part in their tour. It’s still open to him to join them, at the last,

at Liverpool.”

Miss Gostrey considered. “How in the world is it ‘open’ unless you open

it? How can he join them at Liverpool if he but sinks deeper into his

situation here?”

“He has given her—as I explained to you that she let me know

yesterday—his word of honour to do as I say.”

Maria stared. “But if you say nothing!”

Well, he as usual walked about on it. “I did say something this

morning. I gave her my answer—the word I had promised her after hearing

from himself what _he_ had promised. What she demanded of me yesterday,

you’ll remember, was the engagement then and there to make him take up

this vow.”

“Well then,” Miss Gostrey enquired, “was the purpose of your visit to

her only to decline?”

“No; it was to ask, odd as that may seem to you, for another delay.”

“Ah that’s weak!”

“Precisely!” She had spoken with impatience, but, so far as that at

least, he knew where he was. “If I _am_ weak I want to find it out. If

I don’t find it out I shall have the comfort, the little glory, of

thinking I’m strong.”

“It’s all the comfort, I judge,” she returned, “that you _will_ have!”

“At any rate,” he said, “it will have been a month more. Paris may

grow, from day to day, hot and dusty, as you say; but there are other

things that are hotter and dustier. I’m not afraid to stay on; the

summer here must be amusing in a wild—if it isn’t a tame—way of its

own; the place at no time more picturesque. I think I shall like it.

And then,” he benevolently smiled for her, “there will be always you.”

“Oh,” she objected, “it won’t be as a part of the picturesqueness that

I shall stay, for I shall be the plainest thing about you. You may, you

see, at any rate,” she pursued, “have nobody else. Madame de Vionnet

may very well be going off, mayn’t she?—and Mr. Newsome by the same

stroke: unless indeed you’ve had an assurance from them to the

contrary. So that if your idea’s to stay for them”—it was her duty to

suggest it—“you may be left in the lurch. Of course if they do

stay”—she kept it up—“they would be part of the picturesqueness. Or

else indeed you might join them somewhere.”

Strether seemed to face it as if it were a happy thought; but the next

moment he spoke more critically. “Do you mean that they’ll probably go

off together?”

She just considered. “I think it will be treating you quite without

ceremony if they do; though after all,” she added, “it would be

difficult to see now quite what degree of ceremony properly meets your

case.”

“Of course,” Strether conceded, “my attitude toward them is

extraordinary.”

“Just so; so that one may ask one’s self what style of proceeding on

their own part can altogether match it. The attitude of their own that

won’t pale in its light they’ve doubtless still to work out. The really

handsome thing perhaps,” she presently threw off, “_would_ be for them

to withdraw into more secluded conditions, offering at the same time to

share them with you.” He looked at her, on this, as if some generous

irritation—all in his interest—had suddenly again flickered in her; and

what she next said indeed half-explained it. “Don’t really be afraid to

tell me if what now holds you _is_ the pleasant prospect of the empty

town, with plenty of seats in the shade, cool drinks, deserted museums,

drives to the Bois in the evening, and our wonderful woman all to

yourself.” And she kept it up still more. “The handsomest thing of

_all_, when one makes it out, would, I dare say, be that Mr. Chad

should for a while go off by himself. It’s a pity, from that point of

view,” she wound up, “that he doesn’t pay his mother a visit. It would

at least occupy your interval.” The thought in fact held her a moment.

“Why doesn’t he pay his mother a visit? Even a week, at this good

moment, would do.”

“My dear lady,” Strether replied—and he had it even to himself

surprisingly ready—“my dear lady, his mother has paid _him_ a visit.

Mrs. Newsome has been with him, this month, with an intensity that I’m

sure he has thoroughly felt; he has lavishly entertained her, and she

has let him have her thanks. Do you suggest he shall go back for more

of them?”

Well, she succeeded after a little in shaking it off. “I see. It’s what

you don’t suggest—what you haven’t suggested. And you know.”

“So would you, my dear,” he kindly said, “if you had so much as seen

her.”

“As seen Mrs. Newsome?”

“No, Sarah—which, both for Chad and for myself, has served all the

purpose.”

“And served it in a manner,” she responsively mused, “so

extraordinary!”

“Well, you see,” he partly explained, “what it comes to is that she’s

all cold thought—which Sarah could serve to us cold without its really

losing anything. So it is that we know what she thinks of us.”

Maria had followed, but she had an arrest. “What I’ve never made out,

if you come to that, is what you think—I mean you personally—of _her_.

Don’t you so much, when all’s said, as care a little?”

“That,” he answered with no loss of promptness, “is what even Chad

himself asked me last night. He asked me if I don’t mind the loss—well,

the loss of an opulent future. Which moreover,” he hastened to add,

“was a perfectly natural question.”

“I call your attention, all the same,” said Miss Gostrey, “to the fact

that I don’t ask it. What I venture to ask is whether it’s to Mrs.

Newsome herself that you’re indifferent.”

“I haven’t been so”—he spoke with all assurance. “I’ve been the very

opposite. I’ve been, from the first moment, preoccupied with the

impression everything might be making on her—quite oppressed, haunted,

tormented by it. I’ve been interested _only_ in her seeing what I’ve

seen. And I’ve been as disappointed in her refusal to see it as she has

been in what has appeared to her the perversity of my insistence.”

“Do you mean that she has shocked you as you’ve shocked her?”

Strether weighed it. “I’m probably not so shockable. But on the other

hand I’ve gone much further to meet her. She, on her side, hasn’t

budged an inch.”

“So that you’re now at last”—Maria pointed the moral—“in the sad stage

of recriminations.”

“No—it’s only to you I speak. I’ve been like a lamb to Sarah. I’ve only

put my back to the wall. It’s to _that_ one naturally staggers when one

has been violently pushed there.”

She watched him a moment. “Thrown over?”

“Well, as I feel I’ve landed somewhere I think I must have been

thrown.”

She turned it over, but as hoping to clarify much rather than to

harmonise. “The thing is that I suppose you’ve been disappointing—”

“Quite from the very first of my arrival? I dare say. I admit I was

surprising even to myself.”

“And then of course,” Maria went on, “I had much to do with it.”

“With my being surprising—?”

“That will do,” she laughed, “if you’re too delicate to call it _my_

being! Naturally,” she added, “you came over more or less for

surprises.”

“Naturally!”—he valued the reminder.

“But they were to have been all for you”—she continued to piece it

out—“and none of them for _her_.”

Once more he stopped before her as if she had touched the point.

“That’s just her difficulty—that she doesn’t admit surprises. It’s a

fact that, I think, describes and represents her; and it falls in with

what I tell you—that she’s all, as I’ve called it, fine cold thought.

She had, to her own mind, worked the whole thing out in advance, and

worked it out for me as well as for herself. Whenever she has done

that, you see, there’s no room left; no margin, as it were, for any

alteration. She’s filled as full, packed as tight, as she’ll hold and

if you wish to get anything more or different either out or in—”

“You’ve got to make over altogether the woman herself?”

“What it comes to,” said Strether, “is that you’ve got morally and

intellectually to get rid of her.”

“Which would appear,” Maria returned, “to be practically what you’ve

done.”

But her friend threw back his head. “I haven’t touched her. She won’t

_be_ touched. I see it now as I’ve never done; and she hangs together

with a perfection of her own,” he went on, “that does suggest a kind of

wrong in _any_ change of her composition. It was at any rate,” he wound

up, “the woman herself, as you call her the whole moral and

intellectual being or block, that Sarah brought me over to take or to

leave.”

It turned Miss Gostrey to deeper thought. “Fancy having to take at the

point of the bayonet a whole moral and intellectual being or block!”

“It was in fact,” said Strether, “what, at home, I _had_ done. But

somehow over there I didn’t quite know it.”

“One never does, I suppose,” Miss Gostrey concurred, “realise in

advance, in such a case, the size, as you may say, of the block. Little

by little it looms up. It has been looming for you more and more till

at last you see it all.”

“I see it all,” he absently echoed, while his eyes might have been

fixing some particularly large iceberg in a cool blue northern sea.

“It’s magnificent!” he then rather oddly exclaimed.

But his friend, who was used to this kind of inconsequence in him, kept

the thread. “There’s nothing so magnificent—for making others feel

you—as to have no imagination.”

It brought him straight round. “Ah there you are! It’s what I said last

night to Chad. That he himself, I mean, has none.”

“Then it would appear,” Maria suggested, “that he has, after all,

something in common with his mother.”

“He has in common that he makes one, as you say, ‘feel’ him. And yet,”

he added, as if the question were interesting, “one feels others too,

even when they have plenty.”

Miss Gostrey continued suggestive. “Madame de Vionnet?”

“_She_ has plenty.”

“Certainly—she had quantities of old. But there are different ways of

making one’s self felt.”

“Yes, it comes, no doubt, to that. You now—”

He was benevolently going on, but she wouldn’t have it. “Oh I _don’t_

make myself felt; so my quantity needn’t be settled. Yours, you know,”

she said, “is monstrous. No one has ever had so much.”

It struck him for a moment. “That’s what Chad also thinks.”

“There _you_ are then—though it isn’t for him to complain of it!”

“Oh he doesn’t complain of it,” said Strether.

“That’s all that would be wanting! But apropos of what,” Maria went on,

“did the question come up?”

“Well, of his asking me what it is I gain.”

She had a pause. “Then as I’ve asked you too it settles _my_ case. Oh

you _have_,” she repeated, “treasures of imagination.”

But he had been for an instant thinking away from this, and he came up

in another place. “And yet Mrs. Newsome—it’s a thing to remember—_has_

imagined, did, that is, imagine, and apparently still does, horrors

about what I should have found. I was booked, by her

vision—extraordinarily intense, after all—to find them; and that I

didn’t, that I couldn’t, that, as she evidently felt, I wouldn’t—this

evidently didn’t at all, as they say, ‘suit’ her book. It was more than

she could bear. That was her disappointment.”

“You mean you were to have found Chad himself horrible?”

“I was to have found the woman.”

“Horrible?”

“Found her as she imagined her.” And Strether paused as if for his own

expression of it he could add no touch to that picture.

His companion had meanwhile thought. “She imagined stupidly—so it comes

to the same thing.”

“Stupidly? Oh!” said Strether.

But she insisted. “She imagined meanly.”

He had it, however, better. “It couldn’t but be ignorantly.”

“Well, intensity with ignorance—what do you want worse?”

This question might have held him, but he let it pass. “Sarah isn’t

ignorant—now; she keeps up the theory of the horrible.”

“Ah but she’s intense—and that by itself will do sometimes as well. If

it doesn’t do, in this case, at any rate, to deny that Marie’s

charming, it will do at least to deny that she’s good.”

“What I claim is that she’s good for Chad.”

“You don’t claim”—she seemed to like it clear—“that she’s good for

_you_.”

But he continued without heeding. “That’s what I wanted them to come

out for—to see for themselves if she’s bad for him.”

“And now that they’ve done so they won’t admit that she’s good even for

anything?”

“They do think,” Strether presently admitted, “that she’s on the whole

about as bad for me. But they’re consistent of course, inasmuch as

they’ve their clear view of what’s good for both of us.”

“For you, to begin with”—Maria, all responsive, confined the question

for the moment—“to eliminate from your existence and if possible even

from your memory the dreadful creature that _I_ must gruesomely shadow

forth for them, even more than to eliminate the distincter evil—thereby

a little less portentous—of the person whose confederate you’ve

suffered yourself to become. However, that’s comparatively simple. You

can easily, at the worst, after all, give me up.”

“I can easily at the worst, after all, give you up.” The irony was so

obvious that it needed no care. “I can easily at the worst, after all,

even forget you.”

“Call that then workable. But Mr. Newsome has much more to forget. How

can _he_ do it?”

“Ah there again we are! That’s just what I was to have made him do;

just where I was to have worked with him and helped.”

She took it in silence and without attenuation—as if perhaps from very

familiarity with the facts; and her thought made a connexion without

showing the links. “Do you remember how we used to talk at Chester and

in London about my seeing you through?” She spoke as of far-off things

and as if they had spent weeks at the places she named.

“It’s just what you _are_ doing.”

“Ah but the worst—since you’ve left such a margin—may be still to come.

You may yet break down.”

“Yes, I may yet break down. But will you take me—?”

He had hesitated, and she waited. “Take you?”

“For as long as I can bear it.”

She also debated “Mr. Newsome and Madame de Vionnet may, as we were

saying, leave town. How long do you think you can bear it without

them?”

Strether’s reply to this was at first another question. “Do you mean in

order to get away from me?”

Her answer had an abruptness. “Don’t find me rude if I say I should

think they’d want to!”

He looked at her hard again—seemed even for an instant to have an

intensity of thought under which his colour changed. But he smiled.

“You mean after what they’ve done to me?”

“After what _she_ has.”

At this, however, with a laugh, he was all right again. “Ah but she

hasn’t done it yet!”

III

He had taken the train a few days after this from a station—as well as

_to_ a station—selected almost at random; such days, whatever should

happen, were numbered, and he had gone forth under the impulse—artless

enough, no doubt—to give the whole of one of them to that French

ruralism, with its cool special green, into which he had hitherto

looked only through the little oblong window of the picture-frame. It

had been as yet for the most part but a land of fancy for him—the

background of fiction, the medium of art, the nursery of letters;

practically as distant as Greece, but practically also well-nigh as

consecrated. Romance could weave itself, for Strether’s sense, out of

elements mild enough; and even after what he had, as he felt, lately

“been through,” he could thrill a little at the chance of seeing

something somewhere that would remind him of a certain small Lambinet

that had charmed him, long years before, at a Boston dealer’s and that

he had quite absurdly never forgotten. It had been offered, he

remembered, at a price he had been instructed to believe the lowest

ever named for a Lambinet, a price he had never felt so poor as on

having to recognise, all the same, as beyond a dream of possibility. He

had dreamed—had turned and twisted possibilities for an hour: it had

been the only adventure of his life in connexion with the purchase of a

work of art. The adventure, it will be perceived, was modest; but the

memory, beyond all reason and by some accident of association, was

sweet. The little Lambinet abode with him as the picture he _would_

have bought—the particular production that had made him for the moment

overstep the modesty of nature. He was quite aware that if he were to

see it again he should perhaps have a drop or a shock, and he never

found himself wishing that the wheel of time would turn it up again,

just as he had seen it in the maroon-coloured, sky-lighted inner shrine

of Tremont Street. It would be a different thing, however, to see the

remembered mixture resolved back into its elements—to assist at the

restoration to nature of the whole far-away hour: the dusty day in

Boston, the background of the Fitchburg Depot, of the maroon-coloured

sanctum, the special-green vision, the ridiculous price, the poplars,

the willows, the rushes, the river, the sunny silvery sky, the shady

woody horizon.

He observed in respect to his train almost no condition save that it

should stop a few times after getting out of the _banlieue_; he threw

himself on the general amiability of the day for the hint of where to

alight. His theory of his excursion was that he could alight

anywhere—not nearer Paris than an hour’s run—on catching a suggestion

of the particular note required. It made its sign, the

suggestion—weather, air, light, colour and his mood all favouring—at

the end of some eighty minutes; the train pulled up just at the right

spot, and he found himself getting out as securely as if to keep an

appointment. It will be felt of him that he could amuse himself, at his

age, with very small things if it be again noted that his appointment

was only with a superseded Boston fashion. He hadn’t gone far without

the quick confidence that it would be quite sufficiently kept. The

oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the poplars and

willows, the reeds and river—a river of which he didn’t know, and

didn’t want to know, the name—fell into a composition, full of

felicity, within them; the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish;

the village on the left was white and the church on the right was grey;

it was all there, in short—it was what he wanted: it was Tremont

Street, it was France, it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely walking

about in it. He did this last, for an hour, to his heart’s content,

making for the shady woody horizon and boring so deep into his

impression and his idleness that he might fairly have got through them

again and reached the maroon-coloured wall. It was a wonder, no doubt,

that the taste of idleness for him shouldn’t need more time to sweeten;

but it had in fact taken the few previous days; it had been sweetening

in truth ever since the retreat of the Pococks. He walked and walked as

if to show himself how little he had now to do; he had nothing to do

but turn off to some hillside where he might stretch himself and hear

the poplars rustle, and whence—in the course of an afternoon so spent,

an afternoon richly suffused too with the sense of a book in his

pocket—he should sufficiently command the scene to be able to pick out

just the right little rustic inn for an experiment in respect to

dinner. There was a train back to Paris at 9.20, and he saw himself

partaking, at the close of the day, with the enhancements of a coarse

white cloth and a sanded door, of something fried and felicitous,

washed down with authentic wine; after which he might, as he liked,

either stroll back to his station in the gloaming or propose for the

local _carriole_ and converse with his driver, a driver who naturally

wouldn’t fail of a stiff clean blouse, of a knitted nightcap and of the

genius of response—who, in fine, would sit on the shafts, tell him what

the French people were thinking, and remind him, as indeed the whole

episode would incidentally do, of Maupassant. Strether heard his lips,

for the first time in French air, as this vision assumed consistency,

emit sounds of expressive intention without fear of his company. He had

been afraid of Chad and of Maria and of Madame de Vionnet; he had been

most of all afraid of Waymarsh, in whose presence, so far as they had

mixed together in the light of the town, he had never without somehow

paying for it aired either his vocabulary or his accent. He usually

paid for it by meeting immediately afterwards Waymarsh’s eye.

Such were the liberties with which his fancy played after he had turned

off to the hillside that did really and truly, as well as most amiably,

await him beneath the poplars, the hillside that made him feel, for a

murmurous couple of hours, how happy had been his thought. He had the

sense of success, of a finer harmony in things; nothing but what had

turned out as yet according to his plan. It most of all came home to

him, as he lay on his back on the grass, that Sarah had really gone,

that his tension was really relaxed; the peace diffused in these ideas

might be delusive, but it hung about him none the less for the time. It

fairly, for half an hour, sent him to sleep; he pulled his straw hat

over his eyes—he had bought it the day before with a reminiscence of

Waymarsh’s—and lost himself anew in Lambinet. It was as if he had found

out he was tired—tired not from his walk, but from that inward exercise

which had known, on the whole, for three months, so little

intermission. That was it—when once they were off he had dropped; this

moreover was what he had dropped to, and now he was touching bottom. He

was kept luxuriously quiet, soothed and amused by the consciousness of

what he had found at the end of his descent. It was very much what he

had told Maria Gostrey he should like to stay on for, the

hugely-distributed Paris of summer, alternately dazzling and dusky,

with a weight lifted for him off its columns and cornices and with

shade and air in the flutter of awnings as wide as avenues. It was

present to him without attenuation that, reaching out, the day after

making the remark, for some proof of his freedom, he had gone that very

afternoon to see Madame de Vionnet. He had gone again the next day but

one, and the effect of the two visits, the after-sense of the couple of

hours spent with her, was almost that of fulness and frequency. The

brave intention of frequency, so great with him from the moment of his

finding himself unjustly suspected at Woollett, had remained rather

theoretic, and one of the things he could muse about under his poplars

was the source of the special shyness that had still made him careful.

He had surely got rid of it now, this special shyness; what had become

of it if it hadn’t precisely, within the week, rubbed off?

It struck him now in fact as sufficiently plain that if he had still

been careful he had been so for a reason. He had really feared, in his

behaviour, a lapse from good faith; if there was a danger of one’s

liking such a woman too much one’s best safety was in waiting at least

till one had the right to do so. In the light of the last few days the

danger was fairly vivid; so that it was proportionately fortunate that

the right was likewise established. It seemed to our friend that he had

on each occasion profited to the utmost by the latter: how could he

have done so more, he at all events asked himself, than in having

immediately let her know that, if it was all the same to her, he

preferred not to talk about anything tiresome? He had never in his life

so sacrificed an armful of high interests as in that remark; he had

never so prepared the way for the comparatively frivolous as in

addressing it to Madame de Vionnet’s intelligence. It hadn’t been till

later that he quite recalled how in conjuring away everything but the

pleasant he had conjured away almost all they had hitherto talked

about; it was not till later even that he remembered how, with their

new tone, they hadn’t so much as mentioned the name of Chad himself.

One of the things that most lingered with him on his hillside was this

delightful facility, with such a woman, of arriving at a new tone; he

thought, as he lay on his back, of all the tones she might make

possible if one were to try her, and at any rate of the probability

that one could trust her to fit them to occasions. He had wanted her to

feel that, as he was disinterested now, so she herself should be, and

she had showed she felt it, and he had showed he was grateful, and it

had been for all the world as if he were calling for the first time.

They had had other, but irrelevant, meetings; it was quite as if, had

they sooner known how much they _really_ had in common, there were

quantities of comparatively dull matters they might have skipped. Well,

they were skipping them now, even to graceful gratitude, even to

handsome “Don’t mention it!”—and it was amazing what could still come

up without reference to what had been going on between them. It might

have been, on analysis, nothing more than Shakespeare and the musical

glasses; but it had served all the purpose of his appearing to have

said to her: “Don’t like me, if it’s a question of liking me, for

anything obvious and clumsy that I’ve, as they call it, ‘done’ for you:

like me—well, like me, hang it, for anything else you choose. So, by

the same propriety, don’t be for me simply the person I’ve come to know

through my awkward connexion with Chad—was ever anything, by the way,

_more_ awkward? Be for me, please, with all your admirable tact and

trust, just whatever I may show you it’s a present pleasure to me to

think you.” It had been a large indication to meet; but if she hadn’t

met it what _had_ she done, and how had their time together slipped

along so smoothly, mild but not slow, and melting, liquefying, into his

happy illusion of idleness? He could recognise on the other hand that

he had probably not been without reason, in his prior, his restricted

state, for keeping an eye on his liability to lapse from good faith.

He really continued in the picture—that being for himself his

situation—all the rest of this rambling day; so that the charm was

still, was indeed more than ever upon him when, toward six o’clock he

found himself amicably engaged with a stout white-capped deep-voiced

woman at the door of the _auberge_ of the biggest village, a village

that affected him as a thing of whiteness, blueness and crookedness,

set in coppery green, and that had the river flowing behind or before

it—one couldn’t say which; at the bottom, in particular, of the

inn-garden. He had had other adventures before this; had kept along the

height, after shaking off slumber; had admired, had almost coveted,

another small old church, all steep roof and dim slate-colour without

and all whitewash and paper flowers within; had lost his way and had

found it again; had conversed with rustics who struck him perhaps a

little more as men of the world than he had expected; had acquired at a

bound a fearless facility in French; had had, as the afternoon waned, a

watery _bock_, all pale and Parisian, in the café of the furthest

village, which was not the biggest; and had meanwhile not once

overstepped the oblong gilt frame. The frame had drawn itself out for

him, as much as you please; but that was just his luck. He had finally

come down again to the valley, to keep within touch of stations and

trains, turning his face to the quarter from which he had started; and

thus it was that he had at last pulled up before the hostess of the

Cheval Blanc, who met him, with a rough readiness that was like the

clatter of sabots over stones, on their common ground of a _côtelette

de veau à l’oseille_ and a subsequent lift. He had walked many miles

and didn’t know he was tired; but he still knew he was amused, and even

that, though he had been alone all day, he had never yet so struck

himself as engaged with others and in midstream of his drama. It might

have passed for finished his drama, with its catastrophe all but

reached: it had, however, none the less been vivid again for him as he

thus gave it its fuller chance. He had only had to be at last well out

of it to feel it, oddly enough, still going on.

For this had been all day at bottom the spell of the picture—that it

was essentially more than anything else a scene and a stage, that the

very air of the play was in the rustle of the willows and the tone of

the sky. The play and the characters had, without his knowing it till

now, peopled all his space for him, and it seemed somehow quite happy

that they should offer themselves, in the conditions so supplied, with

a kind of inevitability. It was as if the conditions made them not only

inevitable, but so much more nearly natural and right as that they were

at least easier, pleasanter, to put up with. The conditions had nowhere

so asserted their difference from those of Woollett as they appeared to

him to assert it in the little court of the Cheval Blanc while he

arranged with his hostess for a comfortable climax. They were few and

simple, scant and humble, but they were _the thing_, as he would have

called it, even to a greater degree than Madame de Vionnet’s old high

salon where the ghost of the Empire walked. “The” thing was the thing

that implied the greatest number of other things of the sort he had had

to tackle; and it was queer of course, but so it was—the implication

here was complete. Not a single one of his observations but somehow

fell into a place in it; not a breath of the cooler evening that wasn’t

somehow a syllable of the text. The text was simply, when condensed,

that in _these_ places such things were, and that if it was in them one

elected to move about one had to make one’s account with what one

lighted on. Meanwhile at all events it was enough that they did affect

one—so far as the village aspect was concerned—as whiteness,

crookedness and blueness set in coppery green; there being positively,

for that matter, an outer wall of the White Horse that was painted the

most improbable shade. That was part of the amusement—as if to show

that the fun was harmless; just as it was enough, further, that the

picture and the play seemed supremely to melt together in the good

woman’s broad sketch of what she could do for her visitor’s appetite.

He felt in short a confidence, and it was general, and it was all he

wanted to feel. It suffered no shock even on her mentioning that she

had in fact just laid the cloth for two persons who, unlike Monsieur,

had arrived by the river—in a boat of their own; who had asked her,

half an hour before, what she could do for them, and had then paddled

away to look at something a little further up—from which promenade they

would presently return. Monsieur might meanwhile, if he liked, pass

into the garden, such as it was, where she would serve him, should he

wish it—for there were tables and benches in plenty—a “bitter” before

his repast. Here she would also report to him on the possibility of a

conveyance to his station, and here at any rate he would have the

_agrément_ of the river.

It may be mentioned without delay that Monsieur had the _agrément_ of

everything, and in particular, for the next twenty minutes, of a small

and primitive pavilion that, at the garden’s edge, almost overhung the

water, testifying, in its somewhat battered state, to much fond

frequentation. It consisted of little more than a platform, slightly

raised, with a couple of benches and a table, a protecting rail and a

projecting roof; but it raked the full grey-blue stream, which, taking

a turn a short distance above, passed out of sight to reappear much

higher up; and it was clearly in esteemed requisition for Sundays and

other feasts. Strether sat there and, though hungry, felt at peace; the

confidence that had so gathered for him deepened with the lap of the

water, the ripple of the surface, the rustle of the reeds on the

opposite bank, the faint diffused coolness and the slight rock of a

couple of small boats attached to a rough landing-place hard by. The

valley on the further side was all copper-green level and glazed pearly

sky, a sky hatched across with screens of trimmed trees, which looked

flat, like espaliers; and though the rest of the village straggled away

in the near quarter the view had an emptiness that made one of the

boats suggestive. Such a river set one afloat almost before one could

take up the oars—the idle play of which would be moreover the aid to

the full impression. This perception went so far as to bring him to his

feet; but that movement, in turn, made him feel afresh that he was

tired, and while he leaned against a post and continued to look out he

saw something that gave him a sharper arrest.

IV

What he saw was exactly the right thing—a boat advancing round the bend

and containing a man who held the paddles and a lady, at the stern,

with a pink parasol. It was suddenly as if these figures, or something

like them, had been wanted in the picture, had been wanted more or less

all day, and had now drifted into sight, with the slow current, on

purpose to fill up the measure. They came slowly, floating down,

evidently directed to the landing-place near their spectator and

presenting themselves to him not less clearly as the two persons for

whom his hostess was already preparing a meal. For two very happy

persons he found himself straightway taking them—a young man in

shirt-sleeves, a young woman easy and fair, who had pulled pleasantly

up from some other place and, being acquainted with the neighbourhood,

had known what this particular retreat could offer them. The air quite

thickened, at their approach, with further intimations; the intimation

that they were expert, familiar, frequent—that this wouldn’t at all

events be the first time. They knew how to do it, he vaguely felt—and

it made them but the more idyllic, though at the very moment of the

impression, as happened, their boat seemed to have begun to drift wide,

the oarsman letting it go. It had by this time none the less come much

nearer—near enough for Strether to dream the lady in the stern had for

some reason taken account of his being there to watch them. She had

remarked on it sharply, yet her companion hadn’t turned round; it was

in fact almost as if our friend had felt her bid him keep still. She

had taken in something as a result of which their course had wavered,

and it continued to waver while they just stood off. This little effect

was sudden and rapid, so rapid that Strether’s sense of it was separate

only for an instant from a sharp start of his own. He too had within

the minute taken in something, taken in that he knew the lady whose

parasol, shifting as if to hide her face, made so fine a pink point in

the shining scene. It was too prodigious, a chance in a million, but,

if he knew the lady, the gentleman, who still presented his back and

kept off, the gentleman, the coatless hero of the idyll, who had

responded to her start, was, to match the marvel, none other than Chad.

Chad and Madame de Vionnet were then like himself taking a day in the

country—though it was as queer as fiction, as farce, that their country

could happen to be exactly his; and she had been the first at

recognition, the first to feel, across the water, the shock—for it

appeared to come to that—of their wonderful accident. Strether became

aware, with this, of what was taking place—that her recognition had

been even stranger for the pair in the boat, that her immediate impulse

had been to control it, and that she was quickly and intensely debating

with Chad the risk of betrayal. He saw they would show nothing if they

could feel sure he hadn’t made them out; so that he had before him for

a few seconds his own hesitation. It was a sharp fantastic crisis that

had popped up as if in a dream, and it had had only to last the few

seconds to make him feel it as quite horrible. They were thus, on

either side, _trying_ the other side, and all for some reason that

broke the stillness like some unprovoked harsh note. It seemed to him

again, within the limit, that he had but one thing to do—to settle

their common question by some sign of surprise and joy. He hereupon

gave large play to these things, agitating his hat and his stick and

loudly calling out—a demonstration that brought him relief as soon as

he had seen it answered. The boat, in mid-stream, still went a little

wild—which seemed natural, however, while Chad turned round, half

springing up; and his good friend, after blankness and wonder, began

gaily to wave her parasol. Chad dropped afresh to his paddles and the

boat headed round, amazement and pleasantry filling the air meanwhile,

and relief, as Strether continued to fancy, superseding mere violence.

Our friend went down to the water under this odd impression as of

violence averted—the violence of their having “cut” him, out there in

the eye of nature, on the assumption that he wouldn’t know it. He

awaited them with a face from which he was conscious of not being able

quite to banish this idea that they would have gone on, not seeing and

not knowing, missing their dinner and disappointing their hostess, had

he himself taken a line to match. That at least was what darkened his

vision for the moment. Afterwards, after they had bumped at the

landing-place and he had assisted their getting ashore, everything

found itself sponged over by the mere miracle of the encounter.

They could so much better at last, on either side, treat it as a wild

extravagance of hazard, that the situation was made elastic by the

amount of explanation called into play. Why indeed—apart from

oddity—the situation should have been really stiff was a question

naturally not practical at the moment, and in fact, so far as we are

concerned, a question tackled, later on and in private, only by

Strether himself. He was to reflect later on and in private that it was

mainly _he_ who had explained—as he had had moreover comparatively

little difficulty in doing. He was to have at all events meanwhile the

worrying thought of their perhaps secretly suspecting him of having

plotted this coincidence, taking such pains as might be to give it the

semblance of an accident. That possibility—as their imputation—didn’t

of course bear looking into for an instant; yet the whole incident was

so manifestly, arrange it as they would, an awkward one, that he could

scarce keep disclaimers in respect to his own presence from rising to

his lips. Disclaimers of intention would have been as tactless as his

presence was practically gross; and the narrowest escape they either of

them had was his lucky escape, in the event, from making any. Nothing

of the sort, so far as surface and sound were involved, was even in

question; surface and sound all made for their common ridiculous good

fortune, for the general _invraisemblance_ of the occasion, for the

charming chance that they had, the others, in passing, ordered some

food to be ready, the charming chance that he had himself not eaten,

the charming chance, even more, that their little plans, their hours,

their train, in short, from _là-bas_, would all match for their return

together to Paris. The chance that was most charming of all, the chance

that drew from Madame de Vionnet her clearest, gayest “_Comme cela se

trouve!_” was the announcement made to Strether after they were seated

at table, the word given him by their hostess in respect to his

carriage for the station, on which he might now count. It settled the

matter for his friends as well; the conveyance—it _was_ all too

lucky!—would serve for them; and nothing was more delightful than his

being in a position to make the train so definite. It might have been,

for themselves—to hear Madame de Vionnet—almost unnaturally vague, a

detail left to be fixed; though Strether indeed was afterwards to

remember that Chad had promptly enough intervened to forestall this

appearance, laughing at his companion’s flightiness and making the

point that he had after all, in spite of the bedazzlement of a day out

with her, known what he was about.

Strether was to remember afterwards further that this had had for him

the effect of forming Chad’s almost sole intervention; and indeed he

was to remember further still, in subsequent meditation, many things

that, as it were, fitted together. Another of them was for instance

that the wonderful woman’s overflow of surprise and amusement was

wholly into French, which she struck him as speaking with an

unprecedented command of idiomatic turns, but in which she got, as he

might have said, somewhat away from him, taking all at once little

brilliant jumps that he could but lamely match. The question of his own

French had never come up for them; it was the one thing she wouldn’t

have permitted—it belonged, for a person who had been through much, to

mere boredom; but the present result was odd, fairly veiling her

identity, shifting her back into a mere voluble class or race to the

intense audibility of which he was by this time inured. When she spoke

the charming slightly strange English he best knew her by he seemed to

feel her as a creature, among all the millions, with a language quite

to herself, the real monopoly of a special shade of speech, beautifully

easy for her, yet of a colour and a cadence that were both inimitable

and matters of accident. She came back to these things after they had

shaken down in the inn-parlour and knew, as it were, what was to become

of them; it was inevitable that loud ejaculation over the prodigy of

their convergence should at last wear itself out. Then it was that his

impression took fuller form—the impression, destined only to deepen, to

complete itself, that they had something to put a face upon, to carry

off and make the best of, and that it was she who, admirably on the

whole, was doing this. It was familiar to him of course that they had

something to put a face upon; their friendship, their connexion, took

any amount of explaining—that would have been made familiar by his

twenty minutes with Mrs. Pocock if it hadn’t already been so. Yet his

theory, as we know, had bountifully been that the facts were

specifically none of his business, and were, over and above, so far as

one had to do with them, intrinsically beautiful; and this might have

prepared him for anything, as well as rendered him proof against

mystification. When he reached home that night, however, he knew he had

been, at bottom, neither prepared nor proof; and since we have spoken

of what he was, after his return, to recall and interpret, it may as

well immediately be said that his real experience of these few hours

put on, in that belated vision—for he scarce went to bed till

morning—the aspect that is most to our purpose.

He then knew more or less how he had been affected—he but half knew at

the time. There had been plenty to affect him even after, as has been

said, they had shaken down; for his consciousness, though muffled, had

its sharpest moments during this passage, a marked drop into innocent

friendly Bohemia. They then had put their elbows on the table,

deploring the premature end of their two or three dishes; which they

had tried to make up with another bottle while Chad joked a little

spasmodically, perhaps even a little irrelevantly, with the hostess.

What it all came to had been that fiction and fable _were_, inevitably,

in the air, and not as a simple term of comparison, but as a result of

things said; also that they were blinking it, all round, and that they

yet needn’t, so much as that, have blinked it—though indeed if they

hadn’t Strether didn’t quite see what else they could have done.

Strether didn’t quite see _that_ even at an hour or two past midnight,

even when he had, at his hotel, for a long time, without a light and

without undressing, sat back on his bedroom sofa and stared straight

before him. He was, at that point of vantage, in full possession, to

make of it all what he could. He kept making of it that there had been

simply a _lie_ in the charming affair—a lie on which one could now,

detached and deliberate, perfectly put one’s finger. It was with the

lie that they had eaten and drunk and talked and laughed, that they had

waited for their _carriole_ rather impatiently, and had then got into

the vehicle and, sensibly subsiding, driven their three or four miles

through the darkening summer night. The eating and drinking, which had

been a resource, had had the effect of having served its turn; the talk

and laughter had done as much; and it was during their somewhat tedious

progress to the station, during the waits there, the further delays,

their submission to fatigue, their silences in the dim compartment of

the much-stopping train, that he prepared himself for reflexions to

come. It had been a performance, Madame de Vionnet’s manner, and though

it had to that degree faltered toward the end, as through her ceasing

to believe in it, as if she had asked herself, or Chad had found a

moment surreptitiously to ask her, what after all was the use, a

performance it had none the less quite handsomely remained, with the

final fact about it that it was on the whole easier to keep up than to

abandon.

From the point of view of presence of mind it had been very wonderful

indeed, wonderful for readiness, for beautiful assurance, for the way

her decision was taken on the spot, without time to confer with Chad,

without time for anything. Their only conference could have been the

brief instants in the boat before they confessed to recognising the

spectator on the bank, for they hadn’t been alone together a moment

since and must have communicated all in silence. It was a part of the

deep impression for Strether, and not the least of the deep interest,

that they _could_ so communicate—that Chad in particular could let her

know he left it to her. He habitually left things to others, as

Strether was so well aware, and it in fact came over our friend in

these meditations that there had been as yet no such vivid illustration

of his famous knowing how to live. It was as if he had humoured her to

the extent of letting her lie without correction—almost as if, really,

he would be coming round in the morning to set the matter, as between

Strether and himself, right. Of course he couldn’t quite come; it was a

case in which a man was obliged to accept the woman’s version, even

when fantastic; if she had, with more flurry than she cared to show,

elected, as the phrase was, to represent that they had left Paris that

morning, and with no design but of getting back within the day—if she

had so sized-up, in the Woollett phrase, their necessity, she knew best

her own measure. There were things, all the same, it was impossible to

blink and which made this measure an odd one—the too evident fact for

instance that she hadn’t started out for the day dressed and hatted and

shod, and even, for that matter, pink parasol’d, as she had been in the

boat. From what did the drop in her assurance proceed as the tension

increased—from what did this slightly baffled ingenuity spring but from

her consciousness of not presenting, as night closed in, with not so

much as a shawl to wrap her round, an appearance that matched her

story? She admitted that she was cold, but only to blame her imprudence

which Chad suffered her to give such account of as she might. Her shawl

and Chad’s overcoat and her other garments, and his, those they had

each worn the day before, were at the place, best known to themselves—a

quiet retreat enough, no doubt—at which they had been spending the

twenty-four hours, to which they had fully meant to return that

evening, from which they had so remarkably swum into Strether’s ken,

and the tacit repudiation of which had been thus the essence of her

comedy. Strether saw how she had perceived in a flash that they

couldn’t quite look to going back there under his nose; though,

honestly, as he gouged deeper into the matter, he was somewhat

surprised, as Chad likewise had perhaps been, at the uprising of this

scruple. He seemed even to divine that she had entertained it rather

for Chad than for herself, and that, as the young man had lacked the

chance to enlighten her, she had had to go on with it, he meanwhile

mistaking her motive.

He was rather glad, none the less, that they had in point of fact not

parted at the Cheval Blanc, that he hadn’t been reduced to giving them

his blessing for an idyllic retreat down the river. He had had in the

actual case to make-believe more than he liked, but this was nothing,

it struck him, to what the other event would have required. Could he,

literally, quite have faced the other event? Would he have been capable

of making the best of it with them? This was what he was trying to do

now; but with the advantage of his being able to give more time to it a

good deal counteracted by his sense of what, over and above the central

fact itself, he had to swallow. It was the quantity of make-believe

involved and so vividly exemplified that most disagreed with his

spiritual stomach. He moved, however, from the consideration of that

quantity—to say nothing of the consciousness of that organ—back to the

other feature of the show, the deep, deep truth of the intimacy

revealed. That was what, in his vain vigil, he oftenest reverted to:

intimacy, at such a point, was _like_ that—and what in the world else

would one have wished it to be like? It was all very well for him to

feel the pity of its being so much like lying; he almost blushed, in

the dark, for the way he had dressed the possibility in vagueness, as a

little girl might have dressed her doll. He had made them—and by no

fault of their own—momentarily pull it for him, the possibility, out of

this vagueness; and must he not therefore take it now as they had had

simply, with whatever thin attenuations, to give it to him? The very

question, it may be added, made him feel lonely and cold. There was the

element of the awkward all round, but Chad and Madame de Vionnet had at

least the comfort that they could talk it over together. With whom

could _he_ talk of such things?—unless indeed always, at almost any

stage, with Maria? He foresaw that Miss Gostrey would come again into

requisition on the morrow; though it wasn’t to be denied that he was

already a little afraid of her “What on earth—that’s what I want to

know now—had you then supposed?” He recognised at last that he had

really been trying all along to suppose nothing. Verily, verily, his

labour had been lost. He found himself supposing innumerable and

wonderful things.

Book Twelfth

I

Strether couldn’t have said he had during the previous hours definitely

expected it; yet when, later on, that morning—though no later indeed

than for his coming forth at ten o’clock—he saw the concierge produce,

on his approach, a _petit bleu_ delivered since his letters had been

sent up, he recognised the appearance as the first symptom of a sequel.

He then knew he had been thinking of some early sign from Chad as more

likely, after all, than not; and this would be precisely the early

sign. He took it so for granted that he opened the _petit bleu_ just

where he had stopped, in the pleasant cool draught of the

_porte-cochère_—only curious to see where the young man would, at such

a juncture, break out. His curiosity, however, was more than gratified;

the small missive, whose gummed edge he had detached without attention

to the address, not being from the young man at all, but from the

person whom the case gave him on the spot as still more worth while.

Worth while or not, he went round to the nearest telegraph-office, the

big one on the Boulevard, with a directness that almost confessed to a

fear of the danger of delay. He might have been thinking that if he

didn’t go before he could think he wouldn’t perhaps go at all. He at

any rate kept, in the lower side-pocket of his morning coat, a very

deliberate hand on his blue missive, crumpling it up rather tenderly

than harshly. He wrote a reply, on the Boulevard, also in the form of a

_petit bleu_—which was quickly done, under pressure of the place,

inasmuch as, like Madame de Vionnet’s own communication, it consisted

of the fewest words. She had asked him if he could do her the very

great kindness of coming to see her that evening at half-past nine, and

he answered, as if nothing were easier, that he would present himself

at the hour she named. She had added a line of postscript, to the

effect that she would come to him elsewhere and at his own hour if he

preferred; but he took no notice of this, feeling that if he saw her at

all half the value of it would be in seeing her where he had already

seen her best. He mightn’t see her at all; that was one of the

reflexions he made after writing and before he dropped his closed card

into the box; he mightn’t see any one at all any more at all; he might

make an end as well now as ever, leaving things as they were, since he

was doubtless not to leave them better, and taking his way home so far

as should appear that a home remained to him. This alternative was for

a few minutes so sharp that if he at last did deposit his missive it

was perhaps because the pressure of the place had an effect.

There was none other, however, than the common and constant pressure,

familiar to our friend under the rubric of _Postes et Télégraphes_—the

something in the air of these establishments; the vibration of the vast

strange life of the town, the influence of the types, the performers

concocting their messages; the little prompt Paris women, arranging,

pretexting goodness knew what, driving the dreadful needle-pointed

public pen at the dreadful sand-strewn public table: implements that

symbolised for Strether’s too interpretative innocence something more

acute in manners, more sinister in morals, more fierce in the national

life. After he had put in his paper he had ranged himself, he was

really amused to think, on the side of the fierce, the sinister, the

acute. He was carrying on a correspondence, across the great city,

quite in the key of the _Postes et Télégraphes_ in general; and it was

fairly as if the acceptance of that fact had come from something in his

state that sorted with the occupation of his neighbours. He was mixed

up with the typical tale of Paris, and so were they, poor things—how

could they all together help being? They were no worse than he, in

short, and he no worse than they—if, queerly enough, no better; and at

all events he had settled his hash, so that he went out to begin, from

that moment, his day of waiting. The great settlement was, as he felt,

in his preference for seeing his correspondent in her own best

conditions. _That_ was part of the typical tale, the part most

significant in respect to himself. He liked the place she lived in, the

picture that each time squared itself, large and high and clear, around

her: every occasion of seeing it was a pleasure of a different shade.

Yet what precisely was he doing with shades of pleasure now, and why

hadn’t he properly and logically compelled her to commit herself to

whatever of disadvantage and penalty the situation might throw up? He

might have proposed, as for Sarah Pocock, the cold hospitality of his

own _salon de lecture_, in which the chill of Sarah’s visit seemed

still to abide and shades of pleasure were dim; he might have suggested

a stone bench in the dusty Tuileries or a penny chair at the back part

of the Champs Elysées. These things would have been a trifle stern, and

sternness alone now wouldn’t be sinister. An instinct in him cast about

for some form of discipline in which they might meet—some awkwardness

they would suffer from, some danger, or at least some grave

inconvenience, they would incur. This would give a sense—which the

spirit required, rather ached and sighed in the absence of—that

somebody was paying something somewhere and somehow, that they were at

least not all floating together on the silver stream of impunity. Just

instead of that to go and see her late in the evening, as if, for all

the world—well, as if he were as much in the swim as anybody else: this

had as little as possible in common with the penal form.

Even when he had felt that objection melt away, however, the practical

difference was small; the long stretch of his interval took the colour

it would, and if he lived on thus with the sinister from hour to hour

it proved an easier thing than one might have supposed in advance. He

reverted in thought to his old tradition, the one he had been brought

up on and which even so many years of life had but little worn away;

the notion that the state of the wrongdoer, or at least this person’s

happiness, presented some special difficulty. What struck him now

rather was the ease of it—for nothing in truth appeared easier. It was

an ease he himself fairly tasted of for the rest of the day; giving

himself quite up; not so much as trying to dress it out, in any

particular whatever, as a difficulty; not after all going to see

Maria—which would have been in a manner a result of such dressing; only

idling, lounging, smoking, sitting in the shade, drinking lemonade and

consuming ices. The day had turned to heat and eventual thunder, and he

now and again went back to his hotel to find that Chad hadn’t been

there. He hadn’t yet struck himself, since leaving Woollett, so much as

a loafer, though there had been times when he believed himself touching

bottom. This was a deeper depth than any, and with no foresight,

scarcely with a care, as to what he should bring up. He almost wondered

if he didn’t _look_ demoralised and disreputable; he had the fanciful

vision, as he sat and smoked, of some accidental, some motived, return

of the Pococks, who would be passing along the Boulevard and would

catch this view of him. They would have distinctly, on his appearance,

every ground for scandal. But fate failed to administer even that

sternness; the Pococks never passed and Chad made no sign. Strether

meanwhile continued to hold off from Miss Gostrey, keeping her till

to-morrow; so that by evening his irresponsibility, his impunity, his

luxury, had become—there was no other word for them—immense.

Between nine and ten, at last, in the high clear picture—he was moving

in these days, as in a gallery, from clever canvas to clever canvas—he

drew a long breath: it was so presented to him from the first that the

spell of his luxury wouldn’t be broken. He wouldn’t have, that is, to

become responsible—this was admirably in the air: she had sent for him

precisely to let him feel it, so that he might go on with the comfort

(comfort already established, hadn’t it been?) of regarding his ordeal,

the ordeal of the weeks of Sarah’s stay and of their climax, as safely

traversed and left behind him. Didn’t she just wish to assure him that

_she_ now took it all and so kept it; that he was absolutely not to

worry any more, was only to rest on his laurels and continue generously

to help her? The light in her beautiful formal room was dim, though it

would do, as everything would always do; the hot night had kept out

lamps, but there was a pair of clusters of candles that glimmered over

the chimney-piece like the tall tapers of an altar. The windows were

all open, their redundant hangings swaying a little, and he heard once

more, from the empty court, the small plash of the fountain. From

beyond this, and as from a great distance—beyond the court, beyond the

_corps de logis_ forming the front—came, as if excited and exciting,

the vague voice of Paris. Strether had all along been subject to sudden

gusts of fancy in connexion with such matters as these—odd starts of

the historic sense, suppositions and divinations with no warrant but

their intensity. Thus and so, on the eve of the great recorded dates,

the days and nights of revolution, the sounds had come in, the omens,

the beginnings broken out. They were the smell of revolution, the smell

of the public temper—or perhaps simply the smell of blood.

It was at present queer beyond words, “subtle,” he would have risked

saying, that such suggestions should keep crossing the scene; but it

was doubtless the effect of the thunder in the air, which had hung

about all day without release. His hostess was dressed as for

thunderous times, and it fell in with the kind of imagination we have

just attributed to him that she should be in simplest coolest white, of

a character so old-fashioned, if he were not mistaken, that Madame

Roland must on the scaffold have worn something like it. This effect

was enhanced by a small black fichu or scarf, of crape or gauze,

disposed quaintly round her bosom and now completing as by a mystic

touch the pathetic, the noble analogy. Poor Strether in fact scarce

knew what analogy was evoked for him as the charming woman, receiving

him and making him, as she could do such things, at once familiarly and

gravely welcome, moved over her great room with her image almost

repeated in its polished floor, which had been fully bared for summer.

The associations of the place, all felt again; the gleam here and

there, in the subdued light, of glass and gilt and parquet, with the

quietness of her own note as the centre—these things were at first as

delicate as if they had been ghostly, and he was sure in a moment that,

whatever he should find he had come for, it wouldn’t be for an

impression that had previously failed him. That conviction held him

from the outset, and, seeming singularly to simplify, certified to him

that the objects about would help him, would really help them both. No,

he might never see them again—this was only too probably the last time;

and he should certainly see nothing in the least degree like them. He

should soon be going to where such things were not, and it would be a

small mercy for memory, for fancy, to have, in that stress, a loaf on

the shelf. He knew in advance he should look back on the perception

actually sharpest with him as on the view of something old, old, old,

the oldest thing he had ever personally touched; and he also knew, even

while he took his companion in as the feature among features, that

memory and fancy couldn’t help being enlisted for her. She might intend

what she would, but this was beyond anything she could intend, with

things from far back—tyrannies of history, facts of type, values, as

the painters said, of expression—all working for her and giving her the

supreme chance, the chance of the happy, the really luxurious few, the

chance, on a great occasion, to be natural and simple. She had never,

with him, been more so; or if it was the perfection of art it would

never—and that came to the same thing—be proved against her.

What was truly wonderful was her way of differing so from time to time

without detriment to her simplicity. Caprices, he was sure she felt,

were before anything else bad manners, and that judgement in her was by

itself a thing making more for safety of intercourse than anything that

in his various own past intercourses he had had to reckon on. If

therefore her presence was now quite other than the one she had shown

him the night before, there was nothing of violence in the change—it

was all harmony and reason. It gave him a mild deep person, whereas he

had had on the occasion to which their interview was a direct reference

a person committed to movement and surface and abounding in them; but

she was in either character more remarkable for nothing than for her

bridging of intervals, and this now fell in with what he understood he

was to leave to her. The only thing was that, if he was to leave it

_all_ to her, why exactly had she sent for him? He had had, vaguely, in

advance, his explanation, his view of the probability of her wishing to

set something right, to deal in some way with the fraud so lately

practised on his presumed credulity. Would she attempt to carry it

further or would she blot it out? Would she throw over it some more or

less happy colour; or would she do nothing about it at all? He

perceived soon enough at least that, however reasonable she might be,

she wasn’t vulgarly confused, and it herewith pressed upon him that

their eminent “lie,” Chad’s and hers, was simply after all such an

inevitable tribute to good taste as he couldn’t have wished them not to

render. Away from them, during his vigil, he had seemed to wince at the

amount of comedy involved; whereas in his present posture he could only

ask himself how he should enjoy any attempt from her to take the comedy

back. He shouldn’t enjoy it at all; but, once more and yet once more,

he could trust her. That is he could trust her to make deception right.

As she presented things the ugliness—goodness knew why—went out of

them; none the less too that she could present them, with an art of her

own, by not so much as touching them. She let the matter, at all

events, lie where it was—where the previous twenty-four hours had

placed it; appearing merely to circle about it respectfully, tenderly,

almost piously, while she took up another question.

She knew she hadn’t really thrown dust in his eyes; this, the previous

night, before they separated, had practically passed between them; and,

as she had sent for him to see what the difference thus made for him

might amount to, so he was conscious at the end of five minutes that he

had been tried and tested. She had settled with Chad after he left them

that she would, for her satisfaction, assure herself of this quantity,

and Chad had, as usual, let her have her way. Chad was always letting

people have their way when he felt that it would somehow turn his wheel

for him; it somehow always did turn his wheel. Strether felt, oddly

enough, before these facts, freshly and consentingly passive; they

again so rubbed it into him that the couple thus fixing his attention

were intimate, that his intervention had absolutely aided and

intensified their intimacy, and that in fine he must accept the

consequence of that. He had absolutely become, himself, with his

perceptions and his mistakes, his concessions and his reserves, the

droll mixture, as it must seem to them, of his braveries and his fears,

the general spectacle of his art and his innocence, almost an added

link and certainly a common priceless ground for them to meet upon. It

was as if he had been hearing their very tone when she brought out a

reference that was comparatively straight. “The last twice that you’ve

been here, you know, I never asked you,” she said with an abrupt

transition—they had been pretending before this to talk simply of the

charm of yesterday and of the interest of the country they had seen.

The effort was confessedly vain; not for such talk had she invited him;

and her impatient reminder was of their having done for it all the

needful on his coming to her after Sarah’s flight. What she hadn’t

asked him then was to state to her where and how he stood for her; she

had been resting on Chad’s report of their midnight hour together in

the Boulevard Malesherbes. The thing therefore she at present desired

was ushered in by this recall of the two occasions on which,

disinterested and merciful, she hadn’t worried him. To-night truly she

_would_ worry him, and this was her appeal to him to let her risk it.

He wasn’t to mind if she bored him a little: she had behaved, after

all—hadn’t she?—so awfully, awfully well.

II

“Oh, you’re all right, you’re all right,” he almost impatiently

declared; his impatience being moreover not for her pressure, but for

her scruple. More and more distinct to him was the tune to which she

would have had the matter out with Chad: more and more vivid for him

the idea that she had been nervous as to what he might be able to

“stand.” Yes, it had been a question if he had “stood” what the scene

on the river had given him, and, though the young man had doubtless

opined in favour of his recuperation, her own last word must have been

that she should feel easier in seeing for herself. That was it,

unmistakeably; she _was_ seeing for herself. What he could stand was

thus, in these moments, in the balance for Strether, who reflected, as

he became fully aware of it, that he must properly brace himself. He

wanted fully to appear to stand all he might; and there was a certain

command of the situation for him in this very wish not to look too much

at sea. She was ready with everything, but so, sufficiently, was he;

that is he was at one point the more prepared of the two, inasmuch as,

for all her cleverness, she couldn’t produce on the spot—and it was

surprising—an account of the motive of her note. He had the advantage

that his pronouncing her “all right” gave him for an enquiry. “May I

ask, delighted as I’ve been to come, if you’ve wished to say something

special?” He spoke as if she might have seen he had been waiting for

it—not indeed with discomfort, but with natural interest. Then he saw

that she was a little taken aback, was even surprised herself at the

detail she had neglected—the only one ever yet; having somehow assumed

he would know, would recognise, would leave some things not to be said.

She looked at him, however, an instant as if to convey that if he

wanted them _all_—!

“Selfish and vulgar—that’s what I must seem to you. You’ve done

everything for me, and here I am as if I were asking for more. But it

isn’t,” she went on, “because I’m afraid—though I _am_ of course

afraid, as a woman in my position always is. I mean it isn’t because

one lives in terror—it isn’t because of that one is selfish, for I’m

ready to give you my word to-night that I don’t care; don’t care what

still may happen and what I may lose. I don’t ask you to raise your

little finger for me again, nor do I wish so much as to mention to you

what we’ve talked of before, either my danger or my safety, or his

mother, or his sister, or the girl he may marry, or the fortune he may

make or miss, or the right or the wrong, of any kind, he may do. If

after the help one has had from you one can’t either take care of one’s

self or simply hold one’s tongue, one must renounce all claim to be an

object of interest. It’s in the name of what I _do_ care about that

I’ve tried still to keep hold of you. How can I be indifferent,” she

asked, “to how I appear to you?” And as he found himself unable

immediately to say: “Why, if you’re going, _need_ you, after all? Is it

impossible you should stay on—so that one mayn’t lose you?”

“Impossible I should live with you here instead of going home?”

“Not ‘with’ us, if you object to that, but near enough to us,

somewhere, for us to see you—well,” she beautifully brought out, “when

we feel we _must_. How shall we not sometimes feel it? I’ve wanted to

see you often when I couldn’t,” she pursued, “all these last weeks. How

shan’t I then miss you now, with the sense of your being gone forever?”

Then as if the straightness of this appeal, taking him unprepared, had

visibly left him wondering: “Where _is_ your ‘home’ moreover now—what

has become of it? I’ve made a change in your life, I know I have; I’ve

upset everything in your mind as well; in your sense of—what shall I

call it?—all the decencies and possibilities. It gives me a kind of

detestation—” She pulled up short.

Oh but he wanted to hear. “Detestation of what?”

“Of everything—of life.”

“Ah that’s too much,” he laughed—“or too little!”

“Too little, precisely”—she was eager. “What I hate is myself—when I

think that one has to take so much, to be happy, out of the lives of

others, and that one isn’t happy even then. One does it to cheat one’s

self and to stop one’s mouth—but that’s only at the best for a little.

The wretched self is always there, always making one somehow a fresh

anxiety. What it comes to is that it’s not, that it’s never, a

happiness, any happiness at all, to _take_. The only safe thing is to

give. It’s what plays you least false.” Interesting, touching,

strikingly sincere as she let these things come from her, she yet

puzzled and troubled him—so fine was the quaver of her quietness. He

felt what he had felt before with her, that there was always more

behind what she showed, and more and more again behind that. “You know

so, at least,” she added, “where you are!”

“_You_ ought to know it indeed then; for isn’t what you’ve been giving

exactly what has brought us together this way? You’ve been making, as

I’ve so fully let you know I’ve felt,” Strether said, “the most

precious present I’ve ever seen made, and if you can’t sit down

peacefully on that performance you _are_, no doubt, born to torment

yourself. But you ought,” he wound up, “to be easy.”

“And not trouble you any more, no doubt—not thrust on you even the

wonder and the beauty of what I’ve done; only let you regard our

business as over, and well over, and see you depart in a peace that

matches my own? No doubt, no doubt, no doubt,” she nervously

repeated—“all the more that I don’t really pretend I believe you

couldn’t, for yourself, _not_ have done what you have. I don’t pretend

you feel yourself victimised, for this evidently is the way you live,

and it’s what—we’re agreed—is the best way. Yes, as you say,” she

continued after a moment, “I ought to be easy and rest on my work. Well

then here am I doing so. I _am_ easy. You’ll have it for your last

impression. When is it you say you go?” she asked with a quick change.

He took some time to reply—his last impression was more and more so

mixed a one. It produced in him a vague disappointment, a drop that was

deeper even than the fall of his elation the previous night. The good

of what he had done, if he had done so much, wasn’t there to enliven

him quite to the point that would have been ideal for a grand gay

finale. Women were thus endlessly absorbent, and to deal with them was

to walk on water. What was at bottom the matter with her, embroider as

she might and disclaim as she might—what was at bottom the matter with

her was simply Chad himself. It was of Chad she was after all renewedly

afraid; the strange strength of her passion was the very strength of

her fear; she clung to _him_, Lambert Strether, as to a source of

safety she had tested, and, generous graceful truthful as she might try

to be, exquisite as she was, she dreaded the term of his being within

reach. With this sharpest perception yet, it was like a chill in the

air to him, it was almost appalling, that a creature so fine could be,

by mysterious forces, a creature so exploited. For at the end of all

things they _were_ mysterious: she had but made Chad what he was—so why

could she think she had made him infinite? She had made him better, she

had made him best, she had made him anything one would; but it came to

our friend with supreme queerness that he was none the less only Chad.

Strether had the sense that _he_, a little, had made him too; his high

appreciation had as it were, consecrated her work The work, however

admirable, was nevertheless of the strict human order, and in short it

was marvellous that the companion of mere earthly joys, of comforts,

aberrations (however one classed them) within the common experience

should be so transcendently prized. It might have made Strether hot or

shy, as such secrets of others brought home sometimes do make us; but

he was held there by something so hard that it was fairly grim. This

was not the discomposure of last night; that had quite passed—such

discomposures were a detail; the real coercion was to see a man

ineffably adored. There it was again—it took women, it took women; if

to deal with them was to walk on water what wonder that the water rose?

And it had never surely risen higher than round this woman. He

presently found himself taking a long look from her, and the next thing

he knew he had uttered all his thought. “You’re afraid for your life!”

It drew out her long look, and he soon enough saw why. A spasm came

into her face, the tears she had already been unable to hide overflowed

at first in silence, and then, as the sound suddenly comes from a

child, quickened to gasps, to sobs. She sat and covered her face with

her hands, giving up all attempt at a manner. “It’s how you see me,

it’s how you see me”—she caught her breath with it—“and it’s as I _am_,

and as I must take myself, and of course it’s no matter.” Her emotion

was at first so incoherent that he could only stand there at a loss,

stand with his sense of having upset her, though of having done it by

the truth. He had to listen to her in a silence that he made no

immediate effort to attenuate, feeling her doubly woeful amid all her

dim diffused elegance; consenting to it as he had consented to the

rest, and even conscious of some vague inward irony in the presence of

such a fine free range of bliss and bale. He couldn’t say it was _not_

no matter; for he was serving her to the end, he now knew, anyway—quite

as if what he thought of her had nothing to do with it. It was actually

moreover as if he didn’t think of her at all, as if he could think of

nothing but the passion, mature, abysmal, pitiful, she represented, and

the possibilities she betrayed. She was older for him to-night, visibly

less exempt from the touch of time; but she was as much as ever the

finest and subtlest creature, the happiest apparition, it had been

given him, in all his years, to meet; and yet he could see her there as

vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as a maidservant crying for her young

man. The only thing was that she judged herself as the maidservant

wouldn’t; the weakness of which wisdom too, the dishonour of which

judgement, seemed but to sink her lower. Her collapse, however, no

doubt, was briefer and she had in a manner recovered herself before he

intervened. “Of course I’m afraid for my life. But that’s nothing. It

isn’t that.”

He was silent a little longer, as if thinking what it might be.

“There’s something I have in mind that I can still do.”

But she threw off at last, with a sharp sad headshake, drying her eyes,

what he could still do. “I don’t care for that. Of course, as I’ve

said, you’re acting, in your wonderful way, for yourself; and what’s

for yourself is no more my business—though I may reach out unholy hands

so clumsily to touch it—than if it were something in Timbuctoo. It’s

only that you don’t snub me, as you’ve had fifty chances to do—it’s

only your beautiful patience that makes one forget one’s manners. In

spite of your patience, all the same,” she went on, “you’d do anything

rather than be with us here, even if that were possible. You’d do

everything for us but be mixed up with us—which is a statement you can

easily answer to the advantage of your own manners. You can say ‘What’s

the use of talking of things that at the best are impossible?’ What

_is_ of course the use? It’s only my little madness. You’d talk if you

were tormented. And I don’t mean now about _him_. Oh for him—!”

Positively, strangely, bitterly, as it seemed to Strether, she gave

“him,” for the moment, away. “You don’t care what I think of you; but I

happen to care what you think of me. And what you _might_,” she added.

“What you perhaps even did.”

He gained time. “What I did—?”

“Did think before. Before this. _Didn’t_ you think—?”

But he had already stopped her. “I didn’t think anything. I never think

a step further than I’m obliged to.”

“That’s perfectly false, I believe,” she returned—“except that you may,

no doubt, often pull up when things become _too_ ugly; or even, I’ll

say, to save you a protest, too beautiful. At any rate, even so far as

it’s true, we’ve thrust on you appearances that you’ve had to take in

and that have therefore made your obligation. Ugly or beautiful—it

doesn’t matter what we call them—you were getting on without them, and

that’s where we’re detestable. We bore you—that’s where we are. And we

may well—for what we’ve cost you. All you can do _now_ is not to think

at all. And I who should have liked to seem to you—well, sublime!”

He could only after a moment re-echo Miss Barrace. “You’re wonderful!”

“I’m old and abject and hideous”—she went on as without hearing him.

“Abject above all. Or old above all. It’s when one’s old that it’s

worst. I don’t care what becomes of it—let what _will_; there it is.

It’s a doom—I know it; you can’t see it more than I do myself. Things

have to happen as they will.” With which she came back again to what,

face to face with him, had so quite broken down. “Of course you

wouldn’t, even if possible, and no matter what may happen to you, be

near us. But think of me, think of me—!” She exhaled it into air.

He took refuge in repeating something he had already said and that she

had made nothing of. “There’s something I believe I can still do.” And

he put his hand out for good-bye.

She again made nothing of it; she went on with her insistence. “That

won’t help you. There’s nothing to help you.”

“Well, it may help _you_,” he said.

She shook her head. “There’s not a grain of certainty in my future—for

the only certainty is that I shall be the loser in the end.”

She hadn’t taken his hand, but she moved with him to the door. “That’s

cheerful,” he laughed, “for your benefactor!”

“What’s cheerful for _me_,” she replied, “is that we might, you and I,

have been friends. That’s it—that’s it. You see how, as I say, I want

everything. I’ve wanted you too.”

“Ah but you’ve _had_ me!” he declared, at the door, with an emphasis

that made an end.

III

His purpose had been to see Chad the next day, and he had prefigured

seeing him by an early call; having in general never stood on ceremony

in respect to visits at the Boulevard Malesherbes. It had been more

often natural for him to go there than for Chad to come to the small

hotel, the attractions of which were scant; yet it nevertheless, just

now, at the eleventh hour, did suggest itself to Strether to begin by

giving the young man a chance. It struck him that, in the inevitable

course, Chad would be “round,” as Waymarsh used to say—Waymarsh who

already, somehow, seemed long ago. He hadn’t come the day before,

because it had been arranged between them that Madame de Vionnet should

see their friend first; but now that this passage had taken place he

would present himself, and their friend wouldn’t have long to wait.

Strether assumed, he became aware, on this reasoning, that the

interesting parties to the arrangement would have met betimes, and that

the more interesting of the two—as she was after all—would have

communicated to the other the issue of her appeal. Chad would know

without delay that his mother’s messenger had been with her, and,

though it was perhaps not quite easy to see how she could qualify what

had occurred, he would at least have been sufficiently advised to feel

he could go on. The day, however, brought, early or late, no word from

him, and Strether felt, as a result of this, that a change had

practically come over their intercourse. It was perhaps a premature

judgement; or it only meant perhaps—how could he tell?—that the

wonderful pair he protected had taken up again together the excursion

he had accidentally checked. They might have gone back to the country,

and gone back but with a long breath drawn; that indeed would best mark

Chad’s sense that reprobation hadn’t rewarded Madame de Vionnet’s

request for an interview. At the end of the twenty-four hours, at the

end of the forty-eight, there was still no overture; so that Strether

filled up the time, as he had so often filled it before, by going to

see Miss Gostrey.

He proposed amusements to her; he felt expert now in proposing

amusements; and he had thus, for several days, an odd sense of leading

her about Paris, of driving her in the Bois, of showing her the penny

steamboats—those from which the breeze of the Seine was to be best

enjoyed—that might have belonged to a kindly uncle doing the honours of

the capital to an intelligent niece from the country. He found means

even to take her to shops she didn’t know, or that she pretended she

didn’t; while she, on her side, was, like the country maiden, all

passive modest and grateful—going in fact so far as to emulate

rusticity in occasional fatigues and bewilderments. Strether described

these vague proceedings to himself, described them even to her, as a

happy interlude; the sign of which was that the companions said for the

time no further word about the matter they had talked of to satiety. He

proclaimed satiety at the outset, and she quickly took the hint; as

docile both in this and in everything else as the intelligent obedient

niece. He told her as yet nothing of his late adventure—for as an

adventure it now ranked with him; he pushed the whole business

temporarily aside and found his interest in the fact of her beautiful

assent. She left questions unasked—she who for so long had been all

questions; she gave herself up to him with an understanding of which

mere mute gentleness might have seemed the sufficient expression. She

knew his sense of his situation had taken still another step—of that he

was quite aware; but she conveyed that, whatever had thus happened for

him, it was thrown into the shade by what was happening for herself.

This—though it mightn’t to a detached spirit have seemed much—was the

major interest, and she met it with a new directness of response,

measuring it from hour to hour with her grave hush of acceptance.

Touched as he had so often been by her before, he was, for his part

too, touched afresh; all the more that though he could be duly aware of

the principle of his own mood he couldn’t be equally so of the

principle of hers. He knew, that is, in a manner—knew roughly and

resignedly—what he himself was hatching; whereas he had to take the

chance of what he called to himself Maria’s calculations. It was all he

needed that she liked him enough for what they were doing, and even

should they do a good deal more would still like him enough for that;

the essential freshness of a relation so simple was a cool bath to the

soreness produced by other relations. These others appeared to him now

horribly complex; they bristled with fine points, points all

unimaginable beforehand, points that pricked and drew blood; a fact

that gave to an hour with his present friend on a _bateau-mouche_, or

in the afternoon shade of the Champs Elysées, something of the innocent

pleasure of handling rounded ivory. His relation with Chad

personally—from the moment he had got his point of view—had been of the

simplest; yet this also struck him as bristling, after a third and a

fourth blank day had passed. It was as if at last however his care for

such indications had dropped; there came a fifth blank day and he

ceased to enquire or to heed.

They now took on to his fancy, Miss Gostrey and he, the image of the

Babes in the Wood; they could trust the merciful elements to let them

continue at peace. He had been great already, as he knew, at

postponements; but he had only to get afresh into the rhythm of one to

feel its fine attraction. It amused him to say to himself that he might

for all the world have been going to die—die resignedly; the scene was

filled for him with so deep a death-bed hush, so melancholy a charm.

That meant the postponement of everything else—which made so for the

quiet lapse of life; and the postponement in especial of the reckoning

to come—unless indeed the reckoning to come were to be one and the same

thing with extinction. It faced him, the reckoning, over the shoulder

of much interposing experience—which also faced him; and one would

float to it doubtless duly through these caverns of Kubla Khan. It was

really behind everything; it hadn’t merged in what he had done; his

final appreciation of what he had done—his appreciation on the

spot—would provide it with its main sharpness. The spot so focussed was

of course Woollett, and he was to see, at the best, what Woollett would

be with everything there changed for him. Wouldn’t _that_ revelation

practically amount to the wind-up of his career? Well, the summer’s end

would show; his suspense had meanwhile exactly the sweetness of vain

delay; and he had with it, we should mention, other pastimes than

Maria’s company—plenty of separate musings in which his luxury failed

him but at one point. He was well in port, the outer sea behind him,

and it was only a matter of getting ashore. There was a question that

came and went for him, however, as he rested against the side of his

ship, and it was a little to get rid of the obsession that he prolonged

his hours with Miss Gostrey. It was a question about himself, but it

could only be settled by seeing Chad again; it was indeed his principal

reason for wanting to see Chad. After that it wouldn’t signify—it was a

ghost that certain words would easily lay to rest. Only the young man

must be there to take the words. Once they were taken he wouldn’t have

a question left; none, that is, in connexion with this particular

affair. It wouldn’t then matter even to himself that he might now have

been guilty of speaking _because_ of what he had forfeited. That was

the refinement of his supreme scruple—he wished so to leave what he had

forfeited out of account. He wished not to do anything because he had

missed something else, because he was sore or sorry or impoverished,

because he was maltreated or desperate; he wished to do everything

because he was lucid and quiet, just the same for himself on all

essential points as he had ever been. Thus it was that while he

virtually hung about for Chad he kept mutely putting it: “You’ve been

chucked, old boy; but what has that to do with it?” It would have

sickened him to feel vindictive.

These tints of feeling indeed were doubtless but the iridescence of his

idleness, and they were presently lost in a new light from Maria. She

had a fresh fact for him before the week was out, and she practically

met him with it on his appearing one night. He hadn’t on this day seen

her, but had planned presenting himself in due course to ask her to

dine with him somewhere out of doors, on one of the terraces, in one of

the gardens, of which the Paris of summer was profuse. It had then come

on to rain, so that, disconcerted, he changed his mind; dining alone at

home, a little stuffily and stupidly, and waiting on her afterwards to

make up his loss. He was sure within a minute that something had

happened; it was so in the air of the rich little room that he had

scarcely to name his thought. Softly lighted, the whole colour of the

place, with its vague values, was in cool fusion—an effect that made

the visitor stand for a little agaze. It was as if in doing so now he

had felt a recent presence—his recognition of the passage of which his

hostess in turn divined. She had scarcely to say it—“Yes, she has been

here, and this time I received her.” It wasn’t till a minute later that

she added: “There being, as I understand you, no reason _now_—!”

“None for your refusing?”

“No—if you’ve done what you’ve had to do.”

“I’ve certainly so far done it,” Strether said, “as that you needn’t

fear the effect, or the appearance of coming between us. There’s

nothing between us now but what we ourselves have put there, and not an

inch of room for anything else whatever. Therefore you’re only

beautifully _with_ us as always—though doubtless now, if she has talked

to you, rather more with us than less. Of course if she came,” he

added, “it was to talk to you.”

“It was to talk to me,” Maria returned; on which he was further sure

that she was practically in possession of what he himself hadn’t yet

told her. He was even sure she was in possession of things he himself

couldn’t have told; for the consciousness of them was now all in her

face and accompanied there with a shade of sadness that marked in her

the close of all uncertainties. It came out for him more than ever yet

that she had had from the first a knowledge she believed him not to

have had, a knowledge the sharp acquisition of which might be destined

to make a difference for him. The difference for him might not

inconceivably be an arrest of his independence and a change in his

attitude—in other words a revulsion in favour of the principles of

Woollett. She had really prefigured the possibility of a shock that

would send him swinging back to Mrs. Newsome. He hadn’t, it was true,

week after week, shown signs of receiving it, but the possibility had

been none the less in the air. What Maria accordingly had had now to

take in was that the shock had descended and that he hadn’t, all the

same, swung back. He had grown clear, in a flash, on a point long since

settled for herself; but no reapproximation to Mrs. Newsome had

occurred in consequence. Madame de Vionnet had by her visit held up the

torch to these truths, and what now lingered in poor Maria’s face was

the somewhat smoky light of the scene between them. If the light

however wasn’t, as we have hinted, the glow of joy, the reasons for

this also were perhaps discernible to Strether even through the blur

cast over them by his natural modesty. She had held herself for months

with a firm hand; she hadn’t interfered on any chance—and chances were

specious enough—that she might interfere to her profit. She had turned

her back on the dream that Mrs. Newsome’s rupture, their friend’s

forfeiture—the engagement, the relation itself, broken beyond all

mending—might furnish forth her advantage; and, to stay her hand from

promoting these things, she had on private, difficult, but rigid,

lines, played strictly fair. She couldn’t therefore but feel that,

though, as the end of all, the facts in question had been stoutly

confirmed, her ground for personal, for what might have been called

interested, elation remained rather vague. Strether might easily have

made out that she had been asking herself, in the hours she had just

sat through, if there were still for her, or were only not, a fair

shade of uncertainty. Let us hasten to add, however, that what he at

first made out on this occasion he also at first kept to himself. He

only asked what in particular Madame de Vionnet had come for, and as to

this his companion was ready.

“She wants tidings of Mr. Newsome, whom she appears not to have seen

for some days.”

“Then she hasn’t been away with him again?”

“She seemed to think,” Maria answered, “that he might have gone away

with _you_.”

“And did you tell her I know nothing of him?”

She had her indulgent headshake. “I’ve known nothing of what you know.

I could only tell her I’d ask you.”

“Then I’ve not seen him for a week—and of course I’ve wondered.” His

wonderment showed at this moment as sharper, but he presently went on.

“Still, I dare say I can put my hand on him. Did she strike you,” he

asked, “as anxious?”

“She’s always anxious.”

“After all I’ve done for her?” And he had one of the last flickers of

his occasional mild mirth. “To think that was just what I came out to

prevent!”

She took it up but to reply. “You don’t regard him then as safe?”

“I was just going to ask you how in that respect you regard Madame de

Vionnet.”

She looked at him a little. “What woman was _ever_ safe? She told me,”

she added—and it was as if at the touch of the connexion—“of your

extraordinary meeting in the country. After that _à quoi se fier?_”

“It was, as an accident, in all the possible or impossible chapter,”

Strether conceded, “amazing enough. But still, but still—!”

“But still she didn’t mind?”

“She doesn’t mind anything.”

“Well, then, as you don’t either, we may all sink to rest!”

He appeared to agree with her, but he had his reservation. “I do mind

Chad’s disappearance.”

“Oh you’ll get him back. But now you know,” she said, “why I went to

Mentone.” He had sufficiently let her see that he had by this time

gathered things together, but there was nature in her wish to make them

clearer still. “I didn’t want you to put it to me.”

“To put it to you—?”

“The question of what you were at last—a week ago—to see for yourself.

I didn’t want to have to lie for her. I felt that to be too much for

me. A man of course is always expected to do it—to do it, I mean, for a

woman; but not a woman for another woman; unless perhaps on the

tit-for-tat principle, as an indirect way of protecting herself. I

don’t need protection, so that I was free to ‘funk’ you—simply to dodge

your test. The responsibility was too much for me. I gained time, and

when I came back the need of a test had blown over.”

Strether thought of it serenely. “Yes; when you came back little Bilham

had shown me what’s expected of a gentleman. Little Bilham had lied

like one.”

“And like what you believed him?”

“Well,” said Strether, “it was but a technical lie—he classed the

attachment as virtuous. That was a view for which there was much to be

said—and the virtue came out for me hugely There was of course a great

deal of it. I got it full in the face, and I haven’t, you see, done

with it yet.”

“What I see, what I saw,” Maria returned, “is that you dressed up even

the virtue. You were wonderful—you were beautiful, as I’ve had the

honour of telling you before; but, if you wish really to know,” she

sadly confessed, “I never quite knew _where_ you were. There were

moments,” she explained, “when you struck me as grandly cynical; there

were others when you struck me as grandly vague.”

Her friend considered. “I had phases. I had flights.”

“Yes, but things must have a basis.”

“A basis seemed to me just what her beauty supplied.”

“Her beauty of person?”

“Well, her beauty of everything. The impression she makes. She has such

variety and yet such harmony.”

She considered him with one of her deep returns of indulgence—returns

out of all proportion to the irritations they flooded over. “You’re

complete.”

“You’re always too personal,” he good-humouredly said; “but that’s

precisely how I wondered and wandered.”

“If you mean,” she went on, “that she was from the first for you the

most charming woman in the world, nothing’s more simple. Only that was

an odd foundation.”

“For what I reared on it?”

“For what you didn’t!”

“Well, it was all not a fixed quantity. And it had for me—it has

still—such elements of strangeness. Her greater age than his, her

different world, traditions, association; her other opportunities,

liabilities, standards.”

His friend listened with respect to his enumeration of these

disparities; then she disposed of them at a stroke. “Those things are

nothing when a woman’s hit. It’s very awful. She was hit.”

Strether, on his side, did justice to that plea. “Oh of course I saw

she was hit. That she was hit was what we were busy with; that she was

hit was our great affair. But somehow I couldn’t think of her as down

in the dust. And as put there by _our_ little Chad!”

“Yet wasn’t ‘your’ little Chad just your miracle?”

Strether admitted it. “Of course I moved among miracles. It was all

phantasmagoric. But the great fact was that so much of it was none of

my business—as I saw my business. It isn’t even now.”

His companion turned away on this, and it might well have been yet

again with the sharpness of a fear of how little his philosophy could

bring her personally. “I wish _she_ could hear you!”

“Mrs. Newsome?”

“No—not Mrs. Newsome; since I understand you that it doesn’t matter now

what Mrs. Newsome hears. Hasn’t she heard everything?”

“Practically—yes.” He had thought a moment, but he went on. “You wish

Madame de Vionnet could hear me?”

“Madame de Vionnet.” She had come back to him. “She thinks just the

contrary of what you say. That you distinctly judge her.”

He turned over the scene as the two women thus placed together for him

seemed to give it. “She might have known—!”

“Might have known you don’t?” Miss Gostrey asked as he let it drop.

“She was sure of it at first,” she pursued as he said nothing; “she

took it for granted, at least, as any woman in her position would. But

after that she changed her mind; she believed you believed—”

“Well?”—he was curious.

“Why in her sublimity. And that belief had remained with her, I make

out, till the accident of the other day opened your eyes. For that it

did,” said Maria, “open them—”

“She can’t help”—he had taken it up—“being aware? No,” he mused; “I

suppose she thinks of that even yet.”

“Then they _were_ closed? There you are! However, if you see her as the

most charming woman in the world it comes to the same thing. And if

you’d like me to tell her that you do still so see her—!” Miss Gostrey,

in short, offered herself for service to the end.

It was an offer he could temporarily entertain; but he decided. “She

knows perfectly how I see her.”

“Not favourably enough, she mentioned to me, to wish ever to see her

again. She told me you had taken a final leave of her. She says you’ve

done with her.”

“So I have.”

Maria had a pause; then she spoke as if for conscience. “She wouldn’t

have done with _you_. She feels she has lost you—yet that she might

have been better for you.”

“Oh she has been quite good enough!” Strether laughed.

“She thinks you and she might at any rate have been friends.”

“We might certainly. That’s just”—he continued to laugh—“why I’m

going.”

It was as if Maria could feel with this then at last that she had done

her best for each. But she had still an idea. “Shall I tell her that?”

“No. Tell her nothing.”

“Very well then.” To which in the next breath Miss Gostrey added: “Poor

dear thing!”

Her friend wondered; then with raised eyebrows: “Me?”

“Oh no. Marie de Vionnet.”

He accepted the correction, but he wondered still. “Are you so sorry

for her as that?”

It made her think a moment—made her even speak with a smile. But she

didn’t really retract. “I’m sorry for us all!”

IV

He was to delay no longer to re-establish communication with Chad, and

we have just seen that he had spoken to Miss Gostrey of this intention

on hearing from her of the young man’s absence. It was not moreover

only the assurance so given that prompted him; it was the need of

causing his conduct to square with another profession still—the motive

he had described to her as his sharpest for now getting away. If he was

to get away because of some of the relations involved in staying, the

cold attitude toward them might look pedantic in the light of lingering

on. He must do both things; he must see Chad, but he must go. The more

he thought of the former of these duties the more he felt himself make

a subject of insistence of the latter. They were alike intensely

present to him as he sat in front of a quiet little café into which he

had dropped on quitting Maria’s entresol. The rain that had spoiled his

evening with her was over; for it was still to him as if his evening

_had_ been spoiled—though it mightn’t have been wholly the rain. It was

late when he left the café, yet not too late; he couldn’t in any case

go straight to bed, and he would walk round by the Boulevard

Malesherbes—rather far round—on his way home. Present enough always was

the small circumstance that had originally pressed for him the spring

of so big a difference—the accident of little Bilham’s appearance on

the balcony of the mystic troisième at the moment of his first visit,

and the effect of it on his sense of what was then before him. He

recalled his watch, his wait, and the recognition that had proceeded

from the young stranger, that had played frankly into the air and had

presently brought him up—things smoothing the way for his first

straight step. He had since had occasion, a few times, to pass the

house without going in; but he had never passed it without again

feeling how it had then spoken to him. He stopped short to-night on

coming to sight of it: it was as if his last day were oddly copying his

first. The windows of Chad’s apartment were open to the balcony—a pair

of them lighted; and a figure that had come out and taken up little

Bilham’s attitude, a figure whose cigarette-spark he could see leaned

on the rail and looked down at him. It denoted however no reappearance

of his younger friend; it quickly defined itself in the tempered

darkness as Chad’s more solid shape; so that Chad’s was the attention

that after he had stepped forward into the street and signalled, he

easily engaged; Chad’s was the voice that, sounding into the night with

promptness and seemingly with joy, greeted him and called him up.

That the young man had been visible there just in this position

expressed somehow for Strether that, as Maria Gostrey had reported, he

had been absent and silent; and our friend drew breath on each

landing—the lift, at that hour, having ceased to work—before the

implications of the fact. He had been for a week intensely away, away

to a distance and alone; but he was more back than ever, and the

attitude in which Strether had surprised him was something more than a

return—it was clearly a conscious surrender. He had arrived but an hour

before, from London, from Lucerne, from Homburg, from no matter

where—though the visitor’s fancy, on the staircase, liked to fill it

out; and after a bath, a talk with Baptiste and a supper of light cold

clever French things, which one could see the remains of there in the

circle of the lamp, pretty and ultra-Parisian, he had come into the air

again for a smoke, was occupied at the moment of Strether’s approach in

what might have been called taking up his life afresh. His life, his

life!—Strether paused anew, on the last flight, at this final rather

breathless sense of what Chad’s life was doing with Chad’s mother’s

emissary. It was dragging him, at strange hours, up the staircases of

the rich; it was keeping him out of bed at the end of long hot days; it

was transforming beyond recognition the simple, subtle, conveniently

uniform thing that had anciently passed with him for a life of his own.

Why should it concern him that Chad was to be fortified in the pleasant

practice of smoking on balconies, of supping on salads, of feeling his

special conditions agreeably reaffirm themselves, of finding

reassurance in comparisons and contrasts? There was no answer to such a

question but that he was still practically committed—he had perhaps

never yet so much known it. It made him feel old, and he would buy his

railway-ticket—feeling, no doubt, older—the next day; but he had

meanwhile come up four flights, counting the entresol, at midnight and

without a lift, for Chad’s life. The young man, hearing him by this

time, and with Baptiste sent to rest, was already at the door; so that

Strether had before him in full visibility the cause in which he was

labouring and even, with the troisième fairly gained, panting a little.

Chad offered him, as always, a welcome in which the cordial and the

formal—so far as the formal was the respectful—handsomely met; and

after he had expressed a hope that he would let him put him up for the

night Strether was in full possession of the key, as it might have been

called, to what had lately happened. If he had just thought of himself

as old Chad was at sight of him thinking of him as older: he wanted to

put him up for the night just because he was ancient and weary. It

could never be said the tenant of these quarters wasn’t nice to him; a

tenant who, if he might indeed now keep him, was probably prepared to

work it all still more thoroughly. Our friend had in fact the

impression that with the minimum of encouragement Chad would propose to

keep him indefinitely; an impression in the lap of which one of his own

possibilities seemed to sit. Madame de Vionnet had wished him to

stay—so why didn’t that happily fit? He could enshrine himself for the

rest of his days in his young host’s _chambre d’ami_ and draw out these

days at his young host’s expense: there could scarce be greater logical

expression of the countenance he had been moved to give. There was

literally a minute—it was strange enough—during which he grasped the

idea that as he _was_ acting, as he could only act, he was

inconsistent. The sign that the inward forces he had obeyed really hung

together would be that—in default always of another career—he should

promote the good cause by mounting guard on it. These things, during

his first minutes, came and went; but they were after all practically

disposed of as soon as he had mentioned his errand. He had come to say

good-bye—yet that was only a part; so that from the moment Chad

accepted his farewell the question of a more ideal affirmation gave way

to something else. He proceeded with the rest of his business. “You’ll

be a brute, you know—you’ll be guilty of the last infamy—if you ever

forsake her.”

That, uttered there at the solemn hour, uttered in the place that was

full of her influence, was the rest of his business; and when once he

had heard himself say it he felt that his message had never before been

spoken. It placed his present call immediately on solid ground, and the

effect of it was to enable him quite to play with what we have called

the key. Chad showed no shade of embarrassment, but had none the less

been troubled for him after their meeting in the country; had had fears

and doubts on the subject of his comfort. He was disturbed, as it were,

only _for_ him, and had positively gone away to ease him off, to let

him down—if it wasn’t indeed rather to screw him up—the more gently.

Seeing him now fairly jaded he had come, with characteristic good

humour, all the way to meet him, and what Strether thereupon supremely

made out was that he would abound for him to the end in conscientious

assurances. This was what was between them while the visitor remained;

so far from having to go over old ground he found his entertainer keen

to agree to everything. It couldn’t be put too strongly for him that

he’d be a brute. “Oh rather!—if I should do anything of _that_ sort. I

hope you believe I really feel it.”

“I want it,” said Strether, “to be my last word of all to you. I can’t

say more, you know; and I don’t see how I can do more, in every way,

than I’ve done.”

Chad took this, almost artlessly, as a direct allusion. “You’ve seen

her?”

“Oh yes—to say good-bye. And if I had doubted the truth of what I tell

you—”

“She’d have cleared up your doubt?” Chad understood—“rather”—again! It

even kept him briefly silent. But he made that up. “She must have been

wonderful.”

“She _was_,” Strether candidly admitted—all of which practically told

as a reference to the conditions created by the accident of the

previous week.

They appeared for a little to be looking back at it; and that came out

still more in what Chad next said. “I don’t know what you’ve really

thought, all along; I never did know—for anything, with you, seemed to

be possible. But of course—of course—” Without confusion, quite with

nothing but indulgence, he broke down, he pulled up. “After all, you

understand. I spoke to you originally only as I _had_ to speak. There’s

only one way—isn’t there?—about such things. However,” he smiled with a

final philosophy, “I see it’s all right.”

Strether met his eyes with a sense of multiplying thoughts. What was it

that made him at present, late at night and after journeys, so

renewedly, so substantially young? Strether saw in a moment what it

was—it was that he was younger again than Madame de Vionnet. He himself

said immediately none of the things that he was thinking; he said

something quite different. “You _have_ really been to a distance?”

“I’ve been to England.” Chad spoke cheerfully and promptly, but gave no

further account of it than to say: “One must sometimes get off.”

Strether wanted no more facts—he only wanted to justify, as it were,

his question. “Of course you do as you’re free to do. But I hope, this

time, that you didn’t go for _me_.”

“For very shame at bothering you really too much? My dear man,” Chad

laughed, “what _wouldn’t_ I do for you?”

Strether’s easy answer for this was that it was a disposition he had

exactly come to profit by. “Even at the risk of being in your way I’ve

waited on, you know, for a definite reason.”

Chad took it in. “Oh yes—for us to make if possible a still better

impression.” And he stood there happily exhaling his full general

consciousness. “I’m delighted to gather that you feel we’ve made it.”

There was a pleasant irony in the words, which his guest, preoccupied

and keeping to the point, didn’t take up. “If I had my sense of wanting

the rest of the time—the time of their being still on this side,” he

continued to explain—“I know now why I wanted it.”

He was as grave, as distinct, as a demonstrator before a blackboard,

and Chad continued to face him like an intelligent pupil. “You wanted

to have been put through the whole thing.”

Strether again, for a moment, said nothing; he turned his eyes away,

and they lost themselves, through the open window, in the dusky outer

air. “I shall learn from the Bank here where they’re now having their

letters, and my last word, which I shall write in the morning and which

they’re expecting as my ultimatum, will so immediately reach them.” The

light of his plural pronoun was sufficiently reflected in his

companion’s face as he again met it; and he completed his

demonstration. He pursued indeed as if for himself. “Of course I’ve

first to justify what I shall do.”

“You’re justifying it beautifully!” Chad declared.

“It’s not a question of advising you not to go,” Strether said, “but of

absolutely preventing you, if possible, from so much as thinking of it.

Let me accordingly appeal to you by all you hold sacred.”

Chad showed a surprise. “What makes you think me capable—?”

“You’d not only be, as I say, a brute; you’d be,” his companion went on

in the same way, “a criminal of the deepest dye.”

Chad gave a sharper look, as if to gauge a possible suspicion. “I don’t

know what should make you think I’m tired of her.”

Strether didn’t quite know either, and such impressions, for the

imaginative mind, were always too fine, too floating, to produce on the

spot their warrant. There was none the less for him, in the very manner

of his host’s allusion to satiety as a thinkable motive, a slight

breath of the ominous. “I feel how much more she can do for you. She

hasn’t done it all yet. Stay with her at least till she has.”

“And leave her _then?_”

Chad had kept smiling, but its effect in Strether was a shade of

dryness. “Don’t leave her _before_. When you’ve got all that can be

got—I don’t say,” he added a trifle grimly. “That will be the proper

time. But as, for you, from such a woman, there will always be

something to be got, my remark’s not a wrong to her.” Chad let him go

on, showing every decent deference, showing perhaps also a candid

curiosity for this sharper accent. “I remember you, you know, as you

were.”

“An awful ass, wasn’t I?”

The response was as prompt as if he had pressed a spring; it had a

ready abundance at which he even winced; so that he took a moment to

meet it. “You certainly then wouldn’t have seemed worth all you’ve let

me in for. You’ve defined yourself better. Your value has quintupled.”

“Well then, wouldn’t that be enough—?”

Chad had risked it jocosely, but Strether remained blank. “Enough?”

“If one _should_ wish to live on one’s accumulations?” After which,

however, as his friend appeared cold to the joke, the young man as

easily dropped it. “Of course I really never forget, night or day, what

I owe her. I owe her everything. I give you my word of honour,” he

frankly rang out, “that I’m not a bit tired of her.” Strether at this

only gave him a stare: the way youth could express itself was again and

again a wonder. He meant no harm, though he might after all be capable

of much; yet he spoke of being “tired” of her almost as he might have

spoken of being tired of roast mutton for dinner. “She has never for a

moment yet bored me—never been wanting, as the cleverest women

sometimes are, in tact. She has never talked about her tact—as even

they too sometimes talk; but she has always had it. She has never had

it more”—he handsomely made the point—“than just lately.” And he

scrupulously went further. “She has never been anything I could call a

burden.”

Strether for a moment said nothing; then he spoke gravely, with his

shade of dryness deepened. “Oh if you didn’t do her justice—!”

“I _should_ be a beast, eh?”

Strether devoted no time to saying what he would be; _that_, visibly,

would take them far. If there was nothing for it but to repeat,

however, repetition was no mistake. “You owe her everything—very much

more than she can ever owe you. You’ve in other words duties to her, of

the most positive sort; and I don’t see what other duties—as the others

are presented to you—can be held to go before them.”

Chad looked at him with a smile. “And you know of course about the

others, eh?—since it’s you yourself who have done the presenting.”

“Much of it—yes—and to the best of my ability. But not all—from the

moment your sister took my place.”

“She didn’t,” Chad returned. “Sally took a place, certainly; but it was

never, I saw from the first moment, to be yours. No one—with us—will

ever take yours. It wouldn’t be possible.”

“Ah of course,” sighed Strether, “I knew it. I believe you’re right. No

one in the world, I imagine, was ever so portentously solemn. There I

am,” he added with another sigh, as if weary enough, on occasion, of

this truth. “I was made so.”

Chad appeared for a little to consider the way he was made; he might

for this purpose have measured him up and down. His conclusion favoured

the fact. “_You_ have never needed any one to make you better. There

has never been any one good enough. They couldn’t,” the young man

declared.

His friend hesitated. “I beg your pardon. They _have_.”

Chad showed, not without amusement, his doubt. “Who then?”

Strether—though a little dimly—smiled at him. “Women—too.”

“‘Two’?”—Chad stared and laughed. “Oh I don’t believe, for such work,

in any more than one! So you’re proving too much. And what _is_

beastly, at all events,” he added, “is losing you.”

Strether had set himself in motion for departure, but at this he

paused. “Are you afraid?”

“Afraid—?”

“Of doing wrong. I mean away from my eye.” Before Chad could speak,

however, he had taken himself up. “I _am_, certainly,” he laughed,

“prodigious.”

“Yes, you spoil us for all the stupid—!” This might have been, on

Chad’s part, in its extreme emphasis, almost too freely extravagant;

but it was full, plainly enough, of the intention of comfort, it

carried with it a protest against doubt and a promise, positively, of

performance. Picking up a hat in the vestibule he came out with his

friend, came downstairs, took his arm, affectionately, as to help and

guide him, treating him if not exactly as aged and infirm, yet as a

noble eccentric who appealed to tenderness, and keeping on with him,

while they walked, to the next corner and the next. “You needn’t tell

me, you needn’t tell me!”—this again as they proceeded, he wished to

make Strether feel. What he needn’t tell him was now at last, in the

geniality of separation, anything at all it concerned him to know. He

knew, up to the hilt—that really came over Chad; he understood, felt,

recorded his vow; and they lingered on it as they had lingered in their

walk to Strether’s hotel the night of their first meeting. The latter

took, at this hour, all he could get; he had given all he had had to

give; he was as depleted as if he had spent his last sou. But there was

just one thing for which, before they broke off, Chad seemed disposed

slightly to bargain. His companion needn’t, as he said, tell him, but

he might himself mention that he had been getting some news of the art

of advertisement. He came out quite suddenly with this announcement

while Strether wondered if his revived interest were what had taken

him, with strange inconsequence, over to London. He appeared at all

events to have been looking into the question and had encountered a

revelation. Advertising scientifically worked presented itself thus as

the great new force. “It really does the thing, you know.”

They were face to face under the street-lamp as they had been the first

night, and Strether, no doubt, looked blank. “Affects, you mean, the

sale of the object advertised?”

“Yes—but affects it extraordinarily; really beyond what one had

supposed. I mean of course when it’s done as one makes out that in our

roaring age, it _can_ be done. I’ve been finding out a little, though

it doubtless doesn’t amount to much more than what you originally, so

awfully vividly—and all, very nearly, that first night—put before me.

It’s an art like another, and infinite like all the arts.” He went on

as if for the joke of it—almost as if his friend’s face amused him. “In

the hands, naturally, of a master. The right man must take hold. With

the right man to work it _c’est un monde_.”

Strether had watched him quite as if, there on the pavement without a

pretext, he had begun to dance a fancy step. “Is what you’re thinking

of that you yourself, in the case you have in mind, would be the right

man?”

Chad had thrown back his light coat and thrust each of his thumbs into

an armhole of his waistcoat; in which position his fingers played up

and down. “Why, what is he but what you yourself, as I say, took me for

when you first came out?”

Strether felt a little faint, but he coerced his attention. “Oh yes,

and there’s no doubt that, with your natural parts, you’d have much in

common with him. Advertising is clearly at this time of day the secret

of trade. It’s quite possible it will be open to you—giving the whole

of your mind to it—to make the whole place hum with you. Your mother’s

appeal is to the whole of your mind, and that’s exactly the strength of

her case.”

Chad’s fingers continued to twiddle, but he had something of a drop.

“Ah we’ve been through my mother’s case!”

“So I thought. Why then do you speak of the matter?”

“Only because it was part of our original discussion. To wind up where

we began, my interest’s purely platonic. There at any rate the fact

is—the fact of the possible. I mean the money in it.”

“Oh damn the money in it!” said Strether. And then as the young man’s

fixed smile seemed to shine out more strange: “Shall you give your

friend up for the money in it?”

Chad preserved his handsome grimace as well as the rest of his

attitude. “You’re not altogether—in your so great ‘solemnity’—kind.

Haven’t I been drinking you in—showing you all I feel you’re worth to

me? What have I done, what am I doing, but cleave to her to the death?

The only thing is,” he good-humouredly explained, “that one can’t but

have it before one, in the cleaving—the point where the death comes in.

Don’t be afraid for _that_. It’s pleasant to a fellow’s feelings,” he

developed, “to ‘size-up’ the bribe he applies his foot to.”

“Oh then if all you want’s a kickable surface the bribe’s enormous.”

“Good. Then there it goes!” Chad administered his kick with fantastic

force and sent an imaginary object flying. It was accordingly as if

they were once more rid of the question and could come back to what

really concerned him. “Of course I shall see you tomorrow.”

But Strether scarce heeded the plan proposed for this; he had still the

impression—not the slighter for the simulated kick—of an irrelevant

hornpipe or jig. “You’re restless.”

“Ah,” returned Chad as they parted, “you’re exciting.”

V

He had, however, within two days, another separation to face. He had

sent Maria Gostrey a word early, by hand, to ask if he might come to

breakfast; in consequence of which, at noon, she awaited him in the

cool shade of her little Dutch-looking dining-room. This retreat was at

the back of the house, with a view of a scrap of old garden that had

been saved from modern ravage; and though he had on more than one other

occasion had his legs under its small and peculiarly polished table of

hospitality, the place had never before struck him as so sacred to

pleasant knowledge, to intimate charm, to antique order, to a neatness

that was almost august. To sit there was, as he had told his hostess

before, to see life reflected for the time in ideally kept pewter;

which was somehow becoming, improving to life, so that one’s eyes were

held and comforted. Strether’s were comforted at all events now—and the

more that it was the last time—with the charming effect, on the board

bare of a cloth and proud of its perfect surface, of the small old

crockery and old silver, matched by the more substantial pieces happily

disposed about the room. The specimens of vivid Delf, in particular had

the dignity of family portraits; and it was in the midst of them that

our friend resignedly expressed himself. He spoke even with a certain

philosophic humour. “There’s nothing more to wait for; I seem to have

done a good day’s work. I’ve let them have it all round. I’ve seen

Chad, who has been to London and come back. He tells me I’m ‘exciting,’

and I seem indeed pretty well to have upset every one. I’ve at any rate

excited _him_. He’s distinctly restless.”

“You’ve excited _me_,” Miss Gostrey smiled. “_I’m_ distinctly

restless.”

“Oh you were that when I found you. It seems to me I’ve rather got you

out of it. What’s this,” he asked as he looked about him, “but a haunt

of ancient peace?”

“I wish with all my heart,” she presently replied, “I could make you

treat it as a haven of rest.” On which they fronted each other, across

the table, as if things unuttered were in the air.

Strether seemed, in his way, when he next spoke, to take some of them

up. “It wouldn’t give me—that would be the trouble—what it will, no

doubt, still give you. I’m not,” he explained, leaning back in his

chair, but with his eyes on a small ripe round melon—“in real harmony

with what surrounds me. You _are_. I take it too hard. You _don’t_. It

makes—that’s what it comes to in the end—a fool of me.” Then at a

tangent, “What has he been doing in London?” he demanded.

“Ah one may go to London,” Maria laughed. “You know _I_ did.”

Yes—he took the reminder. “And you brought _me_ back.” He brooded there

opposite to her, but without gloom. “Whom has Chad brought? He’s full

of ideas. And I wrote to Sarah,” he added, “the first thing this

morning. So I’m square. I’m ready for them.”

She neglected certain parts of this speech in the interest of others.

“Marie said to me the other day that she felt him to have the makings

of an immense man of business.”

“There it is. He’s the son of his father!”

“But _such_ a father!”

“Ah just the right one from that point of view! But it isn’t his father

in him,” Strether added, “that troubles me.”

“What is it then?” He came back to his breakfast; he partook presently

of the charming melon, which she liberally cut for him; and it was only

after this that he met her question. Then moreover it was but to remark

that he’d answer her presently. She waited, she watched, she served him

and amused him, and it was perhaps with this last idea that she soon

reminded him of his having never even yet named to her the article

produced at Woollett. “Do you remember our talking of it in London—that

night at the play?” Before he could say yes, however, she had put it to

him for other matters. Did he remember, did he remember—this and that

of their first days? He remembered everything, bringing up with humour

even things of which she professed no recollection, things she

vehemently denied; and falling back above all on the great interest of

their early time, the curiosity felt by both of them as to where he

would “come out.” They had so assumed it was to be in some wonderful

place—they had thought of it as so very _much_ out. Well, that was

doubtless what it had been—since he had come out just there. He was

out, in truth, as far as it was possible to be, and must now rather

bethink himself of getting in again. He found on the spot the image of

his recent history; he was like one of the figures of the old clock at

Berne. _They_ came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged along their

little course in the public eye, and went in on the other side. He too

had jigged his little course—him too a modest retreat awaited. He

offered now, should she really like to know, to name the great product

of Woollett. It would be a great commentary on everything. At this she

stopped him off; she not only had no wish to know, but she wouldn’t

know for the world. She had done with the products of Woollett—for all

the good she had got from them. She desired no further news of them,

and she mentioned that Madame de Vionnet herself had, to her knowledge,

lived exempt from the information he was ready to supply. She had never

consented to receive it, though she would have taken it, under stress,

from Mrs. Pocock. But it was a matter about which Mrs. Pocock appeared

to have had little to say—never sounding the word—and it didn’t signify

now. There was nothing clearly for Maria Gostrey that signified

now—save one sharp point, that is, to which she came in time. “I don’t

know whether it’s before you as a possibility that, left to himself,

Mr. Chad may after all go back. I judge that it _is_ more or less so

before you, from what you just now said of him.”

Her guest had his eyes on her, kindly but attentively, as if foreseeing

what was to follow this. “I don’t think it will be for the money.” And

then as she seemed uncertain: “I mean I don’t believe it will be for

that he’ll give her up.”

“Then he _will_ give her up?”

Strether waited a moment, rather slow and deliberate now, drawing out a

little this last soft stage, pleading with her in various suggestive

and unspoken ways for patience and understanding. “What were you just

about to ask me?”

“Is there anything he can do that would make you patch it up?”

“With Mrs. Newsome?”

Her assent, as if she had had a delicacy about sounding the name, was

only in her face; but she added with it: “Or is there anything he can

do that would make _her_ try it?”

“To patch it up with me?” His answer came at last in a conclusive

headshake. “There’s nothing any one can do. It’s over. Over for both of

us.”

Maria wondered, seemed a little to doubt. “Are you so sure for her?”

“Oh yes—sure now. Too much has happened. I’m different for her.”

She took it in then, drawing a deeper breath. “I see. So that as she’s

different for _you_—”

“Ah but,” he interrupted, “she’s not.” And as Miss Gostrey wondered

again: “She’s the same. She’s more than ever the same. But I do what I

didn’t before—I _see_ her.”

He spoke gravely and as if responsibly—since he had to pronounce; and

the effect of it was slightly solemn, so that she simply exclaimed

“Oh!” Satisfied and grateful, however, she showed in her own next words

an acceptance of his statement. “What then do you go home to?”

He had pushed his plate a little away, occupied with another side of

the matter; taking refuge verily in that side and feeling so moved that

he soon found himself on his feet. He was affected in advance by what

he believed might come from her, and he would have liked to forestall

it and deal with it tenderly; yet in the presence of it he wished still

more to be—though as smoothly as possible—deterrent and conclusive. He

put her question by for the moment; he told her more about Chad. “It

would have been impossible to meet me more than he did last night on

the question of the infamy of not sticking to her.”

“Is that what you called it for him—‘infamy’?”

“Oh rather! I described to him in detail the base creature he’d be, and

he quite agrees with me about it.”

“So that it’s really as if you had nailed him?”

“Quite really as if—! I told him I should curse him.”

“Oh,” she smiled, “you _have_ done it.” And then having thought again:

“You _can’t_ after that propose—!” Yet she scanned his face.

“Propose again to Mrs. Newsome?”

She hesitated afresh, but she brought it out. “I’ve never believed, you

know, that you did propose. I always believed it was really she—and, so

far as that goes, I can understand it. What I mean is,” she explained,

“that with such a spirit—the spirit of curses!—your breach is past

mending. She has only to know what you’ve done to him never again to

raise a finger.”

“I’ve done,” said Strether, “what I could—one can’t do more. He

protests his devotion and his horror. But I’m not sure I’ve saved him.

He protests too much. He asks how one can dream of his being tired. But

he has all life before him.”

Maria saw what he meant. “He’s formed to please.”

“And it’s our friend who has formed him.” Strether felt in it the

strange irony.

“So it’s scarcely his fault!”

“It’s at any rate his danger. I mean,” said Strether, “it’s hers. But

she knows it.”

“Yes, she knows it. And is your idea,” Miss Gostrey asked, “that there

was some other woman in London?”

“Yes. No. That is I _have_ no ideas. I’m afraid of them. I’ve done with

them.” And he put out his hand to her. “Good-bye.”

It brought her back to her unanswered question. “To what do you go

home?”

“I don’t know. There will always be something.”

“To a great difference,” she said as she kept his hand.

“A great difference—no doubt. Yet I shall see what I can make of it.”

“Shall you make anything so good—?” But, as if remembering what Mrs.

Newsome had done, it was as far as she went.

He had sufficiently understood. “So good as this place at this moment?

So good as what _you_ make of everything you touch?” He took a moment

to say, for, really and truly, what stood about him there in her

offer—which was as the offer of exquisite service, of lightened care,

for the rest of his days—might well have tempted. It built him softly

round, it roofed him warmly over, it rested, all so firm, on selection.

And what ruled selection was beauty and knowledge. It was awkward, it

was almost stupid, not to seem to prize such things; yet, none the

less, so far as they made his opportunity they made it only for a

moment. She’d moreover understand—she always understood.

That indeed might be, but meanwhile she was going on. “There’s nothing,

you know, I wouldn’t do for you.”

“Oh yes—I know.”

“There’s nothing,” she repeated, “in all the world.”

“I know. I know. But all the same I must go.” He had got it at last.

“To be right.”

“To be right?”

She had echoed it in vague deprecation, but he felt it already clear

for her. “That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole

affair, to have got anything for myself.”

She thought. “But with your wonderful impressions you’ll have got a

great deal.”

“A great deal”—he agreed. “But nothing like _you_. It’s you who would

make me wrong!”

Honest and fine, she couldn’t greatly pretend she didn’t see it. Still

she could pretend just a little. “But why should you be so dreadfully

right?”

“That’s the way that—if I must go—you yourself would be the first to

want me. And I can’t do anything else.”

So then she had to take it, though still with her defeated protest. “It

isn’t so much your _being_ ‘right’—it’s your horrible sharp eye for

what makes you so.”

“Oh but you’re just as bad yourself. You can’t resist me when I point

that out.”

She sighed it at last all comically, all tragically, away. “I can’t

indeed resist you.”

“Then there we are!” said Strether.