head a good deal up, and it came

to Strether that of the two, at this moment, she was the one who most

carried out the idea of a Countess. He quite took in, however, that she

would really return her visitor’s civility: she wouldn’t report again

at Woollett without at least so much producible history as that in her

pocket.

“I want extremely to be able to show you my little daughter.” Madame de

Vionnet went on; “and I should have brought her with me if I hadn’t

wished first to ask your leave. I was in hopes I should perhaps find

Miss Pocock, of whose being with you I’ve heard from Mr. Newsome and

whose acquaintance I should so much like my child to make. If I have

the pleasure of seeing her and you do permit it I shall venture to ask

her to be kind to Jeanne. Mr. Strether will tell you”—she beautifully

kept it up—“that my poor girl is gentle and good and rather lonely.

They’ve made friends, he and she, ever so happily, and he doesn’t, I

believe, think ill of her. As for Jeanne herself he has had the same

success with her that I know he has had here wherever he has turned.”

She seemed to ask him for permission to say these things, or seemed

rather to take it, softly and happily, with the ease of intimacy, for

granted, and he had quite the consciousness now that not to meet her at

any point more than halfway would be odiously, basely to abandon her.

Yes, he was _with_ her, and, opposed even in this covert, this

semi-safe fashion to those who were not, he felt, strangely and

confusedly, but excitedly, inspiringly, how much and how far. It was as

if he had positively waited in suspense for something from her that

would let him in deeper, so that he might show her how he could take

it. And what did in fact come as she drew out a little her farewell

served sufficiently the purpose. “As his success is a matter that I’m

sure he’ll never mention for himself, I feel, you see, the less

scruple; which it’s very good of me to say, you know, by the way,” she

added as she addressed herself to him; “considering how little direct

advantage I’ve gained from your triumphs with _me_. When does one ever

see you? I wait at home and I languish. You’ll have rendered me the

service, Mrs. Pocock, at least,” she wound up, “of giving me one of my

much-too-rare glimpses of this gentleman.”

“I certainly should be sorry to deprive you of anything that seems so

much, as you describe it, your natural due. Mr. Strether and I are very

old friends,” Sarah allowed, “but the privilege of his society isn’t a

thing I shall quarrel about with any one.”

“And yet, dear Sarah,” he freely broke in, “I feel, when I hear you say

that, that you don’t quite do justice to the important truth of the

extent to which—as you’re also mine—I’m _your_ natural due. I should

like much better,” he laughed, “to see you fight for me.”

She met him, Mrs. Pocock, on this, with an arrest of speech—with a

certain breathlessness, as he immediately fancied, on the score of a

freedom for which she wasn’t quite prepared. It had flared up—for all

the harm he had intended by it—because, confoundedly, he didn’t want

any more to be afraid about her than he wanted to be afraid about

Madame de Vionnet. He had never, naturally, called her anything but

Sarah at home, and though he had perhaps never quite so markedly

invoked her as his “dear,” that was somehow partly because no occasion

had hitherto laid so effective a trap for it. But something admonished

him now that it was too late—unless indeed it were possibly too early;

and that he at any rate shouldn’t have pleased Mrs. Pocock the more by

it. “Well, Mr. Strether—!” she murmured with vagueness, yet with

sharpness, while her crimson spot burned a trifle brighter and he was

aware that this must be for the present the limit of her response.

Madame de Vionnet had already, however, come to his aid, and Waymarsh,

as if for further participation, moved again back to them. It was true

that the aid rendered by Madame de Vionnet was questionable; it was a

sign that, for all one might confess to with her, and for all she might

complain of not enjoying, she could still insidiously show how much of

the material of conversation had accumulated between them.

“The real truth is, you know, that you sacrifice one without mercy to

dear old Maria. She leaves no room in your life for anybody else. Do

you know,” she enquired of Mrs. Pocock, “about dear old Maria? The

worst is that Miss Gostrey is really a wonderful woman.”

“Oh yes indeed,” Strether answered for her, “Mrs. Pocock knows about

Miss Gostrey. Your mother, Sarah, must have told you about her; your

mother knows everything,” he sturdily pursued. “And I cordially admit,”

he added with his conscious gaiety of courage, “that she’s as wonderful

a woman as you like.”

“Ah it isn’t _I_ who ‘like,’ dear Mr. Strether, anything to do with the

matter!” Sarah Pocock promptly protested; “and I’m by no means sure I

have—from my mother or from any one else—a notion of whom you’re

talking about.”

“Well, he won’t let you see her, you know,” Madame de Vionnet

sympathetically threw in. “He never lets _me_—old friends as we are: I

mean as I am with Maria. He reserves her for his best hours; keeps her

consummately to himself; only gives us others the crumbs of the feast.”

“Well, Countess, _I’ve_ had some of the crumbs,” Waymarsh observed with

weight and covering her with his large look; which led her to break in

before he could go on.

“_Comment donc_, he shares her with _you?_” she exclaimed in droll

stupefaction. “Take care you don’t have, before you go much further,

rather more of all _ces dames_ than you may know what to do with!”

But he only continued in his massive way. “I can post you about the

lady, Mrs. Pocock, so far as you may care to hear. I’ve seen her quite

a number of times, and I was practically present when they made

acquaintance. I’ve kept my eye on her right along, but I don’t know as

there’s any real harm in her.”

“‘Harm’?” Madame de Vionnet quickly echoed. “Why she’s the dearest and

cleverest of all the clever and dear.”

“Well, you run her pretty close, Countess,” Waymarsh returned with

spirit; “though there’s no doubt she’s pretty well up in things. She

knows her way round Europe. Above all there’s no doubt she does love

Strether.”

“Ah but we all do that—we all love Strether: it isn’t a merit!” their

fellow visitor laughed, keeping to her idea with a good conscience at

which our friend was aware that he marvelled, though he trusted also

for it, as he met her exquisitely expressive eyes, to some later light.

The prime effect of her tone, however—and it was a truth which his own

eyes gave back to her in sad ironic play—could only be to make him feel

that, to say such things to a man in public, a woman must practically

think of him as ninety years old. He had turned awkwardly, responsively

red, he knew, at her mention of Maria Gostrey; Sarah Pocock’s

presence—the particular quality of it—had made this inevitable; and

then he had grown still redder in proportion as he hated to have shown

anything at all. He felt indeed that he was showing much, as,

uncomfortably and almost in pain, he offered up his redness to

Waymarsh, who, strangely enough, seemed now to be looking at him with a

certain explanatory yearning. Something deep—something built on their

old old relation—passed, in this complexity, between them; he got the

side-wind of a loyalty that stood behind all actual queer questions.

Waymarsh’s dry bare humour—as it gave itself to be taken—gloomed out to

demand justice. “Well, if you talk of Miss Barrace I’ve _my_ chance

too,” it appeared stiffly to nod, and it granted that it was giving him

away, but struggled to add that it did so only to save him. The sombre

glow stared it at him till it fairly sounded out—“to save you, poor old

man, to save you; to save you in spite of yourself.” Yet it was somehow

just this communication that showed him to himself as more than ever

lost. Still another result of it was to put before him as never yet

that between his comrade and the interest represented by Sarah there

was already a basis. Beyond all question now, yes: Waymarsh had been in

occult relation with Mrs. Newsome—out, out it all came in the very

effort of his face. “Yes, you’re feeling my hand”—he as good as

proclaimed it; “but only because this at least I _shall_ have got out

of the damned Old World: that I shall have picked up the pieces into

which it has caused you to crumble.” It was as if in short, after an

instant, Strether had not only had it from him, but had recognised that

so far as this went the instant had cleared the air. Our friend

understood and approved; he had the sense that they wouldn’t otherwise

speak of it. This would be all, and it would mark in himself a kind of

intelligent generosity. It was with grim Sarah then—Sarah grim for all

her grace—that Waymarsh had begun at ten o’clock in the morning to save

him. Well—if he _could_, poor dear man, with his big bleak kindness!

The upshot of which crowded perception was that Strether, on his own

side, still showed no more than he absolutely had to. He showed the

least possible by saying to Mrs. Pocock after an interval much briefer

than our glance at the picture reflected in him: “Oh it’s as true as

they please!—There’s no Miss Gostrey for any one but me—not the least

little peep. I keep her to myself.”

“Well, it’s very good of you to notify me,” Sarah replied without

looking at him and thrown for a moment by this discrimination, as the

direction of her eyes showed, upon a dimly desperate little community

with Madame de Vionnet. “But I hope I shan’t miss her too much.”

Madame de Vionnet instantly rallied. “And you know—though it might

occur to one—it isn’t in the least that he’s ashamed of her. She’s

really—in a way—extremely good-looking.”

“Ah but extremely!” Strether laughed while he wondered at the odd part

he found thus imposed on him.

It continued to be so by every touch from Madame de Vionnet. “Well, as

I say, you know, I wish you would keep _me_ a little more to yourself.

Couldn’t you name some day for me, some hour—and better soon than late?

I’ll be at home whenever it best suits you. There—I can’t say fairer.”

Strether thought a moment while Waymarsh and Mrs. Pocock affected him

as standing attentive. “I did lately call on you. Last week—while Chad

was out of town.”

“Yes—and I was away, as it happened, too. You choose your moments well.

But don’t wait for my next absence, for I shan’t make another,” Madame

de Vionnet declared, “while Mrs. Pocock’s here.”

“That vow needn’t keep you long, fortunately,” Sarah observed with

reasserted suavity. “I shall be at present but a short time in Paris. I

have my plans for other countries. I meet a number of charming

friends”—and her voice seemed to caress that description of these

persons.

“Ah then,” her visitor cheerfully replied, “all the more reason!

To-morrow, for instance, or next day?” she continued to Strether.

“Tuesday would do for me beautifully.”

“Tuesday then with pleasure.”

“And at half-past five?—or at six?”

It was ridiculous, but Mrs. Pocock and Waymarsh struck him as fairly

waiting for his answer. It was indeed as if they were arranged,

gathered for a performance, the performance of “Europe” by his

confederate and himself. Well, the performance could only go on. “Say

five forty-five.”

“Five forty-five—good.” And now at last Madame de Vionnet must leave

them, though it carried, for herself, the performance a little further.

“I _did_ hope so much also to see Miss Pocock. Mayn’t I still?”

Sarah hesitated, but she rose equal. “She’ll return your visit with me.

She’s at present out with Mr. Pocock and my brother.”

“I see—of course Mr. Newsome has everything to show them. He has told

me so much about her. My great desire’s to give my daughter the

opportunity of making her acquaintance. I’m always on the lookout for

such chances for her. If I didn’t bring her to-day it was only to make

sure first that you’d let me.” After which the charming woman risked a

more intense appeal. “It wouldn’t suit _you_ also to mention some near

time, so that we shall be sure not to lose you?” Strether on his side

waited, for Sarah likewise had, after all, to perform; and it occupied

him to have been thus reminded that she had stayed at home—and on her

first morning of Paris—while Chad led the others forth. Oh she was up

to her eyes; if she had stayed at home she had stayed by an

understanding, arrived at the evening before, that Waymarsh would come

and find her alone. This was beginning well—for a first day in Paris;

and the thing might be amusing yet. But Madame de Vionnet’s earnestness

was meanwhile beautiful. “You may think me indiscreet, but I’ve _such_

a desire my Jeanne shall know an American girl of the really delightful

kind. You see I throw myself for it on your charity.”

The manner of this speech gave Strether such a sense of depths below it

and behind it as he hadn’t yet had—ministered in a way that almost

frightened him to his dim divinations of reasons; but if Sarah still,

in spite of it, faltered, this was why he had time for a sign of

sympathy with her petitioner. “Let me say then, dear lady, to back your

plea, that Miss Mamie is of the most delightful kind of all—is charming

among the charming.”

Even Waymarsh, though with more to produce on the subject, could get

into motion in time. “Yes, Countess, the American girl’s a thing that

your country must at least allow ours the privilege to say we _can_

show you. But her full beauty is only for those who know how to make

use of her.”

“Ah then,” smiled Madame de Vionnet, “that’s exactly what I want to do.

I’m sure she has much to teach us.”

It was wonderful, but what was scarce less so was that Strether found

himself, by the quick effect of it, moved another way. “Oh that may be!

But don’t speak of your own exquisite daughter, you know, as if she

weren’t pure perfection. _I_ at least won’t take that from you.

Mademoiselle de Vionnet,” he explained, in considerable form, to Mrs.

Pocock, “_is_ pure perfection. Mademoiselle de Vionnet _is_ exquisite.”

It had been perhaps a little portentous, but “Ah?” Sarah simply

glittered.

Waymarsh himself, for that matter, apparently recognised, in respect to

the facts, the need of a larger justice, and he had with it an

inclination to Sarah. “Miss Jane’s strikingly handsome—in the regular

French style.”

It somehow made both Strether and Madame de Vionnet laugh out, though

at the very moment he caught in Sarah’s eyes, as glancing at the

speaker, a vague but unmistakeable “You too?” It made Waymarsh in fact

look consciously over her head. Madame de Vionnet meanwhile, however,

made her point in her own way. “I wish indeed I could offer you my poor

child as a dazzling attraction: it would make one’s position simple

enough! She’s as good as she can be, but of course she’s different, and

the question is now—in the light of the way things seem to go—if she

isn’t after all _too_ different: too different I mean from the splendid

type every one is so agreed that your wonderful country produces. On

the other hand of course Mr. Newsome, who knows it so well, has, as a

good friend, dear kind man that he is, done everything he can—to keep

us from fatal benightedness—for my small shy creature. Well,” she wound

up after Mrs. Pocock had signified, in a murmur still a little stiff,

that she would speak to her own young charge on the question—“well, we

shall sit, my child and I, and wait and wait and wait for you.” But her

last fine turn was for Strether. “Do speak of us in such a way—!”

“As that something can’t but come of it? Oh something _shall_ come of

it! I take a great interest!” he further declared; and in proof of it,

the next moment, he had gone with her down to her carriage.

Book Ninth

I

“The difficulty is,” Strether said to Madame de Vionnet a couple of

days later, “that I can’t surprise them into the smallest sign of his

not being the same old Chad they’ve been for the last three years

glowering at across the sea. They simply won’t give any, and as a

policy, you know—what you call a _parti pris_, a deep game—that’s

positively remarkable.”

It was so remarkable that our friend had pulled up before his hostess

with the vision of it; he had risen from his chair at the end of ten

minutes and begun, as a help not to worry, to move about before her

quite as he moved before Maria. He had kept his appointment with her to

the minute and had been intensely impatient, though divided in truth

between the sense of having everything to tell her and the sense of

having nothing at all. The short interval had, in the face of their

complication, multiplied his impressions—it being meanwhile to be

noted, moreover, that he already frankly, already almost publicly,

viewed the complication as common to them. If Madame de Vionnet, under

Sarah’s eyes, had pulled him into her boat, there was by this time no

doubt whatever that he had remained in it and that what he had really

most been conscious of for many hours together was the movement of the

vessel itself. They were in it together this moment as they hadn’t yet

been, and he hadn’t at present uttered the least of the words of alarm

or remonstrance that had died on his lips at the hotel. He had other

things to say to her than that she had put him in a position; so

quickly had his position grown to affect him as quite excitingly,

altogether richly, inevitable. That the outlook, however—given the

point of exposure—hadn’t cleared up half so much as he had reckoned was

the first warning she received from him on his arrival. She had replied

with indulgence that he was in too great a hurry, and had remarked

soothingly that if she knew how to be patient surely _he_ might be. He

felt her presence, on the spot, he felt her tone and everything about

her, as an aid to that effort; and it was perhaps one of the proofs of

her success with him that he seemed so much to take his ease while they

talked. By the time he had explained to her why his impressions, though

multiplied, still baffled him, it was as if he had been familiarly

talking for hours. They baffled him because Sarah—well, Sarah was deep,

deeper than she had ever yet had a chance to show herself. He didn’t

say that this was partly the effect of her opening so straight down, as

it were, into her mother, and that, given Mrs. Newsome’s profundity,

the shaft thus sunk might well have a reach; but he wasn’t without a

resigned apprehension that, at such a rate of confidence between the

two women, he was likely soon to be moved to show how already, at

moments, it had been for him as if he were dealing directly with Mrs.

Newsome. Sarah, to a certainty, would have begun herself to feel it in

him—and this naturally put it in her power to torment him the more.

From the moment she knew he _could_ be tormented—!

“But _why_ can you be?”—his companion was surprised at his use of the

word.

“Because I’m made so—I think of everything.”

“Ah one must never do that,” she smiled. “One must think of as few

things as possible.”

“Then,” he answered, “one must pick them out right. But all I mean

is—for I express myself with violence—that she’s in a position to watch

me. There’s an element of suspense for me, and she can see me wriggle.

But my wriggling doesn’t matter,” he pursued. “I can bear it. Besides,

I shall wriggle out.”

The picture at any rate stirred in her an appreciation that he felt to

be sincere. “I don’t see how a man can be kinder to a woman than you

are to me.”

Well, kind was what he wanted to be; yet even while her charming eyes

rested on him with the truth of this he none the less had his humour of

honesty. “When I say suspense I mean, you know,” he laughed, “suspense

about my own case too!”

“Oh yes—about your own case too!” It diminished his magnanimity, but

she only looked at him the more tenderly.

“Not, however,” he went on, “that I want to talk to you about that.

It’s my own little affair, and I mentioned it simply as part of Mrs.

Pocock’s advantage.” No, no; though there was a queer present

temptation in it, and his suspense was so real that to fidget was a

relief, he wouldn’t talk to her about Mrs. Newsome, wouldn’t work off

on her the anxiety produced in him by Sarah’s calculated omissions of

reference. The effect she produced of representing her mother had been

produced—and that was just the immense, the uncanny part of it—without

her having so much as mentioned that lady. She had brought no message,

had alluded to no question, had only answered his enquiries with

hopeless limited propriety. She had invented a way of meeting them—as

if he had been a polite perfunctory poor relation, of distant

degree—that made them almost ridiculous in him. He couldn’t moreover on

his own side ask much without appearing to publish how he had lately

lacked news; a circumstance of which it was Sarah’s profound policy not

to betray a suspicion. These things, all the same, he wouldn’t breathe

to Madame de Vionnet—much as they might make him walk up and down. And

what he didn’t say—as well as what _she_ didn’t, for she had also her

high decencies—enhanced the effect of his being there with her at the

end of ten minutes more intimately on the basis of saving her than he

had yet had occasion to be. It ended in fact by being quite beautiful

between them, the number of things they had a manifest consciousness of

not saying. He would have liked to turn her, critically, to the subject

of Mrs. Pocock, but he so stuck to the line he felt to be the point of

honour and of delicacy that he scarce even asked her what her personal

impression had been. He knew it, for that matter, without putting her

to trouble: that she wondered how, with such elements, Sarah could

still have no charm, was one of the principal things she held her

tongue about. Strether would have been interested in her estimate of

the elements—indubitably there, some of them, and to be appraised

according to taste—but he denied himself even the luxury of this

diversion. The way Madame de Vionnet affected him to-day was in itself

a kind of demonstration of the happy employment of gifts. How could a

woman think Sarah had charm who struck one as having arrived at it

herself by such different roads? On the other hand of course Sarah

wasn’t obliged to have it. He felt as if somehow Madame de Vionnet

_was_. The great question meanwhile was what Chad thought of his

sister; which was naturally ushered in by that of Sarah’s apprehension

of Chad. _That_ they could talk of, and with a freedom purchased by

their discretion in other senses. The difficulty however was that they

were reduced as yet to conjecture. He had given them in the day or two

as little of a lead as Sarah, and Madame de Vionnet mentioned that she

hadn’t seen him since his sister’s arrival.

“And does that strike you as such an age?”

She met it in all honesty. “Oh I won’t pretend I don’t miss him.

Sometimes I see him every day. Our friendship’s like that. Make what

you will of it!” she whimsically smiled; a little flicker of the kind,

occasional in her, that had more than once moved him to wonder what he

might best make of _her_. “But he’s perfectly right,” she hastened to

add, “and I wouldn’t have him fail in any way at present for the world.

I’d sooner not see him for three months. I begged him to be beautiful

to them, and he fully feels it for himself.”

Strether turned away under his quick perception; she was so odd a

mixture of lucidity and mystery. She fell in at moments with the theory

about her he most cherished, and she seemed at others to blow it into

air. She spoke now as if her art were all an innocence, and then again

as if her innocence were all an art. “Oh he’s giving himself up, and

he’ll do so to the end. How can he but want, now that it’s within

reach, his full impression?—which is much more important, you know,

than either yours or mine. But he’s just soaking,” Strether said as he

came back; “he’s going in conscientiously for a saturation. I’m bound

to say he _is_ very good.”

“Ah,” she quietly replied, “to whom do you say it?” And then more

quietly still: “He’s capable of anything.”

Strether more than reaffirmed—“Oh he’s excellent. I more and more

like,” he insisted, “to see him with them;” though the oddity of this

tone between them grew sharper for him even while they spoke. It placed

the young man so before them as the result of her interest and the

product of her genius, acknowledged so her part in the phenomenon and

made the phenomenon so rare, that more than ever yet he might have been

on the very point of asking her for some more detailed account of the

whole business than he had yet received from her. The occasion almost

forced upon him some question as to how she had managed and as to the

appearance such miracles presented from her own singularly close place

of survey. The moment in fact however passed, giving way to more

present history, and he continued simply to mark his appreciation of

the happy truth. “It’s a tremendous comfort to feel how one can trust

him.” And then again while for a little she said nothing—as if after

all to _her_ trust there might be a special limit: “I mean for making a

good show to them.”

“Yes,” she thoughtfully returned—“but if they shut their eyes to it!”

Strether for an instant had his own thought. “Well perhaps that won’t

matter!”

“You mean because he probably—do what they will—won’t like them?”

“Oh ‘do what they will’—! They won’t do much; especially if Sarah

hasn’t more—well, more than one has yet made out—to give.”

Madame de Vionnet weighed it. “Ah she has all her grace!” It was a

statement over which, for a little, they could look at each other

sufficiently straight, and though it produced no protest from Strether

the effect was somehow as if he had treated it as a joke. “She may be

persuasive and caressing with him; she may be eloquent beyond words.

She may get hold of him,” she wound up—“well, as neither you nor I

have.”

“Yes, she _may_”—and now Strether smiled. “But he has spent all his

time each day with Jim. He’s still showing Jim round.”

She visibly wondered. “Then how about Jim?”

Strether took a turn before he answered. “Hasn’t he given you Jim?

Hasn’t he before this ‘done’ him for you?” He was a little at a loss.

“Doesn’t he tell you things?”

She hesitated. “No”—and their eyes once more gave and took. “Not as you

do. You somehow make me see them—or at least feel them. And I haven’t

asked too much,” she added; “I’ve of late wanted so not to worry him.”

“Ah for that, so have I,” he said with encouraging assent; so that—as

if she had answered everything—they were briefly sociable on it. It

threw him back on his other thought, with which he took another turn;

stopping again, however, presently with something of a glow. “You see

Jim’s really immense. I think it will be Jim who’ll do it.”

She wondered. “Get hold of him?”

“No—just the other thing. Counteract Sarah’s spell.” And he showed now,

our friend, how far he had worked it out. “Jim’s intensely cynical.”

“Oh dear Jim!” Madame de Vionnet vaguely smiled.

“Yes, literally—dear Jim! He’s awful. What _he_ wants, heaven forgive

him, is to help us.”

“You mean”—she was eager—“help _me?_”

“Well, Chad and me in the first place. But he throws you in too, though

without as yet seeing you much. Only, so far as he does see you—if you

don’t mind—he sees you as awful.”

“‘Awful’?”—she wanted it all.

“A regular bad one—though of course of a tremendously superior kind.

Dreadful, delightful, irresistible.”

“Ah dear Jim! I should like to know him. I _must_.”

“Yes, naturally. But will it do? You may, you know,” Strether

suggested, “disappoint him.”

She was droll and humble about it. “I can but try. But my wickedness

then,” she went on, “is my recommendation for him?”

“Your wickedness and the charms with which, in such a degree as yours,

he associates it. He understands, you see, that Chad and I have above

all wanted to have a good time, and his view is simple and sharp.

Nothing will persuade him—in the light, that is, of my behaviour—that I

really didn’t, quite as much as Chad, come over to have one before it

was too late. He wouldn’t have expected it of me; but men of my age, at

Woollett—and especially the least likely ones—have been noted as liable

to strange outbreaks, belated uncanny clutches at the unusual, the

ideal. It’s an effect that a lifetime of Woollett has quite been

observed as having; and I thus give it to you, in Jim’s view, for what

it’s worth. Now his wife and his mother-in-law,” Strether continued to

explain, “have, as in honour bound, no patience with such phenomena,

late or early—which puts Jim, as against his relatives, on the other

side. Besides,” he added, “I don’t think he really wants Chad back. If

Chad doesn’t come—”

“He’ll have”—Madame de Vionnet quite apprehended—“more of the free

hand?”

“Well, Chad’s the bigger man.”

“So he’ll work now, _en dessous_, to keep him quiet?”

“No—he won’t ‘work’ at all, and he won’t do anything _en dessous_. He’s

very decent and won’t be a traitor in the camp. But he’ll be amused

with his own little view of our duplicity, he’ll sniff up what he

supposes to be Paris from morning till night, and he’ll be, as to the

rest, for Chad—well, just what he is.”

She thought it over. “A warning?”

He met it almost with glee. “You _are_ as wonderful as everybody says!”

And then to explain all he meant: “I drove him about for his first

hour, and do you know what—all beautifully unconscious—he most put

before me? Why that something like _that_ is at bottom, as an

improvement to his present state, as in fact the real redemption of it,

what they think it may not be too late to make of our friend.” With

which, as, taking it in, she seemed, in her recurrent alarm, bravely to

gaze at the possibility, he completed his statement. “But it _is_ too

late. Thanks to you!”

It drew from her again one of her indefinite reflexions. “Oh ‘me’—after

all!”

He stood before her so exhilarated by his demonstration that he could

fairly be jocular. “Everything’s comparative. You’re better than

_that_.”

“You”—she could but answer him—“are better than anything.” But she had

another thought. “_Will_ Mrs. Pocock come to me?”

“Oh yes—she’ll do that. As soon, that is, as my friend Waymarsh—_her_

friend now—leaves her leisure.”

She showed an interest. “Is he so much her friend as that?”

“Why, didn’t you see it all at the hotel?”

“Oh”—she was amused—“‘all’ is a good deal to say. I don’t know—I

forget. I lost myself in _her_.”

“You were splendid,” Strether returned—“but ‘all’ isn’t a good deal to

say: it’s only a little. Yet it’s charming so far as it goes. She wants

a man to herself.”

“And hasn’t she got _you?_”

“Do you think she looked at me—or even at you—as if she had?” Strether

easily dismissed that irony. “Every one, you see, must strike her as

having somebody. You’ve got Chad—and Chad has got you.”

“I see”—she made of it what she could. “And you’ve got Maria.”

Well, he on his side accepted that. “I’ve got Maria. And Maria has got

me. So it goes.”

“But Mr. Jim—whom has he got?”

“Oh he has got—or it’s as _if_ he had—the whole place.”

“But for Mr. Waymarsh”—she recalled—“isn’t Miss Barrace before any one

else?”

He shook his head. “Miss Barrace is a _raffinée_, and her amusement

won’t lose by Mrs. Pocock. It will gain rather—especially if Sarah

triumphs and she comes in for a view of it.”

“How well you know us!” Madame de Vionnet, at this, frankly sighed.

“No—it seems to me it’s we that I know. I know Sarah—it’s perhaps on

that ground only that my feet are firm. Waymarsh will take her round

while Chad takes Jim—and I shall be, I assure you, delighted for both

of them. Sarah will have had what she requires—she will have paid her

tribute to the ideal; and he will have done about the same. In Paris

it’s in the air—so what can one do less? If there’s a point that,

beyond any other, Sarah wants to make, it’s that she didn’t come out to

be narrow. We shall feel at least that.”

“Oh,” she sighed, “the quantity we seem likely to ‘feel’! But what

becomes, in these conditions, of the girl?”

“Of Mamie—if we’re all provided? Ah for that,” said Strether, “you can

trust Chad.”

“To be, you mean, all right to her?”

“To pay her every attention as soon as he has polished off Jim. He

wants what Jim can give him—and what Jim really won’t—though he has had

it all, and more than all, from me. He wants in short his own personal

impression, and he’ll get it—strong. But as soon as he has got it Mamie

won’t suffer.”

“Oh Mamie mustn’t _suffer!_” Madame de Vionnet soothingly emphasised.

But Strether could reassure her. “Don’t fear. As soon as he has done

with Jim, Jim will fall to me. And then you’ll see.”

It was as if in a moment she saw already; yet she still waited. Then

“Is she really quite charming?” she asked.

He had got up with his last words and gathered in his hat and gloves.

“I don’t know; I’m watching. I’m studying the case, as it were—and I

dare say I shall be able to tell you.”

She wondered. “Is it a case?”

“Yes—I think so. At any rate I shall see.’

“But haven’t you known her before?”

“Yes,” he smiled—“but somehow at home she wasn’t a case. She has become

one since.” It was as if he made it out for himself. “She has become

one here.”

“So very very soon?”

He measured it, laughing. “Not sooner than I did.”

“And you became one—?”

“Very very soon. The day I arrived.”

Her intelligent eyes showed her thought of it. “Ah but the day you

arrived you met Maria. Whom has Miss Pocock met?”

He paused again, but he brought it out. “Hasn’t she met Chad?”

“Certainly—but not for the first time. He’s an old friend.” At which

Strether had a slow amused significant headshake that made her go on:

“You mean that for _her_ at least he’s a new person—that she sees him

as different?”

“She sees him as different.”

“And how does she see him?”

Strether gave it up. “How can one tell how a deep little girl sees a

deep young man?”

“Is every one so deep? Is she too?”

“So it strikes me deeper than I thought. But wait a little—between us

we’ll make it out. You’ll judge for that matter yourself.”

Madame de Vionnet looked for the moment fairly bent on the chance.

“Then she _will_ come with her?—I mean Mamie with Mrs. Pocock?”

“Certainly. Her curiosity, if nothing else, will in any case work that.

But leave it all to Chad.”

“Ah,” wailed Madame de Vionnet, turning away a little wearily, “the

things I leave to Chad!”

The tone of it made him look at her with a kindness that showed his

vision of her suspense. But he fell back on his confidence. “Oh

well—trust him. Trust him all the way.” He had indeed no sooner so

spoken than the queer displacement of his point of view appeared again

to come up for him in the very sound, which drew from him a short

laugh, immediately checked. He became still more advisory. “When they

do come give them plenty of Miss Jeanne. Let Mamie see her well.”

She looked for a moment as if she placed them face to face. “For Mamie

to hate her?”

He had another of his corrective headshakes. “Mamie won’t. Trust

_them_.”

She looked at him hard, and then as if it were what she must always

come back to: “It’s _you_ I trust. But I was sincere,” she said, “at

the hotel. I did, I do, want my child—”

“Well?”—Strether waited with deference while she appeared to hesitate

as to how to put it.

“Well, to do what she can for me.”

Strether for a little met her eyes on it; after which something that

might have been unexpected to her came from him. “Poor little duck!”

Not more expected for himself indeed might well have been her echo of

it. “Poor little duck! But she immensely wants herself,” she said, “to

see our friend’s cousin.”

“Is that what she thinks her?”

“It’s what we call the young lady.”

He thought again; then with a laugh: “Well, your daughter will help

you.”

And now at last he took leave of her, as he had been intending for five

minutes. But she went part of the way with him, accompanying him out of

the room and into the next and the next. Her noble old apartment

offered a succession of three, the first two of which indeed, on

entering, smaller than the last, but each with its faded and formal

air, enlarged the office of the antechamber and enriched the sense of

approach. Strether fancied them, liked them, and, passing through them

with her more slowly now, met a sharp renewal of his original

impression. He stopped, he looked back; the whole thing made a vista,

which he found high melancholy and sweet—full, once more, of dim

historic shades, of the faint faraway cannon-roar of the great Empire.

It was doubtless half the projection of his mind, but his mind was a

thing that, among old waxed parquets, pale shades of pink and green,

pseudo-classic candelabra, he had always needfully to reckon with. They

could easily make him irrelevant. The oddity, the originality, the

poetry—he didn’t know what to call it—of Chad’s connexion reaffirmed

for him its romantic side. “They ought to see this, you know. They

_must_.”

“The Pococks?”—she looked about in deprecation; she seemed to see gaps

he didn’t.

“Mamie and Sarah—Mamie in particular.”

“My shabby old place? But _their_ things—!”

“Oh their things! You were talking of what will do something for you—”

“So that it strikes you,” she broke in, “that my poor place may? Oh,”

she ruefully mused, “that _would_ be desperate!”

“Do you know what I wish?” he went on. “I wish Mrs. Newsome herself

could have a look.”

She stared, missing a little his logic. “It would make a difference?”

Her tone was so earnest that as he continued to look about he laughed.

“It might!”

“But you’ve told her, you tell me—”

“All about you? Yes, a wonderful story. But there’s all the

indescribable—what one gets only on the spot.”

“Thank you!” she charmingly and sadly smiled.

“It’s all about me here,” he freely continued. “Mrs. Newsome feels

things.”

But she seemed doomed always to come back to doubt. “No one feels so

much as _you_. No—not any one.”

“So much the worse then for every one. It’s very easy.”

They were by this time in the antechamber, still alone together, as she

hadn’t rung for a servant. The antechamber was high and square, grave

and suggestive too, a little cold and slippery even in summer, and with

a few old prints that were precious, Strether divined, on the walls. He

stood in the middle, slightly lingering, vaguely directing his glasses,

while, leaning against the door-post of the room, she gently pressed

her cheek to the side of the recess. “_You_ would have been a friend.”

“I?”—it startled him a little.

“For the reason you say. You’re not stupid.” And then abruptly, as if

bringing it out were somehow founded on that fact: “We’re marrying

Jeanne.”

It affected him on the spot as a move in a game, and he was even then

not without the sense that that wasn’t the way Jeanne should be

married. But he quickly showed his interest, though—as quickly

afterwards struck him—with an absurd confusion of mind. “‘You’? You

and—a—not Chad?” Of course it was the child’s father who made the ‘we,’

but to the child’s father it would have cost him an effort to allude.

Yet didn’t it seem the next minute that Monsieur de Vionnet was after

all not in question?—since she had gone on to say that it was indeed to

Chad she referred and that he had been in the whole matter kindness

itself.

“If I must tell you all, it is he himself who has put us in the way. I

mean in the way of an opportunity that, so far as I can yet see, is all

I could possibly have dreamed of. For all the trouble Monsieur de

Vionnet will ever take!” It was the first time she had spoken to him of

her husband, and he couldn’t have expressed how much more intimate with

her it suddenly made him feel. It wasn’t much, in truth—there were

other things in what she was saying that were far more; but it was as

if, while they stood there together so easily in these cold chambers of

the past, the single touch had shown the reach of her confidence. “But

our friend,” she asked, “hasn’t then told you?”

“He has told me nothing.”

“Well, it has come with rather a rush—all in a very few days; and

hasn’t moreover yet taken a form that permits an announcement. It’s

only for you—absolutely you alone—that I speak; I so want you to know.”

The sense he had so often had, since the first hour of his

disembarkment, of being further and further “in,” treated him again at

this moment to another twinge; but in this wonderful way of her putting

him in there continued to be something exquisitely remorseless.

“Monsieur de Vionnet will accept what he _must_ accept. He has proposed

half a dozen things—each one more impossible than the other; and he

wouldn’t have found this if he lives to a hundred. Chad found it,” she

continued with her lighted, faintly flushed, her conscious confidential

face, “in the quietest way in the world. Or rather it found _him_—for

everything finds him; I mean finds him right. You’ll think we do such

things strangely—but at my age,” she smiled, “one has to accept one’s

conditions. Our young man’s people had seen her; one of his sisters, a

charming woman—we know all about them—had observed her somewhere with

me. She had spoken to her brother—turned him on; and we were again

observed, poor Jeanne and I, without our in the least knowing it. It

was at the beginning of the winter; it went on for some time; it

outlasted our absence; it began again on our return; and it luckily

seems all right. The young man had met Chad, and he got a friend to

approach him—as having a decent interest in us. Mr. Newsome looked well

before he leaped; he kept beautifully quiet and satisfied himself

fully; then only he spoke. It’s what has for some time past occupied

us. It seems as if it were what would do; really, really all one could

wish. There are only two or three points to be settled—they depend on

her father. But this time I think we’re safe.”

Strether, consciously gaping a little, had fairly hung upon her lips.

“I hope so with all my heart.” And then he permitted himself: “Does

nothing depend on _her?_”

“Ah naturally; everything did. But she’s pleased _comme tout_. She has

been perfectly free; and he—our young friend—is really a combination. I

quite adore him.”

Strether just made sure. “You mean your future son-in-law?”

“Future if we all bring it off.”

“Ah well,” said Strether decorously, “I heartily hope you may.” There

seemed little else for him to say, though her communication had the

oddest effect on him. Vaguely and confusedly he was troubled by it;

feeling as if he had even himself been concerned in something deep and

dim. He had allowed for depths, but these were greater: and it was as

if, oppressively—indeed absurdly—he was responsible for what they had

now thrown up to the surface. It was—through something ancient and cold

in it—what he would have called the real thing. In short his hostess’s

news, though he couldn’t have explained why, was a sensible shock, and

his oppression a weight he felt he must somehow or other immediately

get rid of. There were too many connexions missing to make it tolerable

he should do anything else. He was prepared to suffer—before his own

inner tribunal—for Chad; he was prepared to suffer even for Madame de

Vionnet. But he wasn’t prepared to suffer for the little girl. So now

having said the proper thing, he wanted to get away. She held him an

instant, however, with another appeal.

“Do I seem to you very awful?”

“Awful? Why so?” But he called it to himself, even as he spoke, his

biggest insincerity yet.

“Our arrangements are so different from yours.”

“Mine?” Oh he could dismiss that too! “I haven’t any arrangements.”

“Then you must accept mine; all the more that they’re excellent.

They’re founded on a _vieille sagesse_. There will be much more, if all

goes well, for you to hear and to know, and everything, believe me, for

you to like. Don’t be afraid; you’ll be satisfied.” Thus she could talk

to him of what, of her innermost life—for that was what it came to—he

must “accept”; thus she could extraordinarily speak as if in such an

affair his being satisfied had an importance. It was all a wonder and

made the whole case larger. He had struck himself at the hotel, before

Sarah and Waymarsh, as being in her boat; but where on earth was he

now? This question was in the air till her own lips quenched it with

another. “And do you suppose _he_—who loves her so—would do anything

reckless or cruel?”

He wondered what he supposed. “Do you mean your young man—?”

“I mean yours. I mean Mr. Newsome.” It flashed for Strether the next

moment a finer light, and the light deepened as she went on. “He takes,

thank God, the truest tenderest interest in her.”

It deepened indeed. “Oh I’m sure of that!”

“You were talking,” she said, “about one’s trusting him. You see then

how I do.”

He waited a moment—it all came. “I see—I see.” He felt he really did

see.

“He wouldn’t hurt her for the world, nor—assuming she marries at

all—risk anything that might make against her happiness. And—willingly,

at least—he would never hurt _me_.”

Her face, with what he had by this time grasped, told him more than her

words; whether something had come into it, or whether he only read

clearer, her whole story—what at least he then took for such—reached

out to him from it. With the initiative she now attributed to Chad it

all made a sense, and this sense—a light, a lead, was what had abruptly

risen before him. He wanted, once more, to get off with these things;

which was at last made easy, a servant having, for his assistance, on

hearing voices in the hall, just come forward. All that Strether had

made out was, while the man opened the door and impersonally waited,

summed up in his last word. “I don’t think, you know, Chad will tell me

anything.”

“No—perhaps not yet.”

“And I won’t as yet speak to him.”

“Ah that’s as you’ll think best. You must judge.”

She had finally given him her hand, which he held a moment. “How _much_

I have to judge!”

“Everything,” said Madame de Vionnet: a remark that was indeed—with the

refined disguised suppressed passion of her face—what he most carried

away.

II

So far as a direct approach was concerned Sarah had neglected him, for

the week now about to end, with a civil consistency of chill that,

giving him a higher idea of her social resource, threw him back on the

general reflexion that a woman could always be amazing. It indeed

helped a little to console him that he felt sure she had for the same

period also left Chad’s curiosity hanging; though on the other hand,

for his personal relief, Chad could at least go through the various

motions—and he made them extraordinarily numerous—of seeing she had a

good time. There wasn’t a motion on which, in her presence, poor

Strether could so much as venture, and all he could do when he was out

of it was to walk over for a talk with Maria. He walked over of course

much less than usual, but he found a special compensation in a certain

half-hour during which, toward the close of a crowded empty expensive

day, his several companions seemed to him so disposed of as to give his

forms and usages a rest. He had been with them in the morning and had

nevertheless called on the Pococks in the afternoon; but their whole

group, he then found, had dispersed after a fashion of which it would

amuse Miss Gostrey to hear. He was sorry again, gratefully sorry she

was so out of it—she who had really put him in; but she had fortunately

always her appetite for news. The pure flame of the disinterested

burned in her cave of treasures as a lamp in a Byzantine vault. It was

just now, as happened, that for so fine a sense as hers a near view

would have begun to pay. Within three days, precisely, the situation on

which he was to report had shown signs of an equilibrium; the effect of

his look in at the hotel was to confirm this appearance. If the

equilibrium might only prevail! Sarah was out with Waymarsh, Mamie was

out with Chad, and Jim was out alone. Later on indeed he himself was

booked to Jim, was to take him that evening to the Varieties—which

Strether was careful to pronounce as Jim pronounced them.

Miss Gostrey drank it in. “What then to-night do the others do?”

“Well, it has been arranged. Waymarsh takes Sarah to dine at Bignon’s.”

She wondered. “And what do they do after? They can’t come straight

home.”

“No, they can’t come straight home—at least Sarah can’t. It’s their

secret, but I think I’ve guessed it.” Then as she waited: “The circus.”

It made her stare a moment longer, then laugh almost to extravagance.

“There’s no one like you!”

“Like _me?_”—he only wanted to understand.

“Like all of you together—like all of us: Woollett, Milrose and their

products. We’re abysmal—but may we never be less so! Mr. Newsome,” she

continued, “meanwhile takes Miss Pocock—?”

“Precisely—to the Français: to see what _you_ took Waymarsh and me to,

a family-bill.”

“Ah then may Mr. Chad enjoy it as _I_ did!” But she saw so much in

things. “Do they spend their evenings, your young people, like that,

alone together?”

“Well, they’re young people—but they’re old friends.”

“I see, I see. And do _they_ dine—for a difference—at Brébant’s?”

“Oh where they dine is their secret too. But I’ve my idea that it will

be, very quietly, at Chad’s own place.”

“She’ll come to him there alone?”

They looked at each other a moment. “He has known her from a child.

Besides,” said Strether with emphasis, “Mamie’s remarkable. She’s

splendid.”

She wondered. “Do you mean she expects to bring it off?”

“Getting hold of him? No—I think not.”

“She doesn’t want him enough?—or doesn’t believe in her power?” On

which as he said nothing she continued: “She finds she doesn’t care for

him?”

“No—I think she finds she does. But that’s what I mean by so describing

her. It’s _if_ she does that she’s splendid. But we’ll see,” he wound

up, “where she comes out.”

“You seem to show me sufficiently,” Miss Gostrey laughed, “where she

goes in! But is her childhood’s friend,” she asked, “permitting himself

recklessly to flirt with her?”

“No—not that. Chad’s also splendid. They’re _all_ splendid!” he

declared with a sudden strange sound of wistfulness and envy. “They’re

at least _happy_.”

“Happy?”—it appeared, with their various difficulties, to surprise her.

“Well—I seem to myself among them the only one who isn’t.”

She demurred. “With your constant tribute to the ideal?”

He had a laugh at his tribute to the ideal, but he explained after a

moment his impression. “I mean they’re living. They’re rushing about.

I’ve already had my rushing. I’m waiting.”

“But aren’t you,” she asked by way of cheer, “waiting with _me?_”

He looked at her in all kindness. “Yes—if it weren’t for that!”

“And you help me to wait,” she said. “However,” she went on, “I’ve

really something for you that will help you to wait and which you shall

have in a minute. Only there’s something more I want from you first. I

revel in Sarah.”

“So do I. If it weren’t,” he again amusedly sighed, “for _that_—!”

“Well, you owe more to women than any man I ever saw. We do seem to

keep you going. Yet Sarah, as I see her, must be great.”

“She _is_” Strether fully assented: “great! Whatever happens, she

won’t, with these unforgettable days, have lived in vain.”

Miss Gostrey had a pause. “You mean she has fallen in love?”

“I mean she wonders if she hasn’t—and it serves all her purpose.”

“It has indeed,” Maria laughed, “served women’s purposes before!”

“Yes—for giving in. But I doubt if the idea—as an idea—has ever up to

now answered so well for holding out. That’s _her_ tribute to the

ideal—we each have our own. It’s her romance—and it seems to me better

on the whole than mine. To have it in Paris too,” he explained—“on this

classic ground, in this charged infectious air, with so sudden an

intensity: well, it’s more than she expected. She has had in short to

recognise the breaking out for her of a real affinity—and with

everything to enhance the drama.”

Miss Gostrey followed. “Jim for instance?”

“Jim. Jim hugely enhances. Jim was made to enhance. And then Mr.

Waymarsh. It’s the crowning touch—it supplies the colour. He’s

positively separated.”

“And she herself unfortunately isn’t—that supplies the colour too.”

Miss Gostrey was all there. But somehow—! “Is _he_ in love?”

Strether looked at her a long time; then looked all about the room;

then came a little nearer. “Will you never tell any one in the world as

long as ever you live?”

“Never.” It was charming.

“He thinks Sarah really is. But he has no fear,” Strether hastened to

add.

“Of her being affected by it?”

“Of _his_ being. He likes it, but he knows she can hold out. He’s

helping her, he’s floating her over, by kindness.”

Maria rather funnily considered it. “Floating her over in champagne?

The kindness of dining her, nose to nose, at the hour when all Paris is

crowding to profane delights, and in the—well, in the great temple, as

one hears of it, of pleasure?”

“That’s just _it_, for both of them,” Strether insisted—“and all of a

supreme innocence. The Parisian place, the feverish hour, the putting

before her of a hundred francs’ worth of food and drink, which they’ll

scarcely touch—all that’s the dear man’s own romance; the expensive

kind, expensive in francs and centimes, in which he abounds. And the

circus afterwards—which is cheaper, but which he’ll find some means of

making as dear as possible—that’s also _his_ tribute to the ideal. It

does for him. He’ll see her through. They won’t talk of anything worse

than you and me.”

“Well, we’re bad enough perhaps, thank heaven,” she laughed, “to upset

them! Mr. Waymarsh at any rate is a hideous old coquette.” And the next

moment she had dropped everything for a different pursuit. “What you

don’t appear to know is that Jeanne de Vionnet has become engaged.

She’s to marry—it has been definitely arranged—young Monsieur de

Montbron.”

He fairly blushed. “Then—if you know it—it’s ‘out’?”

“Don’t I often know things that are _not_ out? However,” she said,

“this will be out to-morrow. But I see I’ve counted too much on your

possible ignorance. You’ve been before me, and I don’t make you jump as

I hoped.”

He gave a gasp at her insight. “You never fail! I’ve _had_ my jump. I

had it when I first heard.”

“Then if you knew why didn’t you tell me as soon as you came in?”

“Because I had it from her as a thing not yet to be spoken of.”

Miss Gostrey wondered. “From Madame de Vionnet herself?”

“As a probability—not quite a certainty: a good cause in which Chad has

been working. So I’ve waited.”

“You need wait no longer,” she returned. “It reached me

yesterday—roundabout and accidental, but by a person who had had it

from one of the young man’s own people—as a thing quite settled. I was

only keeping it for you.”

“You thought Chad wouldn’t have told me?”

She hesitated. “Well, if he hasn’t—”

“He hasn’t. And yet the thing appears to have been practically his

doing. So there we are.”

“There we are!” Maria candidly echoed.

“That’s why I jumped. I jumped,” he continued to explain, “because it

means, this disposition of the daughter, that there’s now nothing else:

nothing else but him and the mother.”

“Still—it simplifies.”

“It simplifies”—he fully concurred. “But that’s precisely where we are.

It marks a stage in his relation. The act is his answer to Mrs.

Newsome’s demonstration.”

“It tells,” Maria asked, “the worst?”

“The worst.”

“But is the worst what he wants Sarah to know?”

“He doesn’t care for Sarah.”

At which Miss Gostrey’s eyebrows went up. “You mean she has already

dished herself?”

Strether took a turn about; he had thought it out again and again

before this, to the end; but the vista seemed each time longer. “He

wants his good friend to know the best. I mean the measure of his

attachment. She asked for a sign, and he thought of that one. There it

is.”

“A concession to her jealousy?”

Strether pulled up. “Yes—call it that. Make it lurid—for that makes my

problem richer.”

“Certainly, let us have it lurid—for I quite agree with you that we

want none of our problems poor. But let us also have it clear. Can he,

in the midst of such a preoccupation, or on the heels of it, have

seriously cared for Jeanne?—cared, I mean, as a young man at liberty

would have cared?”

Well, Strether had mastered it. “I think he can have thought it would

be charming if he _could_ care. It would be nicer.”

“Nicer than being tied up to Marie?”

“Yes—than the discomfort of an attachment to a person he can never

hope, short of a catastrophe, to marry. And he was quite right,” said

Strether. “It would certainly have been nicer. Even when a thing’s

already nice there mostly _is_ some other thing that would have been

nicer—or as to which we wonder if it wouldn’t. But his question was all

the same a dream. He _couldn’t_ care in that way. He _is_ tied up to

Marie. The relation is too special and has gone too far. It’s the very

basis, and his recent lively contribution toward establishing Jeanne in

life has been his definite and final acknowledgement to Madame de

Vionnet that he has ceased squirming. I doubt meanwhile,” he went on,

“if Sarah has at all directly attacked him.”

His companion brooded. “But won’t he wish for his own satisfaction to

make his ground good to her?”

“No—he’ll leave it to me, he’ll leave everything to me. I ‘sort of’

feel”—he worked it out—“that the whole thing will come upon me. Yes, I

shall have every inch and every ounce of it. I shall be _used_ for

it—!” And Strether lost himself in the prospect. Then he fancifully

expressed the issue. “To the last drop of my blood.”

Maria, however, roundly protested. “Ah you’ll please keep a drop for

_me_. I shall have a use for it!”—which she didn’t however follow up.

She had come back the next moment to another matter. “Mrs. Pocock, with

her brother, is trusting only to her general charm?”

“So it would seem.”

“And the charm’s not working?”

Well, Strether put it otherwise, “She’s sounding the note of home—which

is the very best thing she can do.”

“The best for Madame de Vionnet?”

“The best for home itself. The natural one; the right one.”

“Right,” Maria asked, “when it fails?”

Strether had a pause. “The difficulty’s Jim. Jim’s the note of home.”

She debated. “Ah surely not the note of Mrs. Newsome.”

But he had it all. “The note of the home for which Mrs. Newsome wants

him—the home of the business. Jim stands, with his little legs apart,

at the door of _that_ tent; and Jim _is_, frankly speaking, extremely

awful.”

Maria stared. “And you in, you poor thing, for your evening with him?”

“Oh he’s all right for _me!_” Strether laughed. “Any one’s good enough

for _me_. But Sarah shouldn’t, all the same, have brought him. She

doesn’t appreciate him.”

His friend was amused with this statement of it. “Doesn’t know, you

mean, how bad he is?”

Strether shook his head with decision. “Not really.”

She wondered. “Then doesn’t Mrs. Newsome?”

It made him frankly do the same. “Well, no—since you ask me.”

Maria rubbed it in. “Not really either?”

“Not at all. She rates him rather high.” With which indeed,

immediately, he took himself up. “Well, he _is_ good too, in his way.

It depends on what you want him for.”

Miss Gostrey, however, wouldn’t let it depend on anything—wouldn’t have

it, and wouldn’t want him, at any price. “It suits my book,” she said,

“that he should be impossible; and it suits it still better,” she more

imaginatively added, “that Mrs. Newsome doesn’t know he is.”

Strether, in consequence, had to take it from her, but he fell back on

something else. “I’ll tell you who does really know.”

“Mr. Waymarsh? Never!”

“Never indeed. I’m not _always_ thinking of Mr. Waymarsh; in fact I

find now I never am.” Then he mentioned the person as if there were a

good deal in it. “Mamie.”

“His own sister?” Oddly enough it but let her down. “What good will

that do?”

“None perhaps. But there—as usual—we are!”

III

There they were yet again, accordingly, for two days more; when

Strether, on being, at Mrs. Pocock’s hotel, ushered into that lady’s

salon, found himself at first assuming a mistake on the part of the

servant who had introduced him and retired. The occupants hadn’t come

in, for the room looked empty as only a room can look in Paris, of a

fine afternoon when the faint murmur of the huge collective life,

carried on out of doors, strays among scattered objects even as a

summer air idles in a lonely garden. Our friend looked about and

hesitated; observed, on the evidence of a table charged with purchases

and other matters, that Sarah had become possessed—by no aid from

_him_—of the last number of the salmon-coloured Revue; noted further

that Mamie appeared to have received a present of Fromentin’s “Maîtres

d’Autrefois” from Chad, who had written her name on the cover; and

pulled up at the sight of a heavy letter addressed in a hand he knew.

This letter, forwarded by a banker and arriving in Mrs. Pocock’s

absence, had been placed in evidence, and it drew from the fact of its

being unopened a sudden queer power to intensify the reach of its

author. It brought home to him the scale on which Mrs. Newsome—for she

had been copious indeed this time—was writing to her daughter while she

kept _him_ in durance; and it had altogether such an effect upon him as

made him for a few minutes stand still and breathe low. In his own

room, at his own hotel, he had dozens of well-filled envelopes

superscribed in that character; and there was actually something in the

renewal of his interrupted vision of the character that played straight

into the so frequent question of whether he weren’t already

disinherited beyond appeal. It was such an assurance as the sharp

downstrokes of her pen hadn’t yet had occasion to give him; but they

somehow at the present crisis stood for a probable absoluteness in any

decree of the writer. He looked at Sarah’s name and address, in short,

as if he had been looking hard into her mother’s face, and then turned

from it as if the face had declined to relax. But since it was in a

manner as if Mrs. Newsome were thereby all the more, instead of the

less, in the room, and were conscious, sharply and sorely conscious, of

himself, so he felt both held and hushed, summoned to stay at least and

take his punishment. By staying, accordingly, he took it—creeping

softly and vaguely about and waiting for Sarah to come in. She _would_

come in if he stayed long enough, and he had now more than ever the

sense of her success in leaving him a prey to anxiety. It wasn’t to be

denied that she had had a happy instinct, from the point of view of

Woollett, in placing him thus at the mercy of her own initiative. It

was very well to try to say he didn’t care—that she might break ground

when she would, might never break it at all if she wouldn’t, and that

he had no confession whatever to wait upon her with: he breathed from

day to day an air that damnably required clearing, and there were

moments when he quite ached to precipitate that process. He couldn’t

doubt that, should she only oblige him by surprising him just as he

then was, a clarifying scene of some sort would result from the

concussion.

He humbly circulated in this spirit till he suddenly had a fresh

arrest. Both the windows of the room stood open to the balcony, but it

was only now that, in the glass of the leaf of one of them, folded

back, he caught a reflexion quickly recognised as the colour of a

lady’s dress. Somebody had been then all the while on the balcony, and

the person, whoever it might be, was so placed between the windows as

to be hidden from him; while on the other hand the many sounds of the

street had covered his own entrance and movements. If the person were

Sarah he might on the spot therefore be served to his taste. He might

lead her by a move or two up to the remedy for his vain tension; as to

which, should he get nothing else from it, he would at least have the

relief of pulling down the roof on their heads. There was fortunately

no one at hand to observe—in respect to his valour—that even on this

completed reasoning he still hung fire. He had been waiting for Mrs.

Pocock and the sound of the oracle; but he had to gird himself

afresh—which he did in the embrasure of the window, neither advancing

nor retreating—before provoking the revelation. It was apparently for

Sarah to come more into view; he was in that case there at her service.

She did however, as meanwhile happened, come more into view; only she

luckily came at the last minute as a contradiction of Sarah. The

occupant of the balcony was after all quite another person, a person

presented, on a second look, by a charming back and a slight shift of

her position, as beautiful brilliant unconscious Mamie—Mamie alone at

home, Mamie passing her time in her own innocent way, Mamie in short

rather shabbily used, but Mamie absorbed interested and interesting.

With her arms on the balustrade and her attention dropped to the street

she allowed Strether to watch her, to consider several things, without

her turning round.

But the oddity was that when he _had_ so watched and considered he

simply stepped back into the room without following up his advantage.

He revolved there again for several minutes, quite as with something

new to think of and as if the bearings of the possibility of Sarah had

been superseded. For frankly, yes, it _had_ bearings thus to find the

girl in solitary possession. There was something in it that touched him

to a point not to have been reckoned beforehand, something that softly

but quite pressingly spoke to him, and that spoke the more each time he

paused again at the edge of the balcony and saw her still unaware. Her

companions were plainly scattered; Sarah would be off somewhere with

Waymarsh and Chad off somewhere with Jim. Strether didn’t at all

mentally impute to Chad that he was with his “good friend”; he gave him

the benefit of supposing him involved in appearances that, had he had

to describe them—for instance to Maria—he would have conveniently

qualified as more subtle. It came to him indeed the next thing that

there was perhaps almost an excess of refinement in having left Mamie

in such weather up there alone; however she might in fact have

extemporised, under the charm of the Rue de Rivoli, a little makeshift

Paris of wonder and fancy. Our friend in any case now recognised—and it

was as if at the recognition Mrs. Newsome’s fixed intensity had

suddenly, with a deep audible gasp, grown thin and vague—that day after

day he had been conscious in respect to his young lady of something odd

and ambiguous, yet something into which he could at last read a

meaning. It had been at the most, this mystery, an obsession—oh an

obsession agreeable; and it had just now fallen into its place as at

the touch of a spring. It had represented the possibility between them

of some communication baffled by accident and delay—the possibility

even of some relation as yet unacknowledged.

There was always their old relation, the fruit of the Woollett years;

but that—and it was what was strangest—had nothing whatever in common

with what was now in the air. As a child, as a “bud,” and then again as

a flower of expansion, Mamie had bloomed for him, freely, in the almost

incessantly open doorways of home; where he remembered her as first

very forward, as then very backward—for he had carried on at one

period, in Mrs. Newsome’s parlours (oh Mrs. Newsome’s phases and his

own!) a course of English Literature re-enforced by exams and teas—and

once more, finally, as very much in advance. But he had kept no great

sense of points of contact; it not being in the nature of things at

Woollett that the freshest of the buds should find herself in the same

basket with the most withered of the winter apples. The child had given

sharpness, above all, to his sense of the flight of time; it was but

the day before yesterday that he had tripped up on her hoop, yet his

experience of remarkable women—destined, it would seem, remarkably to

grow—felt itself ready this afternoon, quite braced itself, to include

her. She had in fine more to say to him than he had ever dreamed the

pretty girl of the moment _could_ have; and the proof of the

circumstance was that, visibly, unmistakeably, she had been able to say

it to no one else. It was something she could mention neither to her

brother, to her sister-in-law nor to Chad; though he could just imagine

that had she still been at home she might have brought it out, as a

supreme tribute to age, authority and attitude, for Mrs. Newsome. It

was moreover something in which they all took an interest; the strength

of their interest was in truth just the reason of her prudence. All

this then, for five minutes, was vivid to Strether, and it put before

him that, poor child, she had now but her prudence to amuse her. That,

for a pretty girl in Paris, struck him, with a rush, as a sorry state;

so that under the impression he went out to her with a step as

hypocritically alert, he was well aware, as if he had just come into

the room. She turned with a start at his voice; preoccupied with him

though she might be, she was just a scrap disappointed. “Oh I thought

you were Mr. Bilham!”

The remark had been at first surprising and our friend’s private

thought, under the influence of it, temporarily blighted; yet we are

able to add that he presently recovered his inward tone and that many a

fresh flower of fancy was to bloom in the same air. Little Bilham—since

little Bilham was, somewhat incongruously, expected—appeared

behindhand; a circumstance by which Strether was to profit. They came

back into the room together after a little, the couple on the balcony,

and amid its crimson-and-gold elegance, with the others still absent,

Strether passed forty minutes that he appraised even at the time as

far, in the whole queer connexion, from his idlest. Yes indeed, since

he had the other day so agreed with Maria about the inspiration of the

lurid, here was something for his problem that surely didn’t make it

shrink and that was floated in upon him as part of a sudden flood. He

was doubtless not to know till afterwards, on turning them over in

thought, of how many elements his impression was composed; but he none

the less felt, as he sat with the charming girl, the signal growth of a

confidence. For she _was_ charming, when all was said—and none the less

so for the visible habit and practice of freedom and fluency. She was

charming, he was aware, in spite of the fact that if he hadn’t found

her so he would have found her something he should have been in peril

of expressing as “funny.” Yes, she was funny, wonderful Mamie, and

without dreaming it; she was bland, she was bridal—with never, that he

could make out as yet, a bridegroom to support it; she was handsome and

portly and easy and chatty, soft and sweet and almost disconcertingly

reassuring. She was dressed, if we might so far discriminate, less as a

young lady than as an old one—had an old one been supposable to

Strether as so committed to vanity; the complexities of her hair missed

moreover also the looseness of youth; and she had a mature manner of

bending a little, as to encourage and reward, while she held neatly

together in front of her a pair of strikingly polished hands: the

combination of all of which kept up about her the glamour of her

“receiving,” placed her again perpetually between the windows and

within sound of the ice-cream plates, suggested the enumeration of all

the names, all the Mr. Brookses and Mr. Snookses, gregarious specimens

of a single type, she was happy to “meet.” But if all this was where

she was funny, and if what was funnier than the rest was the contrast

between her beautiful benevolent patronage—such a hint of the

polysyllabic as might make her something of a bore toward middle

age—and her rather flat little voice, the voice, naturally,

unaffectedly yet, of a girl of fifteen; so Strether, none the less, at

the end of ten minutes, felt in her a quiet dignity that pulled things

bravely together. If quiet dignity, almost more than matronly, with

voluminous, too voluminous clothes, was the effect she proposed to

produce, that was an ideal one could like in her when once one had got

into relation. The great thing now for her visitor was that this was

exactly what he had done; it made so extraordinary a mixture of the

brief and crowded hour. It was the mark of a relation that he had begun

so quickly to find himself sure she was, of all people, as might have

been said, on the side and of the party of Mrs. Newsome’s original

ambassador. She was in _his_ interest and not in Sarah’s, and some sign

of that was precisely what he had been feeling in her, these last days,

as imminent. Finally placed, in Paris, in immediate presence of the

situation and of the hero of it—by whom Strether was incapable of

meaning any one but Chad—she had accomplished, and really in a manner

all unexpected to herself, a change of base; deep still things had come

to pass within her, and by the time she had grown sure of them Strether

had become aware of the little drama. When she knew where she was, in

short, he had made it out; and he made it out at present still better;

though with never a direct word passing between them all the while on

the subject of his own predicament. There had been at first, as he sat

there with her, a moment during which he wondered if she meant to break

ground in respect to his prime undertaking. That door stood so

strangely ajar that he was half-prepared to be conscious, at any

juncture, of her having, of any one’s having, quite bounced in. But,

friendly, familiar, light of touch and happy of tact, she exquisitely

stayed out; so that it was for all the world as if to show she could

deal with him without being reduced to—well, scarcely anything.

It fully came up for them then, by means of their talking of everything

_but_ Chad, that Mamie, unlike Sarah, unlike Jim, knew perfectly what

had become of him. It fully came up that she had taken to the last

fraction of an inch the measure of the change in him, and that she

wanted Strether to know what a secret she proposed to make of it. They

talked most conveniently—as if they had had no chance yet—about

Woollett; and that had virtually the effect of their keeping the secret

more close. The hour took on for Strether, little by little, a queer

sad sweetness of quality, he had such a revulsion in Mamie’s favour and

on behalf of her social value as might have come from remorse at some

early injustice. She made him, as under the breath of some vague

western whiff, homesick and freshly restless; he could really for the

time have fancied himself stranded with her on a far shore, during an

ominous calm, in a quaint community of shipwreck. Their little

interview was like a picnic on a coral strand; they passed each other,

with melancholy smiles and looks sufficiently allusive, such cupfuls of

water as they had saved. Especially sharp in Strether meanwhile was the

conviction that his companion really knew, as we have hinted, where she

had come out. It was at a very particular place—only _that_ she would

never tell him; it would be above all what he should have to puzzle for

himself. This was what he hoped for, because his interest in the girl

wouldn’t be complete without it. No more would the appreciation to

which she was entitled—so assured was he that the more he saw of her

process the more he should see of her pride. She saw, herself,

everything; but she knew what she didn’t want, and that it was that had

helped her. What didn’t she want?—there was a pleasure lost for her old

friend in not yet knowing, as there would doubtless be a thrill in

getting a glimpse. Gently and sociably she kept that dark to him, and

it was as if she soothed and beguiled him in other ways to make up for

it. She came out with her impression of Madame de Vionnet—of whom she

had “heard so much”; she came out with her impression of Jeanne, whom

she had been “dying to see”: she brought it out with a blandness by

which her auditor was really stirred that she had been with Sarah early

that very afternoon, and after dreadful delays caused by all sorts of

things, mainly, eternally, by the purchase of clothes—clothes that

unfortunately wouldn’t be themselves eternal—to call in the Rue de

Bellechasse.

At the sound of these names Strether almost blushed to feel that he

couldn’t have sounded them first—and yet couldn’t either have justified

his squeamishness. Mamie made them easy as he couldn’t have begun to

do, and yet it could only have cost her more than he should ever have

had to spend. It was as friends of Chad’s, friends special,

distinguished, desirable, enviable, that she spoke of them, and she

beautifully carried it off that much as she had heard of them—though

she didn’t say how or where, which was a touch of her own—she had found

them beyond her supposition. She abounded in praise of them, and after

the manner of Woollett—which made the manner of Woollett a loveable

thing again to Strether. He had never so felt the true inwardness of it

as when his blooming companion pronounced the elder of the ladies of

the Rue de Bellechasse too fascinating for words and declared of the

younger that she was perfectly ideal, a real little monster of charm.

“Nothing,” she said of Jeanne, “ought ever to happen to her—she’s so

awfully right as she is. Another touch will spoil her—so she oughtn’t

to _be_ touched.”

“Ah but things, here in Paris,” Strether observed, “do happen to little

girls.” And then for the joke’s and the occasion’s sake: “Haven’t you

found that yourself?”

“That things happen—? Oh I’m not a little girl. I’m a big battered

blowsy one. _I_ don’t care,” Mamie laughed, “_what_ happens.”

Strether had a pause while he wondered if it mightn’t happen that he

should give her the pleasure of learning that he found her nicer than

he had really dreamed—a pause that ended when he had said to himself

that, so far as it at all mattered for her, she had in fact perhaps

already made this out. He risked accordingly a different

question—though conscious, as soon as he had spoken, that he seemed to

place it in relation to her last speech. “But that Mademoiselle de

Vionnet is to be married—I suppose you’ve heard of _that_.”

For all, he then found, he need fear! “Dear, yes; the gentleman was

there: Monsieur de Montbron, whom Madame de Vionnet presented to us.”

“And was he nice?”

Mamie bloomed and bridled with her best reception manner. “Any man’s

nice when he’s in love.”

It made Strether laugh. “But is Monsieur de Montbron in

love—already—with _you?_”

“Oh that’s not necessary—it’s so much better he should be so with

_her_: which, thank goodness, I lost no time in discovering for myself.

He’s perfectly gone—and I couldn’t have borne it for her if he hadn’t

been. She’s just too sweet.”

Strether hesitated. “And through being in love too?”

On which with a smile that struck him as wonderful Mamie had a

wonderful answer. “She doesn’t know if she is or not.”

It made him again laugh out. “Oh but _you_ do!”

She was willing to take it that way. “Oh yes, I know everything.” And

as she sat there rubbing her polished hands and making the best of

it—only holding her elbows perhaps a little too much out—the momentary

effect for Strether was that every one else, in all their affair,

seemed stupid.

“Know that poor little Jeanne doesn’t know what’s the matter with her?”

It was as near as they came to saying that she was probably in love

with Chad; but it was quite near enough for what Strether wanted; which

was to be confirmed in his certitude that, whether in love or not, she

appealed to something large and easy in the girl before him. Mamie

would be fat, too fat, at thirty; but she would always be the person

who, at the present sharp hour, had been disinterestedly tender. “If I

see a little more of her, as I hope I shall, I think she’ll like me

enough—for she seemed to like me to-day—to want me to tell her.”

“And _shall_ you?”

“Perfectly. I shall tell her the matter with her is that she wants only

too much to do right. To do right for her, naturally,” said Mamie, “is

to please.”

“Her mother, do you mean?”

“Her mother first.”

Strether waited. “And then?”

“Well, ‘then’—Mr. Newsome.”

There was something really grand for him in the serenity of this

reference. “And last only Monsieur de Montbron?”

“Last only”—she good-humouredly kept it up.

Strether considered. “So that every one after all then will be suited?”

She had one of her few hesitations, but it was a question only of a

moment; and it was her nearest approach to being explicit with him

about what was between them. “I think I can speak for myself. _I_ shall

be.”

It said indeed so much, told such a story of her being ready to help

him, so committed to him that truth, in short, for such use as he might

make of it toward those ends of his own with which, patiently and

trustfully, she had nothing to do—it so fully achieved all this that he

appeared to himself simply to meet it in its own spirit by the last

frankness of admiration. Admiration was of itself almost accusatory,

but nothing less would serve to show her how nearly he understood. He

put out his hand for good-bye with a “Splendid, splendid, splendid!”

And he left her, in her splendour, still waiting for little Bilham.

Book Tenth

I

Strether occupied beside little Bilham, three evenings after his

interview with Mamie Pocock, the same deep divan they had enjoyed

together on the first occasion of our friend’s meeting Madame de

Vionnet and her daughter in the apartment of the Boulevard Malesherbes,

where his position affirmed itself again as ministering to an easy

exchange of impressions. The present evening had a different stamp; if

the company was much more numerous, so, inevitably, were the ideas set

in motion. It was on the other hand, however, now strongly marked that

the talkers moved, in respect to such matters, round an inner, a

protected circle. They knew at any rate what really concerned them

to-night, and Strether had begun by keeping his companion close to it.

Only a few of Chad’s guests had dined—that is fifteen or twenty, a few

compared with the large concourse offered to sight by eleven o’clock;

but number and mass, quantity and quality, light, fragrance, sound, the

overflow of hospitality meeting the high tide of response, had all from

the first pressed upon Strether’s consciousness, and he felt himself

somehow part and parcel of the most festive scene, as the term was, in

which he had ever in his life been engaged. He had perhaps seen, on

Fourths of July and on dear old domestic Commencements, more people

assembled, but he had never seen so many in proportion to the space, or

had at all events never known so great a promiscuity to show so

markedly as picked. Numerous as was the company, it had still been made

so by selection, and what was above all rare for Strether was that, by

no fault of his own, he was in the secret of the principle that had

worked. He hadn’t enquired, he had averted his head, but Chad had put

him a pair of questions that themselves smoothed the ground. He hadn’t

answered the questions, he had replied that they were the young man’s

own affair; and he had then seen perfectly that the latter’s direction

was already settled.

Chad had applied for counsel only by way of intimating that he knew

what to do; and he had clearly never known it better than in now

presenting to his sister the whole circle of his society. This was all

in the sense and the spirit of the note struck by him on that lady’s

arrival; he had taken at the station itself a line that led him without

a break, and that enabled him to lead the Pococks—though dazed a

little, no doubt, breathless, no doubt, and bewildered—to the uttermost

end of the passage accepted by them perforce as pleasant. He had made

it for them violently pleasant and mercilessly full; the upshot of

which was, to Strether’s vision, that they had come all the way without

discovering it to be really no passage at all. It was a brave blind

alley, where to pass was impossible and where, unless they stuck fast,

they would have—which was always awkward—publicly to back out. They

were touching bottom assuredly tonight; the whole scene represented the

terminus of the _cul-de-sac_. So could things go when there was a hand

to keep them consistent—a hand that pulled the wire with a skill at

which the elder man more and more marvelled. The elder man felt

responsible, but he also felt successful, since what had taken place

was simply the issue of his own contention, six weeks before, that they

properly should wait to see what their friends would have really to

say. He had determined Chad to wait, he had determined him to see; he

was therefore not to quarrel with the time given up to the business. As

much as ever, accordingly, now that a fortnight had elapsed, the

situation created for Sarah, and against which she had raised no

protest, was that of her having accommodated herself to her adventure

as to a pleasure-party surrendered perhaps even somewhat in excess to

bustle and to “pace.” If her brother had been at any point the least

bit open to criticism it might have been on the ground of his spicing

the draught too highly and pouring the cup too full. Frankly treating

the whole occasion of the presence of his relatives as an opportunity

for amusement, he left it, no doubt, but scant margin as an opportunity

for anything else. He suggested, invented, abounded—yet all the while

with the loosest easiest rein. Strether, during his own weeks, had

gained a sense of knowing Paris; but he saw it afresh, and with fresh

emotion, in the form of the knowledge offered to his colleague.

A thousand unuttered thoughts hummed for him in the air of these

observations; not the least frequent of which was that Sarah might well

of a truth not quite know whither she was drifting. She was in no

position not to appear to expect that Chad should treat her handsomely;

yet she struck our friend as privately stiffening a little each time

she missed the chance of marking the great _nuance_. The great _nuance_

was in brief that of course her brother must treat her handsomely—she

should like to see him not; but that treating her handsomely, none the

less, wasn’t all in all—treating her handsomely buttered no parsnips;

and that in fine there were moments when she felt the fixed eyes of

their admirable absent mother fairly screw into the flat of her back.

Strether, watching, after his habit, and overscoring with thought,

positively had moments of his own in which he found himself sorry for

her—occasions on which she affected him as a person seated in a runaway

vehicle and turning over the question of a possible jump. _Would_ she

jump, could she, would _that_ be a safe place?—this question, at such

instants, sat for him in her lapse into pallor, her tight lips, her

conscious eyes. It came back to the main point at issue: would she be,

after all, to be squared? He believed on the whole she would jump; yet

his alternations on this subject were the more especial stuff of his

suspense. One thing remained well before him—a conviction that was in

fact to gain sharpness from the impressions of this evening: that if

she _should_ gather in her skirts, close her eyes and quit the carriage

while in motion, he would promptly enough become aware. She would

alight from her headlong course more or less directly upon him; it

would be appointed to him, unquestionably, to receive her entire

weight. Signs and portents of the experience thus in reserve for him

had as it happened, multiplied even through the dazzle of Chad’s party.

It was partly under the nervous consciousness of such a prospect that,

leaving almost every one in the two other rooms, leaving those of the

guests already known to him as well as a mass of brilliant strangers of

both sexes and of several varieties of speech, he had desired five

quiet minutes with little Bilham, whom he always found soothing and

even a little inspiring, and to whom he had actually moreover something

distinct and important to say.

He had felt of old—for it already seemed long ago—rather humiliated at

discovering he could learn in talk with a personage so much his junior

the lesson of a certain moral ease; but he had now got used to

that—whether or no the mixture of the fact with other humiliations had

made it indistinct, whether or no directly from little Bilham’s

example, the example of his being contentedly just the obscure and

acute little Bilham he was. It worked so for him, Strether seemed to

see; and our friend had at private hours a wan smile over the fact that

he himself, after so many more years, was still in search of something

that would work. However, as we have said, it worked just now for them

equally to have found a corner a little apart. What particularly kept

it apart was the circumstance that the music in the salon was

admirable, with two or three such singers as it was a privilege to hear

in private. Their presence gave a distinction to Chad’s entertainment,

and the interest of calculating their effect on Sarah was actually so

sharp as to be almost painful. Unmistakeably, in her single person, the

motive of the composition and dressed in a splendour of crimson which

affected Strether as the sound of a fall through a skylight, she would

now be in the forefront of the listening circle and committed by it up

to her eyes. Those eyes during the wonderful dinner itself he hadn’t

once met; having confessedly—perhaps a little pusillanimously—arranged

with Chad that he should be on the same side of the table. But there

was no use in having arrived now with little Bilham at an unprecedented

point of intimacy unless he could pitch everything into the pot. “You

who sat where you could see her, what does she make of it all? By which

I mean on what terms does she take it?”

“Oh she takes it, I judge, as proving that the claim of his family is

more than ever justified.”

“She isn’t then pleased with what he has to show?”

“On the contrary; she’s pleased with it as with his capacity to do this

kind of thing—more than she has been pleased with anything for a long

time. But she wants him to show it _there_. He has no right to waste it

on the likes of us.”

Strether wondered. “She wants him to move the whole thing over?”

“The whole thing—with an important exception. Everything he has ‘picked

up’—and the way he knows how. She sees no difficulty in that. She’d run

the show herself, and she’ll make the handsome concession that Woollett

would be on the whole in some ways the better for it. Not that it

wouldn’t be also in some ways the better for Woollett. The people there

are just as good.”

“Just as good as you and these others? Ah that may be. But such an

occasion as this, whether or no,” Strether said, “isn’t the people.

It’s what has made the people possible.”

“Well then,” his friend replied, “there you are; I give you my

impression for what it’s worth. Mrs. Pocock has _seen_, and that’s

to-night how she sits there. If you were to have a glimpse of her face

you’d understand me. She has made up her mind—to the sound of expensive

music.”

Strether took it freely in. “Ah then I shall have news of her.”

“I don’t want to frighten you, but I think that likely. However,”

little Bilham continued, “if I’m of the least use to you to hold on

by—!”

“You’re not of the least!”—and Strether laid an appreciative hand on

him to say it. “No one’s of the least.” With which, to mark how gaily

he could take it, he patted his companion’s knee. “I must meet my fate

alone, and I _shall_—oh you’ll see! And yet,” he pursued the next

moment, “you _can_ help me too. You once said to me”—he followed this

further—“that you held Chad should marry. I didn’t see then so well as

I know now that you meant he should marry Miss Pocock. Do you still

consider that he should? Because if you do”—he kept it up—“I want you

immediately to change your mind. You can help me that way.”

“Help you by thinking he should _not_ marry?”

“Not marry at all events Mamie.”

“And who then?”

“Ah,” Strether returned, “that I’m not obliged to say. But Madame de

Vionnet—I suggest—when he can.’

“Oh!” said little Bilham with some sharpness.

“Oh precisely! But he needn’t marry at all—I’m at any rate not obliged

to provide for it. Whereas in your case I rather feel that I _am_.”

Little Bilham was amused. “Obliged to provide for my marrying?”

“Yes—after all I’ve done to you!”

The young man weighed it. “Have you done as much as that?”

“Well,” said Strether, thus challenged, “of course I must remember what

you’ve also done to _me_. We may perhaps call it square. But all the

same,” he went on, “I wish awfully you’d marry Mamie Pocock yourself.”

Little Bilham laughed out. “Why it was only the other night, in this

very place, that you were proposing to me a different union

altogether.”

“Mademoiselle de Vionnet?” Well, Strether easily confessed it. “That, I

admit, was a vain image. _This_ is practical politics. I want to do

something good for both of you—I wish you each so well; and you can see

in a moment the trouble it will save me to polish you off by the same

stroke. She likes you, you know. You console her. And she’s splendid.”

Little Bilham stared as a delicate appetite stares at an overheaped

plate. “What do I console her for?”

It just made his friend impatient. “Oh come, you know!”

“And what proves for you that she likes me?”

“Why the fact that I found her three days ago stopping at home alone

all the golden afternoon on the mere chance that you’d come to her, and

hanging over her balcony on that of seeing your cab drive up. I don’t

know what you want more.”

Little Bilham after a moment found it. “Only just to know what proves

to you that I like _her_.”

“Oh if what I’ve just mentioned isn’t enough to make you do it, you’re

a stony-hearted little fiend. Besides”—Strether encouraged his fancy’s

flight—“you showed your inclination in the way you kept her waiting,

kept her on purpose to see if she cared enough for you.”

His companion paid his ingenuity the deference of a pause. “I didn’t

keep her waiting. I came at the hour. I wouldn’t have kept her waiting

for the world,” the young man honourably declared.

“Better still—then there you are!” And Strether, charmed, held him the

faster. “Even if you didn’t do her justice, moreover,” he continued, “I

should insist on your immediately coming round to it. I want awfully to

have worked it. I want”—and our friend spoke now with a yearning that

was really earnest—“at least to have done _that_.”

“To have married me off—without a penny?”

“Well, I shan’t live long; and I give you my word, now and here, that

I’ll leave you every penny of my own. I haven’t many, unfortunately,

but you shall have them all. And Miss Pocock, I think, has a few. I

want,” Strether went on, “to have been at least to that extent

constructive even expiatory. I’ve been sacrificing so to strange gods

that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my fidelity—fundamentally

unchanged after all—to our own. I feel as if my hands were embrued with

the blood of monstrous alien altars—of another faith altogether. There

it is—it’s done.” And then he further explained. “It took hold of me

because the idea of getting her quite out of the way for Chad helps to

clear my ground.”

The young man, at this, bounced about, and it brought them face to face

in admitted amusement. “You want me to marry as a convenience to Chad?”

“No,” Strether debated—“_he_ doesn’t care whether you marry or not.

It’s as a convenience simply to my own plan _for_ him.”

“‘Simply’!”—and little Bilham’s concurrence was in itself a lively

comment. “Thank you. But I thought,” he continued, “you had exactly

_no_ plan ‘for’ him.”

“Well then call it my plan for myself—which may be well, as you say, to

have none. His situation, don’t you see? is reduced now to the bare

facts one has to recognise. Mamie doesn’t want him, and he doesn’t want

Mamie: so much as that these days have made clear. It’s a thread we can

wind up and tuck in.”

But little Bilham still questioned. “_You_ can—since you seem so much

to want to. But why should I?”

Poor Strether thought it over, but was obliged of course to admit that

his demonstration did superficially fail. “Seriously, there _is_ no

reason. It’s my affair—I must do it alone. I’ve only my fantastic need

of making my dose stiff.”

Little Bilham wondered. “What do you call your dose?”

“Why what I have to swallow. I want my conditions unmitigated.”

He had spoken in the tone of talk for talk’s sake, and yet with an

obscure truth lurking in the loose folds; a circumstance presently not

without its effect on his young friend. Little Bilham’s eyes rested on

him a moment with some intensity; then suddenly, as if everything had

cleared up, he gave a happy laugh. It seemed to say that if pretending,

or even trying, or still even hoping, to be able to care for Mamie

would be of use, he was all there for the job. “I’ll do anything in the

world for you!”

“Well,” Strether smiled, “anything in the world is all I want. I don’t

know anything that pleased me in her more,” he went on, “than the way

that, on my finding her up there all alone, coming on her unawares and

feeling greatly for her being so out of it, she knocked down my tall

house of cards with her instant and cheerful allusion to the next young

man. It was somehow so the note I needed—her staying at home to receive

him.”

“It was Chad of course,” said little Bilham, “who asked the next young

man—I like your name for me!—to call.”

“So I supposed—all of which, thank God, is in our innocent and natural

manners. But do you know,” Strether asked, “if Chad knows—?” And then

as this interlocutor seemed at a loss: “Why where she has come out.”

Little Bilham, at this, met his face with a conscious look—it was as

if, more than anything yet, the allusion had penetrated. “Do you know

yourself?”

Strether lightly shook his head. “There I stop. Oh, odd as it may

appear to you, there _are_ things I don’t know. I only got the sense

from her of something very sharp, and yet very deep down, that she was

keeping all to herself. That is I had begun with the belief that she

_had_ kept it to herself; but face to face with her there I soon made

out that there was a person with whom she would have shared it. I had

thought she possibly might with _me_—but I saw then that I was only

half in her confidence. When, turning to me to greet me—for she was on

the balcony and I had come in without her knowing it—she showed me she

had been expecting _you_ and was proportionately disappointed, I got

hold of the tail of my conviction. Half an hour later I was in

possession of all the rest of it. You know what has happened.” He

looked at his young friend hard—then he felt sure. “For all you say,

you’re up to your eyes. So there you are.”

Little Bilham after an instant pulled half round. “I assure you she

hasn’t told me anything.”

“Of course she hasn’t. For what do you suggest that I suppose her to

take you? But you’ve been with her every day, you’ve seen her freely,

you’ve liked her greatly—I stick to that—and you’ve made your profit of

it. You know what she has been through as well as you know that she has

dined here to-night—which must have put her, by the way, through a good

deal more.”

The young man faced this blast; after which he pulled round the rest of

the way. “I haven’t in the least said she hasn’t been nice to me. But

she’s proud.”

“And quite properly. But not too proud for that.”

“It’s just her pride that has made her. Chad,” little Bilham loyally

went on, “has really been as kind to her as possible. It’s awkward for

a man when a girl’s in love with him.”

“Ah but she isn’t—now.”

Little Bilham sat staring before him; then he sprang up as if his

friend’s penetration, recurrent and insistent, made him really after

all too nervous. “No—she isn’t now. It isn’t in the least,” he went on,

“Chad’s fault. He’s really all right. I mean he would have been

willing. But she came over with ideas. Those she had got at home. They

had been her motive and support in joining her brother and his wife.

She was to _save_ our friend.”

“Ah like me, poor thing?” Strether also got to his feet.

“Exactly—she had a bad moment. It was very soon distinct to her, to

pull her up, to let her down, that, alas, he was, he _is_, saved.

There’s nothing left for her to do.”

“Not even to love him?”

“She would have loved him better as she originally believed him.”

Strether wondered. “Of course one asks one’s self what notion a little

girl forms, where a young man’s in question, of such a history and such

a state.”

“Well, this little girl saw them, no doubt, as obscure, but she saw

them practically as wrong. The wrong for her _was_ the obscure. Chad

turns out at any rate right and good and disconcerting, while what she

was all prepared for, primed and girded and wound up for, was to deal

with him as the general opposite.”

“Yet wasn’t her whole point”—Strether weighed it—“that he was to be,

that he _could_ be, made better, redeemed?”

Little Bilham fixed it all a moment, and then with a small headshake

that diffused a tenderness: “She’s too late. Too late for the miracle.”

“Yes”—his companion saw enough. “Still, if the worst fault of his

condition is that it may be all there for her to profit by—?”

“Oh she doesn’t want to ‘profit,’ in that flat way. She doesn’t want to

profit by another woman’s work—she wants the miracle to have been her

own miracle. _That’s_ what she’s too late for.”

Strether quite felt how it all fitted, yet there seemed one loose

piece. “I’m bound to say, you know, that she strikes one, on these

lines, as fastidious—what you call here _difficile_.”

Little Bilham tossed up his chin. “Of course she’s _difficile_—on any

lines! What else in the world _are_ our Mamies—the real, the right

ones?”

“I see, I see,” our friend repeated, charmed by the responsive wisdom

he had ended by so richly extracting. “Mamie is one of the real and the

right.”

“The very thing itself.”

“And what it comes to then,” Strether went on, “is that poor awful Chad

is simply too good for her.”

“Ah too good was what he was after all to be; but it was she herself,

and she herself only, who was to have made him so.”

It hung beautifully together, but with still a loose end. “Wouldn’t he

do for her even if he should after all break—”

“With his actual influence?” Oh little Bilham had for this enquiry the

sharpest of all his controls. “How can he ‘do’—on any terms

whatever—when he’s flagrantly spoiled?”

Strether could only meet the question with his passive, his receptive

pleasure. “Well, thank goodness, _you’re_ not! _You_ remain for her to

save, and I come back, on so beautiful and full a demonstration, to my

contention of just now—that of your showing distinct signs of her

having already begun.”

The most he could further say to himself—as his young friend turned

away—was that the charge encountered for the moment no renewed denial.

Little Bilham, taking his course back to the music, only shook his

good-natured ears an instant, in the manner of a terrier who has got

wet; while Strether relapsed into the sense—which had for him in these

days most of comfort—that he was free to believe in anything that from

hour to hour kept him going. He had positively motions and flutters of

this conscious hour-to-hour kind, temporary surrenders to irony, to

fancy, frequent instinctive snatches at the growing rose of

observation, constantly stronger for him, as he felt, in scent and

colour, and in which he could bury his nose even to wantonness. This

last resource was offered him, for that matter, in the very form of his

next clear perception—the vision of a prompt meeting, in the doorway of

the room, between little Bilham and brilliant Miss Barrace, who was

entering as Bilham withdrew. She had apparently put him a question, to

which he had replied by turning to indicate his late interlocutor;

toward whom, after an interrogation further aided by a resort to that

optical machinery which seemed, like her other ornaments, curious and

archaic, the genial lady, suggesting more than ever for her fellow

guest the old French print, the historic portrait, directed herself

with an intention that Strether instantly met. He knew in advance the

first note she would sound, and took in as she approached all her need

of sounding it. Nothing yet had been so “wonderful” between them as the

present occasion; and it was her special sense of this quality in

occasions that she was there, as she was in most places, to feed. That

sense had already been so well fed by the situation about them that she

had quitted the other room, forsaken the music, dropped out of the

play, abandoned, in a word, the stage itself, that she might stand a

minute behind the scenes with Strether and so perhaps figure as one of

the famous augurs replying, behind the oracle, to the wink of the

other. Seated near him presently where little Bilham had sat, she

replied in truth to many things; beginning as soon as he had said to

her—what he hoped he said without fatuity—“All you ladies are

extraordinarily kind to me.”

She played her long handle, which shifted her observation; she saw in

an instant all the absences that left them free. “How can we be

anything else? But isn’t that exactly your plight? ‘We ladies’—oh we’re

nice, and you must be having enough of us! As one of us, you know, I

don’t pretend I’m crazy about us. But Miss Gostrey at least to-night

has left you alone, hasn’t she?” With which she again looked about as

if Maria might still lurk.

“Oh yes,” said Strether; “she’s only sitting up for me at home.” And

then as this elicited from his companion her gay “Oh, oh, oh!” he

explained that he meant sitting up in suspense and prayer. “We thought

it on the whole better she shouldn’t be present; and either way of

course it’s a terrible worry for her.” He abounded in the sense of his

appeal to the ladies, and they might take their choice of his doing so

from humility or from pride. “Yet she inclines to believe I shall come

out.”

“Oh I incline to believe too you’ll come out!”—Miss Barrace, with her

laugh, was not to be behind. “Only the question’s about _where_, isn’t

it? However,” she happily continued, “if it’s anywhere at all it must

be very far on, mustn’t it? To do us justice, I think, you know,” she

laughed, “we do, among us all, want you rather far on. Yes, yes,” she

repeated in her quick droll way; “we want you very, _very_ far on!”

After which she wished to know why he had thought it better Maria

shouldn’t be present.

“Oh,” he replied, “it was really her own idea. I should have wished it.

But she dreads responsibility.”

“And isn’t that a new thing for her?”

“To dread it? No doubt—no doubt. But her nerve has given way.”

Miss Barrace looked at him a moment. “She has too much at stake.” Then

less gravely: “Mine, luckily for me, holds out.”

“Luckily for me too”—Strether came back to that. “My own isn’t so firm,

_my_ appetite for responsibility isn’t so sharp, as that I haven’t felt

the very principle of this occasion to be ‘the more the merrier.’ If we

_are_ so merry it’s because Chad has understood so well.”

“He has understood amazingly,” said Miss Barrace.

“It’s wonderful—Strether anticipated for her.

“It’s wonderful!” she, to meet it, intensified; so that, face to face

over it, they largely and recklessly laughed. But she presently added:

“Oh I see the principle. If one didn’t one would be lost. But when once

one has got hold of it—”

“It’s as simple as twice two! From the moment he had to do something—”

“A crowd”—she took him straight up—“was the only thing? Rather, rather:

a rumpus of sound,” she laughed, “or nothing. Mrs. Pocock’s built in,

or built out—whichever you call it; she’s packed so tight she can’t

move. She’s in splendid isolation”—Miss Barrace embroidered the theme.

Strether followed, but scrupulous of justice. “Yet with every one in

the place successively introduced to her.”

“Wonderfully—but just so that it does build her out. She’s bricked up,

she’s buried alive!”

Strether seemed for a moment to look at it; but it brought him to a

sigh. “Oh but she’s not dead! It will take more than this to kill her.”

His companion had a pause that might have been for pity. “No, I can’t

pretend I think she’s finished—or that it’s for more than to-night.”

She remained pensive as if with the same compunction. “It’s only up to

her chin.” Then again for the fun of it: “She can breathe.”

“She can breathe!”—he echoed it in the same spirit. “And do you know,”

he went on, “what’s really all this time happening to me?—through the

beauty of music, the gaiety of voices, the uproar in short of our revel

and the felicity of your wit? The sound of Mrs. Pocock’s respiration

drowns for me, I assure you, every other. It’s literally all I hear.”

She focussed him with her clink of chains. “Well—!” she breathed ever

so kindly.

“Well, what?”

“She _is_ free from her chin up,” she mused; “and that _will_ be enough

for her.”

“It will be enough for me!” Strether ruefully laughed. “Waymarsh has

really,” he then asked, “brought her to see you?”

“Yes—but that’s the worst of it. I could do you no good. And yet I

tried hard.”

Strether wondered. “And how did you try?”

“Why I didn’t speak of you.”

“I see. That was better.”

“Then what would have been worse? For speaking or silent,” she lightly

wailed, “I somehow ‘compromise.’ And it has never been any one but

you.”

“That shows”—he was magnanimous—“that it’s something not in you, but in

one’s self. It’s _my_ fault.”

She was silent a little. “No, it’s Mr. Waymarsh’s. It’s the fault of

his having brought her.”

“Ah then,” said Strether good-naturedly, “why _did_ he bring her?”

“He couldn’t afford not to.”

“Oh you were a trophy—one of the spoils of conquest? But why in that

case, since you do ‘compromise’—”

“Don’t I compromise _him_ as well? I do compromise him as well,” Miss

Barrace smiled. “I compromise him as hard as I can. But for Mr.

Waymarsh it isn’t fatal. It’s—so far as his wonderful relation with

Mrs. Pocock is concerned—favourable.” And then, as he still seemed

slightly at sea: “The man who had succeeded with _me_, don’t you see?

For her to get him from me was such an added incentive.”

Strether saw, but as if his path was still strewn with surprises. “It’s

‘from’ you then that she has got him?”

She was amused at his momentary muddle. “You can fancy my fight! She

believes in her triumph. I think it has been part of her joy.

“Oh her joy!” Strether sceptically murmured.

“Well, she thinks she has had her own way. And what’s to-night for her

but a kind of apotheosis? Her frock’s really good.”

“Good enough to go to heaven in? For after a real apotheosis,” Strether

went on, “there’s nothing _but_ heaven. For Sarah there’s only

to-morrow.”

“And you mean that she won’t find to-morrow heavenly?”

“Well, I mean that I somehow feel to-night—on her behalf—too good to be

true. She has had her cake; that is she’s in the act now of having it,

of swallowing the largest and sweetest piece. There won’t be another

left for her. Certainly _I_ haven’t one. It can only, at the best, be

Chad.” He continued to make it out as for their common entertainment.

“He may have one, as it were, up his sleeve; yet it’s borne in upon me

that if he had—”

“He wouldn’t”—she quite understood—“have taken all _this_ trouble? I

dare say not, and, if I may be quite free and dreadful, I very much

hope he won’t take any more. Of course I won’t pretend now,” she added,

“not to know what it’s a question of.”

“Oh every one must know now,” poor Strether thoughtfully admitted; “and

it’s strange enough and funny enough that one should feel everybody

here at this very moment to be knowing and watching and waiting.”

“Yes—isn’t it indeed funny?” Miss Barrace quite rose to it. “That’s the

way we _are_ in Paris.” She was always pleased with a new contribution

to that queerness. “It’s wonderful! But, you know,” she declared, “it

all depends on you. I don’t want to turn the knife in your vitals, but

that’s naturally what you just now meant by our all being on top of

you. We know you as the hero of the drama, and we’re gathered to see

what you’ll do.”

Strether looked at her a moment with a light perhaps slightly obscured.

“I think that must be why the hero has taken refuge in this corner.

He’s scared at his heroism—he shrinks from his part.”

“Ah but we nevertheless believe he’ll play it. That’s why,” Miss

Barrace kindly went on, “we take such an interest in you. We feel

you’ll come up to the scratch.” And then as he seemed perhaps not quite

to take fire: “Don’t let him do it.”

“Don’t let Chad go?”

“Yes, keep hold of him. With all this”—and she indicated the general

tribute—“he has done enough. We love him here—he’s charming.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Strether, “the way you all can simplify when you

will.”

But she gave it to him back. “It’s nothing to the way _you_ will when

you must.”

He winced at it as at the very voice of prophecy, and it kept him a

moment quiet. He detained her, however, on her appearing about to leave

him alone in the rather cold clearance their talk had made. “There

positively isn’t a sign of a hero to-night; the hero’s dodging and

shirking, the hero’s ashamed. Therefore, you know, I think, what you

must all _really_ be occupied with is the heroine.”

Miss Barrace took a minute. “The heroine?”

“The heroine. I’ve treated her,” said Strether, “not a bit like a hero.

Oh,” he sighed, “I don’t do it well!”

She eased him off. “You do it as you can.” And then after another

hesitation: “I think she’s satisfied.”

But he remained compunctious. “I haven’t been near her. I haven’t

looked at her.”

“Ah then you’ve lost a good deal!”

He showed he knew it. “She’s more wonderful than ever?”

“Than ever. With Mr. Pocock.”

Strether wondered. “Madame de Vionnet—with Jim?”

“Madame de Vionnet—with ‘Jim.’” Miss Barrace was historic.

“And what’s she doing with him?”

“Ah you must ask _him!_”

Strether’s face lighted again at the prospect. “It _will_ be amusing to

do so.” Yet he continued to wonder. “But she must have some idea.”

“Of course she has—she has twenty ideas. She has in the first place,”

said Miss Barrace, swinging a little her tortoise-shell, “that of doing

her part. Her part is to help _you_.”

It came out as nothing had come yet; links were missing and connexions

unnamed, but it was suddenly as if they were at the heart of their

subject. “Yes; how much more she does it,” Strether gravely reflected,

“than I help _her!_” It all came over him as with the near presence of

the beauty, the grace, the intense, dissimulated spirit with which he

had, as he said, been putting off contact. “_She_ has courage.”

“Ah she has courage!” Miss Barrace quite agreed; and it was as if for a

moment they saw the quantity in each other’s face.

But indeed the whole thing was present. “How much she must care!”

“Ah there it is. She does care. But it isn’t, is it,” Miss Barrace

considerately added, “as if you had ever had any doubt of that?”

Strether seemed suddenly to like to feel that he really never had. “Why

of course it’s the whole point.”

“Voilà!” Miss Barrace smiled.

“It’s why one came out,” Strether went on. “And it’s why one has stayed

so long. And it’s also”—he abounded—“why one’s going home. It’s why,

it’s why—”

“It’s why everything!” she concurred. “It’s why she might be

to-night—for all she looks and shows, and for all your friend ‘Jim’

does—about twenty years old. That’s another of her ideas; to be for

him, and to be quite easily and charmingly, as young as a little girl.”

Strether assisted at his distance. “‘For him’? For Chad—?”

“For Chad, in a manner, naturally, always. But in particular to-night

for Mr. Pocock.” And then as her friend still stared: “Yes, it _is_ of

a bravery! But that’s what she has: her high sense of duty.” It was

more than sufficiently before them. “When Mr. Newsome has his hands so

embarrassed with his sister—”

“It’s quite the least”—Strether filled it out—“that she should take his

sister’s husband? Certainly—quite the least. So she has taken him.”

“She has taken him.” It was all Miss Barrace had meant.

Still it remained enough. “It must be funny.”

“Oh it _is_ funny.” That of course essentially went with it.

But it brought them back. “How indeed then she must care!” In answer to

which Strether’s entertainer dropped a comprehensive “Ah!” expressive

perhaps of some impatience for the time he took to get used to it. She

herself had got used to it long before.

II

When one morning within the week he perceived the whole thing to be

really at last upon him Strether’s immediate feeling was all relief. He

had known this morning that something was about to happen—known it, in

a moment, by Waymarsh’s manner when Waymarsh appeared before him during

his brief consumption of coffee and a roll in the small slippery

_salle-à-manger_ so associated with rich rumination. Strether had taken

there of late various lonely and absent-minded meals; he communed

there, even at the end of June, with a suspected chill, the air of old

shivers mixed with old savours, the air in which so many of his

impressions had perversely matured; the place meanwhile renewing its

message to him by the very circumstance of his single state. He now sat

there, for the most part, to sigh softly, while he vaguely tilted his

carafe, over the vision of how much better Waymarsh was occupied. That

was really his success by the common measure—to have led this companion

so on and on. He remembered how at first there had been scarce a

squatting-place he could beguile him into passing; the actual outcome

of which at last was that there was scarce one that could arrest him in

his rush. His rush—as Strether vividly and amusedly figured

it—continued to be all with Sarah, and contained perhaps moreover the

word of the whole enigma, whipping up in its fine full-flavoured froth

the very principle, for good or for ill, of his own, of Strether’s

destiny. It might after all, to the end, only be that they had united

to save him, and indeed, so far as Waymarsh was concerned, that _had_

to be the spring of action. Strether was glad at all events, in

connexion with the case, that the saving he required was not more

scant; so constituted a luxury was it in certain lights just to lurk

there out of the full glare. He had moments of quite seriously

wondering whether Waymarsh wouldn’t in fact, thanks to old friendship

and a conceivable indulgence, make about as good terms for him as he

might make for himself. They wouldn’t be the same terms of course; but

they might have the advantage that he himself probably should be able

to make none at all.

He was never in the morning very late, but Waymarsh had already been

out, and, after a peep into the dim refectory, he presented himself

with much less than usual of his large looseness. He had made sure,

through the expanse of glass exposed to the court, that they would be

alone; and there was now in fact that about him that pretty well took

up the room. He was dressed in the garments of summer; and save that

his white waistcoat was redundant and bulging these things favoured,

they determined, his expression. He wore a straw hat such as his friend

hadn’t yet seen in Paris, and he showed a buttonhole freshly adorned

with a magnificent rose. Strether read on the instant his story—how,

astir for the previous hour, the sprinkled newness of the day, so

pleasant at that season in Paris, he was fairly panting with the pulse

of adventure and had been with Mrs. Pocock, unmistakeably, to the

Marché aux Fleurs. Strether really knew in this vision of him a joy

that was akin to envy; so reversed as he stood there did their old

positions seem; so comparatively doleful now showed, by the sharp turn

of the wheel, the posture of the pilgrim from Woollett. He wondered,

this pilgrim, if he had originally looked to Waymarsh so brave and

well, so remarkably launched, as it was at present the latter’s

privilege to appear. He recalled that his friend had remarked to him

even at Chester that his aspect belied his plea of prostration; but

there certainly couldn’t have been, for an issue, an aspect less

concerned than Waymarsh’s with the menace of decay. Strether had at any

rate never resembled a Southern planter of the great days—which was the

image picturesquely suggested by the happy relation between the

fuliginous face and the wide panama of his visitor. This type, it

further amused him to guess, had been, on Waymarsh’s part, the object

of Sarah’s care; he was convinced that her taste had not been a

stranger to the conception and purchase of the hat, any more than her

fine fingers had been guiltless of the bestowal of the rose. It came to

him in the current of thought, as things so oddly did come, that _he_

had never risen with the lark to attend a brilliant woman to the Marché

aux Fleurs; this could be fastened on him in connexion neither with

Miss Gostrey nor with Madame de Vionnet; the practice of getting up

early for adventures could indeed in no manner be fastened on him. It

came to him in fact that just here was his usual case: he was for ever

missing things through his general genius for missing them, while

others were for ever picking them up through a contrary bent. And it

was others who looked abstemious and he who looked greedy; it was he

somehow who finally paid, and it was others who mainly partook. Yes, he

should go to the scaffold yet for he wouldn’t know quite whom. He

almost, for that matter, felt on the scaffold now and really quite

enjoying it. It worked out as _because_ he was anxious there—it worked

out as for this reason that Waymarsh was so blooming. It was _his_ trip

for health, for a change, that proved the success—which was just what

Strether, planning and exerting himself, had desired it should be. That

truth already sat full-blown on his companion’s lips; benevolence

breathed from them as with the warmth of active exercise, and also a

little as with the bustle of haste.

“Mrs. Pocock, whom I left a quarter of an hour ago at her hotel, has

asked me to mention to you that she would like to find you at home here

in about another hour. She wants to see you; she has something to

say—or considers, I believe, that you may have: so that I asked her

myself why she shouldn’t come right round. She hasn’t _been_ round

yet—to see our place; and I took upon myself to say that I was sure

you’d be glad to have her. The thing’s therefore, you see, to keep

right here till she comes.”

The announcement was sociably, even though, after Waymarsh’s wont,

somewhat solemnly made; but Strether quickly felt other things in it

than these light features. It was the first approach, from that

quarter, to admitted consciousness; it quickened his pulse; it simply

meant at last that he should have but himself to thank if he didn’t

know where he was. He had finished his breakfast; he pushed it away and

was on his feet. There were plenty of elements of surprise, but only

one of doubt. “The thing’s for _you_ to keep here too?” Waymarsh had

been slightly ambiguous.

He wasn’t ambiguous, however, after this enquiry; and Strether’s

understanding had probably never before opened so wide and effective a

mouth as it was to open during the next five minutes. It was no part of

his friend’s wish, as appeared, to help to receive Mrs. Pocock; he

quite understood the spirit in which she was to present herself, but

his connexion with her visit was limited to his having—well, as he

might say—perhaps a little promoted it. He had thought, and had let her

know it, that Strether possibly would think she might have been round

before. At any rate, as turned out, she had been wanting herself, quite

a while, to come. “I told her,” said Waymarsh, “that it would have been

a bright idea if she had only carried it out before.”

Strether pronounced it so bright as to be almost dazzling. “But why

_hasn’t_ she carried it out before? She has seen me every day—she had

only to name her hour. I’ve been waiting and waiting.”

“Well, I told her you had. And she has been waiting too.” It was, in

the oddest way in the world, on the showing of this tone, a genial new

pressing coaxing Waymarsh; a Waymarsh conscious with a different

consciousness from any he had yet betrayed, and actually rendered by it

almost insinuating. He lacked only time for full persuasion, and

Strether was to see in a moment why. Meantime, however, our friend

perceived, he was announcing a step of some magnanimity on Mrs.

Pocock’s part, so that he could deprecate a sharp question. It was his

own high purpose in fact to have smoothed sharp questions to rest. He

looked his old comrade very straight in the eyes, and he had never

conveyed to him in so mute a manner so much kind confidence and so much

good advice. Everything that was between them was again in his face,

but matured and shelved and finally disposed of. “At any rate,” he

added, “she’s coming now.”

Considering how many pieces had to fit themselves, it all fell, in

Strether’s brain, into a close rapid order. He saw on the spot what had

happened, and what probably would yet; and it was all funny enough. It

was perhaps just this freedom of appreciation that wound him up to his

flare of high spirits. “What is she coming _for?_—to kill me?”

“She’s coming to be very _very_ kind to you, and you must let me say

that I greatly hope you’ll not be less so to herself.”

This was spoken by Waymarsh with much gravity of admonition, and as

Strether stood there he knew he had but to make a movement to take the

attitude of a man gracefully receiving a present. The present was that

of the opportunity dear old Waymarsh had flattered himself he had

divined in him the slight soreness of not having yet thoroughly

enjoyed; so he had brought it to him thus, as on a little silver

breakfast-tray, familiarly though delicately—without oppressive pomp;

and he was to bend and smile and acknowledge, was to take and use and

be grateful. He was not—that was the beauty of it—to be asked to

deflect too much from his dignity. No wonder the old boy bloomed in

this bland air of his own distillation. Strether felt for a moment as

if Sarah were actually walking up and down outside. Wasn’t she hanging

about the _porte-cochère_ while her friend thus summarily opened a way?

Strether would meet her but to take it, and everything would be for the

best in the best of possible worlds. He had never so much known what

any one meant as, in the light of this demonstration, he knew what Mrs.

Newsome did. It had reached Waymarsh from Sarah, but it had reached

Sarah from her mother, and there was no break in the chain by which it

reached _him_. “Has anything particular happened,” he asked after a

minute—“so suddenly to determine her? Has she heard anything unexpected

from home?”

Waymarsh, on this, it seemed to him, looked at him harder than ever.

“‘Unexpected’?” He had a brief hesitation; then, however, he was firm.

“We’re leaving Paris.”

“Leaving? That _is_ sudden.”

Waymarsh showed a different opinion. “Less so than it may seem. The

purpose of Mrs. Pocock’s visit is to explain to you in fact that it’s

_not_.”

Strether didn’t at all know if he had really an advantage—anything that

would practically count as one; but he enjoyed for the moment—as for

the first time in his life—the sense of so carrying it off. He

wondered—it was amusing—if he felt as the impudent feel. “I shall take

great pleasure, I assure you, in any explanation. I shall be delighted

to receive Sarah.”

The sombre glow just darkened in his comrade’s eyes; but he was struck

with the way it died out again. It was too mixed with another

consciousness—it was too smothered, as might be said, in flowers. He

really for the time regretted it—poor dear old sombre glow! Something

straight and simple, something heavy and empty, had been eclipsed in

its company; something by which he had best known his friend. Waymarsh

wouldn’t _be_ his friend, somehow, without the occasional ornament of

the sacred rage, and the right to the sacred rage—inestimably precious

for Strether’s charity—he also seemed in a manner, and at Mrs. Pocock’s

elbow, to have forfeited. Strether remembered the occasion early in

their stay when on that very spot he had come out with his earnest, his

ominous “Quit it!”—and, so remembering, felt it hang by a hair that he

didn’t himself now utter the same note. Waymarsh was having a good

time—this was the truth that was embarrassing for him, and he was

having it then and there, he was having it in Europe, he was having it

under the very protection of circumstances of which he didn’t in the

least approve; all of which placed him in a false position, with no

issue possible—none at least by the grand manner. It was practically in

the manner of any one—it was all but in poor Strether’s own—that

instead of taking anything up he merely made the most of having to be

himself explanatory. “I’m not leaving for the United States direct. Mr.

and Mrs. Pocock and Miss Mamie are thinking of a little trip before

their own return, and we’ve been talking for some days past of our

joining forces. We’ve settled it that we do join and that we sail

together the end of next month. But we start to-morrow for Switzerland.

Mrs. Pocock wants some scenery. She hasn’t had much yet.”

He was brave in his way too, keeping nothing back, confessing all there

was, and only leaving Strether to make certain connexions. “Is what

Mrs. Newsome had cabled her daughter an injunction to break off short?”

The grand manner indeed at this just raised its head a little. “I know

nothing about Mrs. Newsome’s cables.”

Their eyes met on it with some intensity—during the few seconds of

which something happened quite out of proportion to the time. It

happened that Strether, looking thus at his friend, didn’t take his

answer for truth—and that something more again occurred in consequence

of _that_. Yes—Waymarsh just _did_ know about Mrs. Newsome’s cables: to

what other end than that had they dined together at Bignon’s? Strether

almost felt for the instant that it was to Mrs. Newsome herself the

dinner had been given; and, for that matter, quite felt how she must

have known about it and, as he might think, protected and consecrated

it. He had a quick blurred view of daily cables, questions, answers,

signals: clear enough was his vision of the expense that, when so wound

up, the lady at home was prepared to incur. Vivid not less was his

memory of what, during his long observation of her, some of her

attainments of that high pitch had cost her. Distinctly she was at the

highest now, and Waymarsh, who imagined himself an independent

performer, was really, forcing his fine old natural voice, an

overstrained accompanist. The whole reference of his errand seemed to

mark her for Strether as by this time consentingly familiar to him, and

nothing yet had so despoiled her of a special shade of consideration.

“You don’t know,” he asked, “whether Sarah has been directed from home

to try me on the matter of my also going to Switzerland?”

“I know,” said Waymarsh as manfully as possible, “nothing whatever

about her private affairs; though I believe her to be acting in

conformity with things that have my highest respect.” It was as manful

as possible, but it was still the false note—as it had to be to convey

so sorry a statement. He knew everything, Strether more and more felt,

that he thus disclaimed, and his little punishment was just in this

doom to a second fib. What falser position—given the man—could the most

vindictive mind impose? He ended by squeezing through a passage in

which three months before he would certainly have stuck fast. “Mrs

Pocock will probably be ready herself to answer any enquiry you may put

to her. But,” he continued, “_but_—!” He faltered on it.

“But what? Don’t put her too many?”

Waymarsh looked large, but the harm was done; he couldn’t, do what he

would, help looking rosy. “Don’t do anything you’ll be sorry for.”

It was an attenuation, Strether guessed, of something else that had

been on his lips; it was a sudden drop to directness, and was thereby

the voice of sincerity. He had fallen to the supplicating note, and

that immediately, for our friend, made a difference and reinstated him.

They were in communication as they had been, that first morning, in

Sarah’s salon and in her presence and Madame de Vionnet’s; and the same

recognition of a great good will was again, after all, possible. Only

the amount of response Waymarsh had then taken for granted was doubled,

decupled now. This came out when he presently said: “Of course I

needn’t assure you _I_ hope you’ll come with us.” Then it was that his

implications and expectations loomed up for Strether as almost

pathetically gross.

The latter patted his shoulder while he thanked him, giving the go-by

to the question of joining the Pococks; he expressed the joy he felt at

seeing him go forth again so brave and free, and he in fact almost took

leave of him on the spot. “I shall see you again of course before you

go; but I’m meanwhile much obliged to you for arranging so conveniently

for what you’ve told me. I shall walk up and down in the court

there—dear little old court which we’ve each bepaced so, this last

couple of months, to the tune of our flights and our drops, our

hesitations and our plunges: I shall hang about there, all impatience

and excitement, please let Sarah know, till she graciously presents

herself. Leave me with her without fear,” he laughed; “I assure you I

shan’t hurt her. I don’t think either she’ll hurt _me_: I’m in a

situation in which damage was some time ago discounted. Besides, _that_

isn’t what worries you—but don’t, don’t explain! We’re all right as we

are: which was the degree of success our adventure was pledged to for

each of us. We weren’t, it seemed, all right as we were before; and

we’ve got over the ground, all things considered, quickly. I hope

you’ll have a lovely time in the Alps.”

Waymarsh fairly looked up at him as from the foot of them. “I don’t

know as I _ought_ really to go.”

It was the conscience of Milrose in the very voice of Milrose, but, oh

it was feeble and flat! Strether suddenly felt quite ashamed for him;

he breathed a greater boldness. “_Let_ yourself, on the contrary, go—in

all agreeable directions. These are precious hours—at our age they

mayn’t recur. Don’t have it to say to yourself at Milrose, next winter,

that you hadn’t courage for them.” And then as his comrade queerly

stared: “Live up to Mrs. Pocock.”

“Live up to her?”

“You’re a great help to her.”

Waymarsh looked at it as at one of the uncomfortable things that were

certainly true and that it was yet ironical to say. “It’s more then

than you are.”

“That’s exactly your own chance and advantage. Besides,” said Strether,

“I do in my way contribute. I know what I’m about.”

Waymarsh had kept on his great panama, and, as he now stood nearer the

door, his last look beneath the shade of it had turned again to

darkness and warning. “So do I! See here, Strether.”

“I know what you’re going to say. ‘Quit this’?”

“Quit this!” But it lacked its old intensity; nothing of it remained;

it went out of the room with him.

III

Almost the first thing, strangely enough, that, about an hour later,

Strether found himself doing in Sarah’s presence was to remark

articulately on this failure, in their friend, of what had been

superficially his great distinction. It was as if—he alluded of course

to the grand manner—the dear man had sacrificed it to some other

advantage; which would be of course only for himself to measure. It

might be simply that he was physically so much more sound than on his

first coming out; this was all prosaic, comparatively cheerful and

vulgar. And fortunately, if one came to that, his improvement in health

was really itself grander than any manner it could be conceived as

having cost him. “You yourself alone, dear Sarah”—Strether took the

plunge—“have done him, it strikes me, in these three weeks, as much

good as all the rest of his time together.”

It was a plunge because somehow the range of reference was, in the

conditions, “funny,” and made funnier still by Sarah’s attitude, by the

turn the occasion had, with her appearance, so sensibly taken. Her

appearance was really indeed funnier than anything else—the spirit in

which he felt her to be there as soon as she was there, the shade of

obscurity that cleared up for him as soon as he was seated with her in

the small _salon de lecture_ that had, for the most part, in all the

weeks, witnessed the wane of his early vivacity of discussion with

Waymarsh. It was an immense thing, quite a tremendous thing, for her to

have come: this truth opened out to him in spite of his having already

arrived for himself at a fairly vivid view of it. He had done exactly

what he had given Waymarsh his word for—had walked and re-walked the

court while he awaited her advent; acquiring in this exercise an amount

of light that affected him at the time as flooding the scene. She had

decided upon the step in order to give him the benefit of a doubt, in

order to be able to say to her mother that she had, even to abjectness,

smoothed the way for him. The doubt had been as to whether he mightn’t

take her as not having smoothed it—and the admonition had possibly come

from Waymarsh’s more detached spirit. Waymarsh had at any rate,

certainly, thrown his weight into the scale—he had pointed to the

importance of depriving their friend of a grievance. She had done

justice to the plea, and it was to set herself right with a high ideal

that she actually sat there in her state. Her calculation was sharp in

the immobility with which she held her tall parasol-stick upright and

at arm’s length, quite as if she had struck the place to plant her

flag; in the separate precautions she took not to show as nervous; in

the aggressive repose in which she did quite nothing but wait for him.

Doubt ceased to be possible from the moment he had taken in that she

had arrived with no proposal whatever; that her concern was simply to

show what she had come to receive. She had come to receive his

submission, and Waymarsh was to have made it plain to him that she

would expect nothing less. He saw fifty things, her host, at this

convenient stage; but one of those he most saw was that their anxious

friend hadn’t quite had the hand required of him. Waymarsh _had_,

however, uttered the request that she might find him mild, and while

hanging about the court before her arrival he had turned over with zeal

the different ways in which he could be so. The difficulty was that if

he was mild he wasn’t, for her purpose, conscious. If she wished him

conscious—as everything about her cried aloud that she did—she must

accordingly be at costs to make him so. Conscious he _was_, for

himself—but only of too many things; so she must choose the one she

required.

Practically, however, it at last got itself named, and when once that

had happened they were quite at the centre of their situation. One

thing had really done as well as another; when Strether had spoken of

Waymarsh’s leaving him, and that had necessarily brought on a reference

to Mrs. Pocock’s similar intention, the jump was but short to supreme

lucidity. Light became indeed after that so intense that Strether would

doubtless have but half made out, in the prodigious glare, by which of

the two the issue had been in fact precipitated. It was, in their

contracted quarters, as much there between them as if it had been

something suddenly spilled with a crash and a splash on the floor. The

form of his submission was to be an engagement to acquit himself within

the twenty-four hours. “He’ll go in a moment if you give him the

word—he assures me on his honour he’ll do that”: this came in its

order, out of its order, in respect to Chad, after the crash had

occurred. It came repeatedly during the time taken by Strether to feel

that he was even more fixed in his rigour than he had supposed—the time

he was not above adding to a little by telling her that such a way of

putting it on her brother’s part left him sufficiently surprised. She

wasn’t at all funny at last—she was really fine; and he felt easily

where she was strong—strong for herself. It hadn’t yet so come home to

him that she was nobly and appointedly officious. She was acting in

interests grander and clearer than that of her poor little personal,

poor little Parisian equilibrium, and all his consciousness of her

mother’s moral pressure profited by this proof of its sustaining force.

She would be held up; she would be strengthened; he needn’t in the

least be anxious for her. What would once more have been distinct to

him had he tried to make it so was that, as Mrs. Newsome was

essentially all moral pressure, the presence of this element was almost

identical with her own presence. It wasn’t perhaps that he felt he was

dealing with her straight, but it was certainly as if she had been

dealing straight with _him_. She was reaching him somehow by the

lengthened arm of the spirit, and he was having to that extent to take

her into account; but he wasn’t reaching her in turn, not making her

take _him_; he was only reaching Sarah, who appeared to take so little

of him. “Something has clearly passed between you and Chad,” he

presently said, “that I think I ought to know something more about.

Does he put it all,” he smiled, “on me?”

“Did you come out,” she asked, “to put it all on _him?_”

But he replied to this no further than, after an instant, by saying:

“Oh it’s all right. Chad I mean’s all right in having said to you—well

anything he may have said. I’ll _take_ it all—what he does put on me.

Only I must see him before I see you again.”

She hesitated, but she brought it out. “Is it absolutely necessary you

should see me again?”

“Certainly, if I’m to give you any definite word about anything.”

“Is it your idea then,” she returned, “that I shall keep on meeting you

only to be exposed to fresh humiliation?”

He fixed her a longer time. “Are your instructions from Mrs. Newsome

that you shall, even at the worst, absolutely and irretrievably break

with me?”

“My instructions from Mrs. Newsome are, if you please, my affair. You

know perfectly what your own were, and you can judge for yourself of

what it can do for you to have made what you have of them. You can

perfectly see, at any rate, I’ll go so far as to say, that if I wish

not to expose myself I must wish still less to expose _her_.” She had

already said more than she had quite expected; but, though she had also

pulled up, the colour in her face showed him he should from one moment

to the other have it all. He now indeed felt the high importance of his

having it. “What is your conduct,” she broke out as if to explain—“what

is your conduct but an outrage to women like _us?_ I mean your acting

as if there can be a doubt—as between us and such another—of his duty?”

He thought a moment. It was rather much to deal with at once; not only

the question itself, but the sore abysses it revealed. “Of course

they’re totally different kinds of duty.”

“And do you pretend that he has any at all—to such another?”

“Do you mean to Madame de Vionnet?” He uttered the name not to affront

her, but yet again to gain time—time that he needed for taking in

something still other and larger than her demand of a moment before. It

wasn’t at once that he could see all that was in her actual challenge;

but when he did he found himself just checking a low vague sound, a

sound which was perhaps the nearest approach his vocal chords had ever

known to a growl. Everything Mrs. Pocock had failed to give a sign of

recognising in Chad as a particular part of a transformation—everything

that had lent intention to this particular failure—affected him as

gathered into a large loose bundle and thrown, in her words, into his

face. The missile made him to that extent catch his breath; which

however he presently recovered. “Why when a woman’s at once so charming

and so beneficent—”

“You can sacrifice mothers and sisters to her without a blush and can

make them cross the ocean on purpose to feel the more and take from you

the straighter, _how_ you do it?”

Yes, she had taken him up as short and as sharply as that, but he tried

not to flounder in her grasp. “I don’t think there’s anything I’ve done

in any such calculated way as you describe. Everything has come as a

sort of indistinguishable part of everything else. Your coming out

belonged closely to my having come before you, and my having come was a

result of our general state of mind. Our general state of mind had

proceeded, on its side, from our queer ignorance, our queer

misconceptions and confusions—from which, since then, an inexorable

tide of light seems to have floated us into our perhaps still queerer

knowledge. Don’t you _like_ your brother as he is,” he went on, “and

haven’t you given your mother an intelligible account of all that that

comes to?”

It put to her also, doubtless, his own tone, too many things, this at

least would have been the case hadn’t his final challenge directly

helped her. Everything, at the stage they had reached, directly helped

her, because everything betrayed in him such a basis of intention. He

saw—the odd way things came out!—that he would have been held less

monstrous had he only been a little wilder. What exposed him was just

his poor old trick of quiet inwardness, what exposed him was his

_thinking_ such offence. He hadn’t in the least however the desire to

irritate that Sarah imputed to him, and he could only at last

temporise, for the moment, with her indignant view. She was altogether

more inflamed than he had expected, and he would probably understand

this better when he should learn what had occurred for her with Chad.

Till then her view of his particular blackness, her clear surprise at

his not clutching the pole she held out, must pass as extravagant. “I

leave you to flatter yourself,” she returned, “that what you speak of

is what _you’ve_ beautifully done. When a thing has been already

described in such a lovely way—!” But she caught herself up, and her

comment on his description rang out sufficiently loud. “Do you consider

her even an apology for a decent woman?”

Ah there it was at last! She put the matter more crudely than, for his

own mixed purposes, he had yet had to do; but essentially it was all

one matter. It was so much—so much; and she treated it, poor lady, as

so little. He grew conscious, as he was now apt to do, of a strange

smile, and the next moment he found himself talking like Miss Barrace.

“She has struck me from the first as wonderful. I’ve been thinking too

moreover that, after all, she would probably have represented even for

yourself something rather new and rather good.”

He was to have given Mrs. Pocock with this, however, but her best

opportunity for a sound of derision. “Rather new? I hope so with all my

heart!”

“I mean,” he explained, “that she might have affected you by her

exquisite amiability—a real revelation, it has seemed to myself; her

high rarity, her distinction of every sort.”

He had been, with these words, consciously a little “precious”; but he

had had to be—he couldn’t give her the truth of the case without them;

and it seemed to him moreover now that he didn’t care. He had at all

events not served his cause, for she sprang at its exposed side. “A

‘revelation’—to _me_: I’ve come to such a woman for a revelation? You

talk to me about ‘distinction’—_you_, you who’ve had your

privilege?—when the most distinguished woman we shall either of us have

seen in this world sits there insulted, in her loneliness, by your

incredible comparison!”

Strether forbore, with an effort, from straying; but he looked all

about him. “Does your mother herself make the point that she sits

insulted?”

Sarah’s answer came so straight, so “pat,” as might have been said,

that he felt on the instant its origin. “She has confided to my

judgement and my tenderness the expression of her personal sense of

everything, and the assertion of her personal dignity.”

They were the very words of the lady of Woollett—he would have known

them in a thousand; her parting charge to her child. Mrs. Pocock

accordingly spoke to this extent by book, and the fact immensely moved

him. “If she does really feel as you say it’s of course very very

dreadful. I’ve given sufficient proof, one would have thought,” he

added, “of my deep admiration for Mrs. Newsome.”

“And pray what proof would one have thought you’d _call_ sufficient?

That of thinking this person here so far superior to her?”

He wondered again; he waited. “Ah dear Sarah, you must _leave_ me this

person here!”

In his desire to avoid all vulgar retorts, to show how, even

perversely, he clung to his rag of reason, he had softly almost wailed

this plea. Yet he knew it to be perhaps the most positive declaration

he had ever made in his life, and his visitor’s reception of it

virtually gave it that importance. “That’s exactly what I’m delighted

to do. God knows _we_ don’t want her! You take good care not to meet,”

she observed in a still higher key, “my question about their life. If

you do consider it a thing one can even _speak_ of, I congratulate you

on your taste!”

The life she alluded to was of course Chad’s and Madame de Vionnet’s,

which she thus bracketed together in a way that made him wince a

little; there being nothing for him but to take home her full

intention. It was none the less his inconsequence that while he had

himself been enjoying for weeks the view of the brilliant woman’s

specific action, he just suffered from any characterisation of it by

other lips. “I think tremendously well of her, at the same time that I

seem to feel her ‘life’ to be really none of my business. It’s my

business, that is, only so far as Chad’s own life is affected by it;

and what has happened, don’t you see? is that Chad’s has been affected

so beautifully. The proof of the pudding’s in the eating”—he tried,

with no great success, to help it out with a touch of pleasantry, while

she let him go on as if to sink and sink. He went on however well

enough, as well as he could do without fresh counsel; he indeed

shouldn’t stand quite firm, he felt, till he should have re-established

his communications with Chad. Still, he could always speak for the

woman he had so definitely promised to “save.” This wasn’t quite for

her the air of salvation; but as that chill fairly deepened what did it

become but a reminder that one might at the worst perish _with_ her?

And it was simple enough—it was rudimentary: not, not to give her away.

“I find in her more merits than you would probably have patience with

my counting over. And do you know,” he enquired, “the effect you

produce on me by alluding to her in such terms? It’s as if you had some

motive in not recognising all she has done for your brother, and so

shut your eyes to each side of the matter, in order, whichever side

comes up, to get rid of the other. I don’t, you must allow me to say,

see how you can with any pretence to candour get rid of the side

nearest you.”

“Near me—_that_ sort of thing?” And Sarah gave a jerk back of her head

that well might have nullified any active proximity.

It kept her friend himself at his distance, and he respected for a

moment the interval. Then with a last persuasive effort he bridged it.

“You don’t, on your honour, appreciate Chad’s fortunate development?”

“Fortunate?” she echoed again. And indeed she was prepared. “I call it

hideous.”

Her departure had been for some minutes marked as imminent, and she was

already at the door that stood open to the court, from the threshold of

which she delivered herself of this judgement. It rang out so loud as

to produce for the time the hush of everything else. Strether quite, as

an effect of it, breathed less bravely; he could acknowledge it, but

simply enough. “Oh if you think _that_—!”

“Then all’s at an end? So much the better. I do think that!” She passed

out as she spoke and took her way straight across the court, beyond

which, separated from them by the deep arch of the _porte-cochère_ the

low victoria that had conveyed her from her own hotel was drawn up. She

made for it with decision, and the manner of her break, the sharp shaft

of her rejoinder, had an intensity by which Strether was at first kept

in arrest. She had let fly at him as from a stretched cord, and it took

him a minute to recover from the sense of being pierced. It was not the

penetration of surprise; it was that, much more, of certainty; his case

being put for him as he had as yet only put it to himself. She was away

at any rate; she had distanced him—with rather a grand spring, an

effect of pride and ease, after all; she had got into her carriage

before he could overtake her, and the vehicle was already in motion. He

stopped halfway; he stood there in the court only seeing her go and

noting that she gave him no other look. The way he had put it to

himself was that all quite _might_ be at an end. Each of her movements,

in this resolute rupture, reaffirmed, re-enforced that idea. Sarah

passed out of sight in the sunny street while, planted there in the

centre of the comparatively grey court, he continued merely to look

before him. It probably _was_ all at an end.

Book Eleventh

[Note: In the 1909 New York Edition the following two chapters were

placed in the reverse of the order appearing below. Since 1950, most

scholars have agreed, because of the internal evidence of the two

chapters, that an editorial error caused them to be printed in reverse

order. This Etext, like other editions of the past four decades,

corrects the apparent error.—Richard D. Hathaway, preparer of this

electronic text]

I

He went late that evening to the Boulevard Malesherbes, having his

impression that it would be vain to go early, and having also, more

than once in the course of the day, made enquiries of the concierge.

Chad hadn’t come in and had left no intimation; he had affairs,

apparently, at this juncture—as it occurred to Strether he so well

might have—that kept him long abroad. Our friend asked once for him at

the hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, but the only contribution offered there

was the fact that every one was out. It was with the idea that he would

have to come home to sleep that Strether went up to his rooms, from

which however he was still absent, though, from the balcony, a few

moments later, his visitor heard eleven o’clock strike. Chad’s servant

had by this time answered for his reappearance; he _had_, the visitor

learned, come quickly in to dress for dinner and vanish again. Strether

spent an hour in waiting for him—an hour full of strange suggestions,

persuasions, recognitions; one of those that he was to recall, at the

end of his adventure, as the particular handful that most had counted.

The mellowest lamplight and the easiest chair had been placed at his

disposal by Baptiste, subtlest of servants; the novel half-uncut, the

novel lemon-coloured and tender, with the ivory knife athwart it like

the dagger in a contadina’s hair, had been pushed within the soft

circle—a circle which, for some reason, affected Strether as softer

still after the same Baptiste had remarked that in the absence of a

further need of anything by Monsieur he would betake himself to bed.

The night was hot and heavy and the single lamp sufficient; the great

flare of the lighted city, rising high, spending itself afar, played up

from the Boulevard and, through the vague vista of the successive

rooms, brought objects into view and added to their dignity. Strether

found himself in possession as he never yet had been; he had been there

alone, had turned over books and prints, had invoked, in Chad’s

absence, the spirit of the place, but never at the witching hour and

never with a relish quite so like a pang.

He spent a long time on the balcony; he hung over it as he had seen

little Bilham hang the day of his first approach, as he had seen Mamie

hang over her own the day little Bilham himself might have seen her

from below; he passed back into the rooms, the three that occupied the

front and that communicated by wide doors; and, while he circulated and

rested, tried to recover the impression that they had made on him three

months before, to catch again the voice in which they had seemed then

to speak to him. That voice, he had to note, failed audibly to sound;

which he took as the proof of all the change in himself. He had heard,

of old, only what he _could_ then hear; what he could do now was to

think of three months ago as a point in the far past. All voices had

grown thicker and meant more things; they crowded on him as he moved

about—it was the way they sounded together that wouldn’t let him be

still. He felt, strangely, as sad as if he had come for some wrong, and

yet as excited as if he had come for some freedom. But the freedom was

what was most in the place and the hour, it was the freedom that most

brought him round again to the youth of his own that he had long ago

missed. He could have explained little enough to-day either why he had

missed it or why, after years and years, he should care that he had;

the main truth of the actual appeal of everything was none the less

that everything represented the substance of his loss put it within

reach, within touch, made it, to a degree it had never been, an affair

of the senses. That was what it became for him at this singular time,

the youth he had long ago missed—a queer concrete presence, full of

mystery, yet full of reality, which he could handle, taste, smell, the

deep breathing of which he could positively hear. It was in the outside

air as well as within; it was in the long watch, from the balcony, in

the summer night, of the wide late life of Paris, the unceasing soft

quick rumble, below, of the little lighted carriages that, in the

press, always suggested the gamblers he had seen of old at Monte Carlo

pushing up to the tables. This image was before him when he at last

became aware that Chad was behind.

“She tells me you put it all on _me_”—he had arrived after this

promptly enough at that information; which expressed the case however

quite as the young man appeared willing for the moment to leave it.

Other things, with this advantage of their virtually having the night

before them, came up for them, and had, as well, the odd effect of

making the occasion, instead of hurried and feverish, one of the

largest, loosest and easiest to which Strether’s whole adventure was to

have treated him. He had been pursuing Chad from an early hour and had

overtaken him only now; but now the delay was repaired by their being

so exceptionally confronted. They had foregathered enough of course in

all the various times; they had again and again, since that first night

at the theatre, been face to face over their question; but they had

never been so alone together as they were actually alone—their talk

hadn’t yet been so supremely for themselves. And if many things

moreover passed before them, none passed more distinctly for Strether

than that striking truth about Chad of which he had been so often moved

to take note: the truth that everything came happily back with him to

his knowing how to live. It had been seated in his pleased smile—a

smile that pleased exactly in the right degree—as his visitor turned

round, on the balcony, to greet his advent; his visitor in fact felt on

the spot that there was nothing their meeting would so much do as bear

witness to that facility. He surrendered himself accordingly to so

approved a gift; for what was the meaning of the facility but that

others _did_ surrender themselves? He didn’t want, luckily, to prevent

Chad from living; but he was quite aware that even if he had he would

himself have thoroughly gone to pieces. It was in truth essentially by

bringing down his personal life to a function all subsidiary to the

young man’s own that he held together. And the great point, above all,

the sign of how completely Chad possessed the knowledge in question,

was that one thus became, not only with a proper cheerfulness, but with

wild native impulses, the feeder of his stream. Their talk had

accordingly not lasted three minutes without Strether’s feeling basis

enough for the excitement in which he had waited. This overflow fairly

deepened, wastefully abounded, as he observed the smallness of anything

corresponding to it on the part of his friend. That was exactly this

friend’s happy case; he “put out” his excitement, or whatever other

emotion the matter involved, as he put out his washing; than which no

arrangement could make more for domestic order. It was quite for

Strether himself in short to feel a personal analogy with the laundress

bringing home the triumphs of the mangle.

When he had reported on Sarah’s visit, which he did very fully, Chad

answered his question with perfect candour. “I positively referred her

to you—told her she must absolutely see you. This was last night, and

it all took place in ten minutes. It was our first free talk—really the

first time she had tackled me. She knew I also knew what her line had

been with yourself; knew moreover how little you had been doing to make

anything difficult for her. So I spoke for you frankly—assured her you

were all at her service. I assured her _I_ was too,” the young man

continued; “and I pointed out how she could perfectly, at any time,

have got at me. Her difficulty has been simply her not finding the

moment she fancied.”

“Her difficulty,” Strether returned, “has been simply that she finds

she’s afraid of you. She’s not afraid of _me_, Sarah, one little scrap;

and it was just because she has seen how I can fidget when I give my

mind to it that she has felt her best chance, rightly enough to be in

making me as uneasy as possible. I think she’s at bottom as pleased to

_have_ you put it on me as you yourself can possibly be to put it.”

“But what in the world, my dear man,” Chad enquired in objection to

this luminosity, “have I done to make Sally afraid?”

“You’ve been ‘wonderful, wonderful,’ as we say—we poor people who watch

the play from the pit; and that’s what has, admirably, made her. Made

her all the more effectually that she could see you didn’t set about it

on purpose—I mean set about affecting her as with fear.”

Chad cast a pleasant backward glance over his possibilities of motive.

“I’ve only wanted to be kind and friendly, to be decent and

attentive—and I still only want to be.”

Strether smiled at his comfortable clearness. “Well, there can

certainly be no way for it better than by my taking the onus. It

reduces your personal friction and your personal offence to almost

nothing.”

Ah but Chad, with his completer conception of the friendly, wouldn’t

quite have this! They had remained on the balcony, where, after their

day of great and premature heat, the midnight air was delicious; and

they leaned back in turn against the balustrade, all in harmony with

the chairs and the flower-pots, the cigarettes and the starlight. “The

onus isn’t _really_ yours—after our agreeing so to wait together and

judge together. That was all my answer to Sally,” Chad pursued—“that we

have been, that we are, just judging together.”

“I’m not afraid of the burden,” Strether explained; “I haven’t come in

the least that you should take it off me. I’ve come very much, it seems

to me, to double up my fore legs in the manner of the camel when he

gets down on his knees to make his back convenient. But I’ve supposed

you all this while to have been doing a lot of special and private

judging—about which I haven’t troubled you; and I’ve only wished to

have your conclusion first from you. I don’t ask more than that; I’m

quite ready to take it as it has come.”

Chad turned up his face to the sky with a slow puff of his smoke.

“Well, I’ve seen.”

Strether waited a little. “I’ve left you wholly alone; haven’t, I think

I may say, since the first hour or two—when I merely preached

patience—so much as breathed on you.”

“Oh you’ve been awfully good!”

“We’ve both been good then—we’ve played the game. We’ve given them the

most liberal conditions.”

“Ah,” said Chad, “splendid conditions! It was open to them, open to

them”—he seemed to make it out, as he smoked, with his eyes still on

the stars. He might in quiet sport have been reading their horoscope.

Strether wondered meanwhile what had been open to them, and he finally

let him have it. “It was open to them simply to let me alone; to have

made up their minds, on really seeing me for themselves, that I could

go on well enough as I was.”

Strether assented to this proposition with full lucidity, his

companion’s plural pronoun, which stood all for Mrs. Newsome and her

daughter, having no ambiguity for him. There was nothing, apparently,

to stand for Mamie and Jim; and this added to our friend’s sense of

Chad’s knowing what he thought. “But they’ve made up their minds to the

opposite—that you _can’t_ go on as you are.”

“No,” Chad continued in the same way; “they won’t have it for a

minute.”

Strether on his side also reflectively smoked. It was as if their high

place really represented some moral elevation from which they could

look down on their recent past. “There never was the smallest chance,

do you know, that they _would_ have it for a moment.”

“Of course not—no real chance. But if they were willing to think there

was—!”

“They weren’t willing.” Strether had worked it all out. “It wasn’t for

you they came out, but for me. It wasn’t to see for themselves what

you’re doing, but what I’m doing. The first branch of their curiosity

was inevitably destined, under my culpable delay, to give way to the

second; and it’s on the second that, if I may use the expression and

you don’t mind my marking the invidious fact, they’ve been of late

exclusively perched. When Sarah sailed it was me, in other words, they

were after.”

Chad took it in both with intelligence and with indulgence. “It _is_

rather a business then—what I’ve let you in for!”

Strether had again a brief pause; which ended in a reply that seemed to

dispose once for all of this element of compunction. Chad was to treat

it, at any rate, so far as they were again together, as having done so.

“I was ‘in’ when you found me.”

“Ah but it was you,” the young man laughed, “who found _me_.”

“I only found you out. It was you who found me in. It was all in the

day’s work for them, at all events, that they should come. And they’ve

greatly enjoyed it,” Strether declared.

“Well, I’ve tried to make them,” said Chad.

His companion did himself presently the same justice. “So have I. I

tried even this very morning—while Mrs. Pocock was with me. She enjoys

for instance, almost as much as anything else, not being, as I’ve said,

afraid of me; and I think I gave her help in that.”

Chad took a deeper interest. “Was she very very nasty?”

Strether debated. “Well, she was the most important thing—she was

definite. She was—at last—crystalline. And I felt no remorse. I saw

that they must have come.”

“Oh I wanted to see them for myself; so that if it were only for

_that_—!” Chad’s own remorse was as small.

This appeared almost all Strether wanted. “Isn’t your having seen them

for yourself then _the_ thing, beyond all others, that has come of

their visit?”

Chad looked as if he thought it nice of his old friend to put it so.

“Don’t you count it as anything that you’re dished—if you _are_ dished?

Are you, my dear man, dished?”

It sounded as if he were asking if he had caught cold or hurt his foot,

and Strether for a minute but smoked and smoked. “I want to see her

again. I must see her.”

“Of course you must.” Then Chad hesitated. “Do you mean—a—Mother

herself?”

“Oh your mother—that will depend.”

It was as if Mrs. Newsome had somehow been placed by the words very far

off. Chad however endeavoured in spite of this to reach the place.

“What do you mean it will depend on?”

Strether, for all answer, gave him a longish look. “I was speaking of

Sarah. I must positively—though she quite cast me off—see _her_ again.

I can’t part with her that way.”

“Then she was awfully unpleasant?”

Again Strether exhaled. “She was what she had to be. I mean that from

the moment they’re not delighted they can only be—well what I admit she

was. We gave them,” he went on, “their chance to be delighted, and

they’ve walked up to it, and looked all round it, and not taken it.”

“You can bring a horse to water—!” Chad suggested.

“Precisely. And the tune to which this morning Sarah wasn’t

delighted—the tune to which, to adopt your metaphor, she refused to

drink—leaves us on that side nothing more to hope.”

Chad had a pause, and then as if consolingly: “It was never of course

really the least on the cards that they would be ‘delighted.’”

“Well, I don’t know, after all,” Strether mused. “I’ve had to come as

far round. However”—he shook it off—“it’s doubtless _my_ performance

that’s absurd.”

“There are certainly moments,” said Chad, “when you seem to me too good

to be true. Yet if you are true,” he added, “that seems to be all that

need concern me.”

“I’m true, but I’m incredible. I’m fantastic and ridiculous—I don’t

explain myself even _to_ myself. How can they then,” Strether asked,

“understand me? So I don’t quarrel with them.”

“I see. They quarrel,” said Chad rather comfortably, “with _us_.”

Strether noted once more the comfort, but his young friend had already

gone on. “I should feel greatly ashamed, all the same, if I didn’t put

it before you again that you ought to think, after all, tremendously

well. I mean before giving up beyond recall—” With which insistence, as

from a certain delicacy, dropped.

Ah but Strether wanted it. “Say it all, say it all.”

“Well, at your age, and with what—when all’s said and done—Mother might

do for you and be for you.”

Chad had said it all, from his natural scruple, only to that extent; so

that Strether after an instant himself took a hand. “My absence of an

assured future. The little I have to show toward the power to take care

of myself. The way, the wonderful way, she would certainly take care of

me. Her fortune, her kindness, and the constant miracle of her having

been disposed to go even so far. Of course, of course”—he summed it up.

“There are those sharp facts.”

Chad had meanwhile thought of another still. “And don’t you really

care—?”

His friend slowly turned round to him. “Will you go?”

“I’ll go if you’ll say you now consider I should. You know,” he went

on, “I was ready six weeks ago.”

“Ah,” said Strether, “that was when you didn’t know _I_ wasn’t! You’re

ready at present because you do know it.”

“That may be,” Chad returned; “but all the same I’m sincere. You talk

about taking the whole thing on your shoulders, but in what light do

you regard me that you think me capable of letting you pay?” Strether

patted his arm, as they stood together against the parapet,

reassuringly—seeming to wish to contend that he _had_ the wherewithal;

but it was again round this question of purchase and price that the

young man’s sense of fairness continued to hover. “What it literally

comes to for you, if you’ll pardon my putting it so, is that you give

up money. Possibly a good deal of money.”

“Oh,” Strether laughed, “if it were only just enough you’d still be

justified in putting it so! But I’ve on my side to remind you too that

_you_ give up money; and more than ‘possibly’—quite certainly, as I

should suppose—a good deal.”

“True enough; but I’ve got a certain quantity,” Chad returned after a

moment. “Whereas you, my dear man, you—”

“I can’t be at all said”—Strether took him up—“to have a ‘quantity’

certain or uncertain? Very true. Still, I shan’t starve.”

“Oh you mustn’t _starve!_” Chad pacifically emphasised; and so, in the

pleasant conditions, they continued to talk; though there was, for that

matter, a pause in which the younger companion might have been taken as

weighing again the delicacy of his then and there promising the elder

some provision against the possibility just mentioned. This, however,

he presumably thought best not to do, for at the end of another minute

they had moved in quite a different direction. Strether had broken in

by returning to the subject of Chad’s passage with Sarah and enquiring

if they had arrived, in the event, at anything in the nature of a

“scene.” To this Chad replied that they had on the contrary kept

tremendously polite; adding moreover that Sally was after all not the

woman to have made the mistake of not being. “Her hands are a good deal

tied, you see. I got so, from the first,” he sagaciously observed, “the

start of her.”

“You mean she has taken so much from you?”

“Well, I couldn’t of course in common decency give less: only she

hadn’t expected, I think, that I’d give her nearly so much. And she

began to take it before she knew it.”

“And she began to like it,” said Strether, “as soon as she began to

take it!”

“Yes, she has liked it—also more than she expected.” After which Chad

observed: “But she doesn’t like _me_. In fact she hates me.”

Strether’s interest grew. “Then why does she want you at home?”

“Because when you hate you want to triumph, and if she should get me

neatly stuck there she _would_ triumph.”

Strether followed afresh, but looking as he went. “Certainly—in a

manner. But it would scarce be a triumph worth having if, once

entangled, feeling her dislike and possibly conscious in time of a

certain quantity of your own, you should on the spot make yourself

unpleasant to her.”

“Ah,” said Chad, “she can bear _me_—could bear me at least at home.

It’s my being there that would be her triumph. She hates me in Paris.”

“She hates in other words—”

“Yes, _that’s_ it!”—Chad had quickly understood this understanding;

which formed on the part of each as near an approach as they had yet

made to naming Madame de Vionnet. The limitations of their distinctness

didn’t, however, prevent its fairly lingering in the air that it was

this lady Mrs. Pocock hated. It added one more touch moreover to their

established recognition of the rare intimacy of Chad’s association with

her. He had never yet more twitched away the last light veil from this

phenomenon than in presenting himself as confounded and submerged in

the feeling she had created at Woollett. “And I’ll tell you who hates

me too,” he immediately went on.

Strether knew as immediately whom he meant, but with as prompt a

protest. “Ah no! Mamie doesn’t hate—well,” he caught himself in

time—“anybody at all. Mamie’s beautiful.”

Chad shook his head. “That’s just why I mind it. She certainly doesn’t

like me.”

“How much do you mind it? What would you do for her?”

“Well, I’d like her if she’d like me. Really, really,” Chad declared.

It gave his companion a moment’s pause. “You asked me just now if I

don’t, as you said, ‘care’ about a certain person. You rather tempt me

therefore to put the question in my turn. Don’t _you_ care about a

certain other person?”

Chad looked at him hard in the lamplight of the window. “The difference

is that I don’t want to.”

Strether wondered. “‘Don’t want’ to?”

“I try not to—that is I _have_ tried. I’ve done my best. You can’t be

surprised,” the young man easily went on, “when you yourself set me on

it. I was indeed,” he added, “already on it a little; but you set me

harder. It was six weeks ago that I thought I had come out.”

Strether took it well in. “But you haven’t come out!”

“I don’t know—it’s what I _want_ to know,” said Chad. “And if I could

have sufficiently wanted—by myself—to go back, I think I might have

found out.”

“Possibly”—Strether considered. “But all you were able to achieve was

to want to want to! And even then,” he pursued, “only till our friends

there came. Do you want to want to still?” As with a sound

half-dolorous, half-droll and all vague and equivocal, Chad buried his

face for a little in his hands, rubbing it in a whimsical way that

amounted to an evasion, he brought it out more sharply: “_Do_ you?”

Chad kept for a time his attitude, but at last he looked up, and then

abruptly, “Jim _is_ a damned dose!” he declared.

“Oh I don’t ask you to abuse or describe or in any way pronounce on

your relatives; I simply put it to you once more whether you’re _now_

ready. You say you’ve ‘seen.’ Is what you’ve seen that you can’t

resist?”

Chad gave him a strange smile—the nearest approach he had ever shown to

a troubled one. “Can’t you make me _not_ resist?”

“What it comes to,” Strether went on very gravely now and as if he

hadn’t heard him, “what it comes to is that more has been done for you,

I think, than I’ve ever seen done—attempted perhaps, but never so

successfully done—by one human being for another.”

“Oh an immense deal certainly”—Chad did it full justice. “And you

yourself are adding to it.”

It was without heeding this either that his visitor continued. “And our

friends there won’t have it.”

“No, they simply won’t.”

“They demand you on the basis, as it were, of repudiation and

ingratitude; and what has been the matter with me,” Strether went on,

“is that I haven’t seen my way to working with you for repudiation.”

Chad appreciated this. “Then as you haven’t seen yours you naturally

haven’t seen mine. There it is.” After which he proceeded, with a

certain abruptness, to a sharp interrogation. “_Now_ do you say she

doesn’t hate me?”

Strether hesitated. “‘She’—?”

“Yes—Mother. We called it Sarah, but it comes to the same thing.”

“Ah,” Strether objected, “not to the same thing as her hating _you_.”

On which—though as if for an instant it had hung fire—Chad remarkably

replied: “Well, if they hate my good friend, _that_ comes to the same

thing.” It had a note of inevitable truth that made Strether take it as

enough, feel he wanted nothing more. The young man spoke in it for his

“good friend” more than he had ever yet directly spoken, confessed to

such deep identities between them as he might play with the idea of

working free from, but which at a given moment could still draw him

down like a whirlpool. And meanwhile he had gone on. “Their hating you

too moreover—that also comes to a good deal.”

“Ah,” said Strether, “your mother doesn’t.”

Chad, however, loyally stuck to it—loyally, that is, to Strether. “She

will if you don’t look out.”

“Well, I do look out. I am, after all, looking out. That’s just why,”

our friend explained, “I want to see her again.”

It drew from Chad again the same question. “To see Mother?”

“To see—for the present—Sarah.”

“Ah then there you are! And what I don’t for the life of me make out,”

Chad pursued with resigned perplexity, “is what you _gain_ by it.”

Oh it would have taken his companion too long to say! “That’s because

you have, I verily believe, no imagination. You’ve other qualities. But

no imagination, don’t you see? at all.”

“I dare say. I do see.” It was an idea in which Chad showed interest.

“But haven’t you yourself rather too much?”

“Oh _rather_—!” So that after an instant, under this reproach and as if

it were at last a fact really to escape from, Strether made his move

for departure.

II

One of the features of the restless afternoon passed by him after Mrs.

Pocock’s visit was an hour spent, shortly before dinner, with Maria

Gostrey, whom of late, in spite of so sustained a call on his attention

from other quarters, he had by no means neglected. And that he was

still not neglecting her will appear from the fact that he was with her

again at the same hour on the very morrow—with no less fine a

consciousness moreover of being able to hold her ear. It continued

inveterately to occur, for that matter, that whenever he had taken one

of his greater turns he came back to where she so faithfully awaited

him. None of these excursions had on the whole been livelier than the

pair of incidents—the fruit of the short interval since his previous

visit—on which he had now to report to her. He had seen Chad Newsome

late the night before, and he had had that morning, as a sequel to this

conversation, a second interview with Sarah. “But they’re all off,” he

said, “at last.”

It puzzled her a moment. “All?—Mr. Newsome with them?”

“Ah not yet! Sarah and Jim and Mamie. But Waymarsh with them—for Sarah.

It’s too beautiful,” Strether continued; “I find I don’t get over

that—it’s always a fresh joy. But it’s a fresh joy too,” he added,

“that—well, what do you think? Little Bilham also goes. But he of

course goes for Mamie.”

Miss Gostrey wondered. “‘For’ her? Do you mean they’re already

engaged?”

“Well,” said Strether, “say then for _me_. He’ll do anything for me;

just as I will, for that matter—anything I can—for him. Or for Mamie

either. _She’ll_ do anything for me.”

Miss Gostrey gave a comprehensive sigh. “The way you reduce people to

subjection!”

“It’s certainly, on one side, wonderful. But it’s quite equalled, on

another, by the way I don’t. I haven’t reduced Sarah, since yesterday;

though I’ve succeeded in seeing her again, as I’ll presently tell you.

The others however are really all right. Mamie, by that blessed law of

ours, absolutely must have a young man.”

“But what must poor Mr. Bilham have? Do you mean they’ll _marry_ for

you?”

“I mean that, by the same blessed law, it won’t matter a grain if they

don’t—I shan’t have in the least to worry.”

She saw as usual what he meant. “And Mr. Jim?—who goes for him?”

“Oh,” Strether had to admit, “I couldn’t manage _that_. He’s thrown, as

usual, on the world; the world which, after all, by his account—for he

has prodigious adventures—seems very good to him. He fortunately—‘over

here,’ as he says—finds the world everywhere; and his most prodigious

adventure of all,” he went on, “has been of course of the last few

days.”

Miss Gostrey, already knowing, instantly made the connexion. “He has

seen Marie de Vionnet again?”

“He went, all by himself, the day after Chad’s party—didn’t I tell

you?—to tea with her. By her invitation—all alone.”

“Quite like yourself!” Maria smiled.

“Oh but he’s more wonderful about her than I am!” And then as his

friend showed how she could believe it, filling it out, fitting it on

to old memories of the wonderful woman: “What I should have liked to

manage would have been _her_ going.”

“To Switzerland with the party?”

“For Jim—and for symmetry. If it had been workable moreover for a

fortnight she’d have gone. She’s ready”—he followed up his renewed

vision of her—“for anything.”

Miss Gostrey went with him a minute. “She’s too perfect!”

“She _will_, I think,” he pursued, “go to-night to the station.”

“To see him off?”

“With Chad—marvellously—as part of their general attention. And she

does it”—it kept before him—“with a light, light grace, a free, free

gaiety, that may well softly bewilder Mr. Pocock.”

It kept her so before him that his companion had after an instant a

friendly comment. “As in short it has softly bewildered a saner man.

Are you really in love with her?” Maria threw off.

“It’s of no importance I should know,” he replied. “It matters so

little—has nothing to do, practically, with either of us.”

“All the same”—Maria continued to smile—“they go, the five, as I

understand you, and you and Madame de Vionnet stay.”

“Oh and Chad.” To which Strether added: “And you.”

“Ah ‘me’!”—she gave a small impatient wail again, in which something of

the unreconciled seemed suddenly to break out. “_I_ don’t stay, it

somehow seems to me, much to my advantage. In the presence of all you

cause to pass before me I’ve a tremendous sense of privation.”

Strether hesitated. “But your privation, your keeping out of

everything, has been—hasn’t it?—by your own choice.”

“Oh yes; it has been necessary—that is it has been better for you. What

I mean is only that I seem to have ceased to serve you.”

“How can you tell that?” he asked. “You don’t know how you serve me.

When you cease—”

“Well?” she said as he dropped.

“Well, I’ll _let_ you know. Be quiet till then.”

She thought a moment. “Then you positively like me to stay?”

“Don’t I treat you as if I did?”

“You’re certainly very kind to me. But that,” said Maria, “is for

myself. It’s getting late, as you see, and Paris turning rather hot and

dusty. People are scattering, and some of them, in other places want

me. But if you want me here—!”

She had spoken as resigned to his word, but he had of a sudden a still

sharper sense than he would have expected of desiring not to lose her.

“I want you here.”

She took it as if the words were all she had wished; as if they brought

her, gave her something that was the compensation of her case. “Thank

you,” she simply answered. And then as he looked at her a little

harder, “Thank you very much,” she repeated.

It had broken as with a slight arrest into the current of their talk,

and it held him a moment longer. “Why, two months, or whatever the time

was, ago, did you so suddenly dash off? The reason you afterwards gave

me for having kept away three weeks wasn’t the real one.”

She recalled. “I never supposed you believed it was. Yet,” she

continued, “if you didn’t guess it that was just what helped you.”

He looked away from her on this; he indulged, so far as space

permitted, in one of his slow absences. “I’ve often thought of it, but

never to feel that I could guess it. And you see the consideration with

which I’ve treated you in never asking till now.”

“Now then why _do_ you ask?”

“To show you how I miss you when you’re not here, and what it does for

me.”

“It doesn’t seem to have done,” she laughed, “all it might! However,”

she added, “if you’ve really never guessed the truth I’ll tell it you.”

“I’ve never guessed it,” Strether declared.

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Well then I dashed off, as you say, so as not to have the confusion of

being there if Marie de Vionnet should tell you anything to my

detriment.”

He looked as if he considerably doubted. “You even then would have had

to face it on your return.”

“Oh if I had found reason to believe it something very bad I’d have

left you altogether.”

“So then,” he continued, “it was only on guessing she had been on the

whole merciful that you ventured back?”

Maria kept it together. “I owe her thanks. Whatever her temptation she

didn’t separate us. That’s one of my reasons,” she went on “for

admiring her so.”

“Let it pass then,” said Strether, “for one of mine as well. But what

would have been her temptation?”

“What are ever the temptations of women?”

He thought—but hadn’t, naturally, to think too long. “Men?”

“She would have had you, with it, more for herself. But she saw she

could have you without it.”

“Oh ‘have’ me!” Strether a trifle ambiguously sighed. “_You_,” he

handsomely declared, “would have had me at any rate _with_ it.”

“Oh ‘have’ you!”—she echoed it as he had done. “I do have you,

however,” she less ironically said, “from the moment you express a

wish.”

He stopped before her, full of the disposition. “I’ll express fifty.”

Which indeed begot in her, with a certain inconsequence, a return of

her small wail. “Ah there you are!”

There, if it were so, he continued for the rest of the time to be, and

it was as if to show her how she could still serve him that, coming

back to the departure of the Pococks, he gave her the view, vivid with

a hundred more touches than we can reproduce, of what had happened for

him that morning. He had had ten minutes with Sarah at her hotel, ten

minutes reconquered, by irresistible pressure, from the time over which

he had already described her to Miss Gostrey as having, at the end of

their interview on his own premises, passed the great sponge of the

future. He had caught her by not announcing himself, had found her in

her sitting-room with a dressmaker and a _lingère_ whose accounts she

appeared to have been more or less ingenuously settling and who soon

withdrew. Then he had explained to her how he had succeeded, late the

night before, in keeping his promise of seeing Chad. “I told her I’d

take it all.”

“You’d ‘take’ it?”

“Why if he doesn’t go.”

Maria waited. “And who takes it if he does?” she enquired with a

certain grimness of gaiety.

“Well,” said Strether, “I think I take, in any event, everything.”

“By which I suppose you mean,” his companion brought out after a

moment, “that you definitely understand you now lose everything.”

He stood before her again. “It does come perhaps to the same thing. But

Chad, now that he has seen, doesn’t really want it.”

She could believe that, but she made, as always, for clearness. “Still,

what, after all, _has_ he seen?”

“What they want of him. And it’s enough.”

“It contrasts so unfavourably with what Madame de Vionnet wants?”

“It contrasts—just so; all round, and tremendously.”

“Therefore, perhaps, most of all with what _you_ want?”

“Oh,” said Strether, “what I want is a thing I’ve ceased to measure or

even to understand.”

But his friend none the less went on. “Do you want Mrs. Newsome—after

such a way of treating you?”

It was a straighter mode of dealing with this lady than they had as

yet—such was their high form—permitted themselves; but it seemed not

wholly for this that he delayed a moment. “I dare say it has been,

after all, the only way she could have imagined.”

“And does that make you want her any more?”

“I’ve tremendously disappointed her,” Strether thought it worth while

to mention.

“Of course you have. That’s rudimentary; that was plain to us long ago.

But isn’t it almost as plain,” Maria went on, “that you’ve even yet

your straight remedy? Really drag him away, as I believe you still can,

and you’d cease to have to count with her disappointment.”

“Ah then,” he laughed, “I should have to count with yours!”

But this barely struck her now. “What, in that case, should you call

counting? You haven’t come out where you are, I think, to please _me_.”

“Oh,” he insisted, “that too, you know, has been part of it. I can’t

separate—it’s all one; and that’s perhaps why, as I say, I don’t

understand.” But he was ready to declare again that this didn’t in the

least matter; all the more that, as he affirmed, he _hadn’t_ really as

yet “come out.” “She gives me after all, on its coming to the pinch, a

last mercy, another chance. They don’t sail, you see, for five or six

weeks more, and they haven’t—she admits that—expected Chad would take