It really looked true moreover from the way Chad was to behave after
this.  He was full of attentions to his mother's ambassador; in spite
of which, all the while, the latter's other relations rather remarkably
contrived to assert themselves.  Strether's sittings pen in hand with
Mrs. Newsome up in his own room were broken, yet they were richer; and
they were more than ever interspersed with the hours in which he
reported himself, in a different fashion, but with scarce less
earnestness and fulness, to Maria Gostrey.  Now that, as he would have
expressed it, he had really something to talk about he found himself,
in respect to any oddity that might reside for him in the double
connexion, at once more aware and more indifferent.  He had been fine
to Mrs. Newsome about his useful friend, but it had begun to haunt his
imagination that Chad, taking up again for her benefit a pen too long
disused, might possibly be finer.  It wouldn't at all do, he saw, that
anything should come up for him at Chad's hand but what specifically
was to have come; the greatest divergence from which would be precisely
the element of any lubrication of their intercourse by levity It was
accordingly to forestall such an accident that he frankly put before
the young man the several facts, just as they had occurred, of his
funny alliance.  He spoke of these facts, pleasantly and obligingly, as
"the whole story," and felt that he might qualify the alliance as funny
if he remained sufficiently grave about it.  He flattered himself that
he even exaggerated the wild freedom of his original encounter with the
wonderful lady; he was scrupulously definite about the absurd
conditions in which they had made acquaintance--their having picked
each other up almost in the street; and he had (finest inspiration of
all!) a conception of carrying the war into the enemy's country by
showing surprise at the enemy's ignorance.

He had always had a notion that this last was the grand style of
fighting; the greater therefore the reason for it, as he couldn't
remember that he had ever before fought in the grand style.  Every one,
according to this, knew Miss Gostrey:  how came it Chad didn't know
her?  The difficulty, the impossibility, was really to escape it;
Strether put on him, by what he took for granted, the burden of proof
of the contrary.  This tone was so far successful as that Chad quite
appeared to recognise her as a person whose fame had reached him, but
against his acquaintance with whom much mischance had worked.  He made
the point at the same time that his social relations, such as they
could be called, were perhaps not to the extent Strether supposed with
the rising flood of their compatriots.  He hinted at his having more
and more given way to a different principle of selection; the moral of
which seemed to be that he went about little in the "colony."  For the
moment certainly he had quite another interest.  It was deep, what he
understood, and Strether, for himself, could only so observe it. He
couldn't see as yet how deep.  Might he not all too soon! For there was
really too much of their question that Chad had already committed
himself to liking.  He liked, to begin with, his prospective
stepfather; which was distinctly what had not been on the cards.  His
hating him was the untowardness for which Strether had been best
prepared; he hadn't expected the boy's actual form to give him more to
do than his imputed.  It gave him more through suggesting that he must
somehow make up to himself for not being sure he was sufficiently
disagreeable.  That had really been present to him as his only way to
be sure he was sufficiently thorough.  The point was that if Chad's
tolerance of his thoroughness were insincere, were but the best of
devices for gaining time, it none the less did treat everything as
tacitly concluded.

That seemed at the end of ten days the upshot of the abundant, the
recurrent talk through which Strether poured into him all it concerned
him to know, put him in full possession of facts and figures.  Never
cutting these colloquies short by a minute, Chad behaved, looked and
spoke as if he were rather heavily, perhaps even a trifle gloomily, but
none the less fundamentally and comfortably free.  He made no crude
profession of eagerness to yield, but he asked the most intelligent
questions, probed, at moments, abruptly, even deeper than his friend's
layer of information, justified by these touches the native estimate of
his latent stuff, and had in every way the air of trying to live,
reflectively, into the square bright picture.  He walked up and down in
front of this production, sociably took Strether's arm at the points at
which he stopped, surveyed it repeatedly from the right and from the
left, inclined a critical head to either quarter, and, while he puffed
a still more critical cigarette, animadverted to his companion on this
passage and that.  Strether sought relief--there were hours when he
required it--in repeating himself; it was in truth not to be blinked
that Chad had a way. The main question as yet was of what it was a way
TO.  It made vulgar questions no more easy; but that was unimportant
when all questions save those of his own asking had dropped.  That he
was free was answer enough, and it wasn't quite ridiculous that this
freedom should end by presenting itself as what was difficult to move.
His changed state, his lovely home, his beautiful things, his easy
talk, his very appetite for Strether, insatiable and, when all was
said, flattering--what were such marked matters all but the notes of
his freedom?  He had the effect of making a sacrifice of it just in
these handsome forms to his visitor; which was mainly the reason the
visitor was privately, for the time, a little out of countenance.
Strether was at this period again and again thrown back on a felt need
to remodel somehow his plan.  He fairly caught himself shooting rueful
glances, shy looks of pursuit, toward the embodied influence, the
definite adversary, who had by a stroke of her own failed him and on a
fond theory of whose palpable presence he had, under Mrs. Newsome's
inspiration, altogether proceeded.  He had once or twice, in secret,
literally expressed the irritated wish that SHE would come out and find
her.

He couldn't quite yet force it upon Woollett that such a career, such a
perverted young life, showed after all a certain plausible side, DID in
the case before them flaunt something like an impunity for the social
man; but he could at least treat himself to the statement that would
prepare him for the sharpest echo. This echo--as distinct over there in
the dry thin air as some shrill "heading" above a column of
print--seemed to reach him even as he wrote.  "He says there's no
woman," he could hear Mrs. Newsome report, in capitals almost of
newspaper size, to Mrs. Pocock; and he could focus in Mrs. Pocock the
response of the reader of the journal.  He could see in the younger
lady's face the earnestness of her attention and catch the full
scepticism of her but slightly delayed "What is there then?"  Just so
he could again as little miss the mother's clear decision:  "There's
plenty of disposition, no doubt, to pretend there isn't."  Strether
had, after posting his letter, the whole scene out; and it was a scene
during which, coming and going, as befell, he kept his eye not least
upon the daughter.  He had his fine sense of the conviction Mrs. Pocock
would take occasion to reaffirm--a conviction bearing, as he had from
the first deeply divined it to bear, on Mr. Strether's essential
inaptitude.  She had looked him in his conscious eyes even before he
sailed, and that she didn't believe HE would find the woman had been
written in her book. Hadn't she at the best but a scant faith in
his ability to find women? It wasn't even as if he had found her
mother--so much more, to her discrimination, had her mother performed
the finding.  Her mother had, in a case her private judgement of which
remained educative of Mrs. Pocock's critical sense, found the man.  The
man owed his unchallenged state, in general, to the fact that Mrs.
Newsome's discoveries were accepted at Woollett; but he knew in his
bones, our friend did, how almost irresistibly Mrs. Pocock would now be
moved to show what she thought of his own.  Give HER a free hand, would
be the moral, and the woman would soon be found.

His impression of Miss Gostrey after her introduction to Chad was
meanwhile an impression of a person almost unnaturally on her guard. He
struck himself as at first unable to extract from her what he wished;
though indeed OF what he wished at this special juncture he would
doubtless have contrived to make but a crude statement.  It sifted and
settled nothing to put to her, tout betement, as she often said, "Do
you like him, eh?"--thanks to his feeling it actually the least of his
needs to heap up the evidence in the young man's favour. He repeatedly
knocked at her door to let her have it afresh that Chad's
case--whatever else of minor interest it might yield--was first and
foremost a miracle almost monstrous.  It was the alteration of the
entire man, and was so signal an instance that nothing else, for the
intelligent observer, could--COULD it?--signify.  "It's a plot," he
declared--"there's more in it than meets the eye."  He gave the rein to
his fancy.  "It's a plant!"

His fancy seemed to please her.  "Whose then?"

"Well, the party responsible is, I suppose, the fate that waits for
one, the dark doom that rides.  What I mean is that with such elements
one can't count.  I've but my poor individual, my modest human means.
It isn't playing the game to turn on the uncanny.  All one's energy
goes to facing it, to tracking it.  One wants, confound it, don't you
see?" he confessed with a queer face--"one wants to enjoy anything so
rare.  Call it then life"--he puzzled it out--"call it poor dear old
life simply that springs the surprise. Nothing alters the fact that the
surprise is paralysing, or at any rate engrossing--all, practically,
hang it, that one sees, that one CAN see."

Her silences were never barren, nor even dull.  "Is that what you've
written home?"

He tossed it off.  "Oh dear, yes!"

She had another pause while, across her carpets, he had another walk.
"If you don't look out you'll have them straight over."

"Oh but I've said he'll go back."

"And WILL he?" Miss Gostrey asked.

The special tone of it made him, pulling up, look at her long. "What's
that but just the question I've spent treasures of patience and
ingenuity in giving you, by the sight of him--after everything had led
up--every facility to answer?  What is it but just the thing I came
here to-day to get out of you?  Will he?"

"No--he won't," she said at last.  "He's not free."

The air of it held him.  "Then you've all the while known--?"

"I've known nothing but what I've seen; and I wonder," she declared
with some impatience, "that you didn't see as much.  It was enough to be
with him there--"

"In the box?  Yes," he rather blankly urged.

"Well--to feel sure."

"Sure of what?"

She got up from her chair, at this, with a nearer approach than she had
ever yet shown to dismay at his dimness.  She even, fairly pausing for
it, spoke with a shade of pity.  "Guess!"

It was a shade, fairly, that brought a flush into his face; so that for
a moment, as they waited together, their difference was between them.
"You mean that just your hour with him told you so much of his story?
Very good; I'm not such a fool, on my side, as that I don't understand
you, or as that I didn't in some degree understand HIM.  That he has
done what he liked most isn't, among any of us, a matter the least in
dispute.  There's equally little question at this time of day of what
it is he does like most.  But I'm not talking," he reasonably
explained, "of any mere wretch he may still pick up.  I'm talking of
some person who in his present situation may have held her own, may
really have counted."

"That's exactly what I am!" said Miss Gostrey.  But she as quickly made
her point.  "I thought you thought--or that they think at
Woollett--that that's what mere wretches necessarily do.  Mere wretches
necessarily DON'T!" she declared with spirit.  "There must, behind
every appearance to the contrary, still be somebody--somebody who's not
a mere wretch, since we accept the miracle. What else but such a
somebody can such a miracle be?"

He took it in.  "Because the fact itself IS the woman?"

"A woman.  Some woman or other.  It's one of the things that HAVE to
be."

"But you mean then at least a good one."

"A good woman?"  She threw up her arms with a laugh.  "I should call
her excellent!"

"Then why does he deny her?"

Miss Gostrey thought a moment.  "Because she's too good to admit! Don't
you see," she went on, "how she accounts for him?"

Strether clearly, more and more, did see; yet it made him also see
other things.  "But isn't what we want that he shall account for HER?"

"Well, he does.  What you have before you is his way.  You must forgive
him if it isn't quite outspoken.  In Paris such debts are tacit."

Strether could imagine; but still--! "Even when the woman's good?"

Again she laughed out.  "Yes, and even when the man is! There's always
a caution in such cases," she more seriously explained--"for what it
may seem to show.  There's nothing that's taken as showing so much here
as sudden unnatural goodness."

"Ah then you're speaking now," Strether said, "of people who are NOT
nice."

"I delight," she replied, "in your classifications.  But do you want
me," she asked, "to give you in the matter, on this ground, the wisest
advice I'm capable of?  Don't consider her, don't judge her at all in
herself.  Consider her and judge her only in Chad."

He had the courage at least of his companion's logic.  "Because then I
shall like her?"  He almost looked, with his quick imagination as if he
already did, though seeing at once also the full extent of how little
it would suit his book.  "But is that what I came out for?"

She had to confess indeed that it wasn't.  But there was something
else.  "Don't make up your mind.  There are all sorts of things.  You
haven't seen him all."

This on his side Strether recognised; but his acuteness none the less
showed him the danger.  "Yes, but if the more I see the better he
seems?"

Well, she found something.  "That may be--but his disavowal of her
isn't, all the same, pure consideration.  There's a hitch."  She made
it out.  "It's the effort to sink her."

Strether winced at the image.  "To 'sink'--?"

"Well, I mean there's a struggle, and a part of it is just what he
hides.  Take time--that's the only way not to make some mistake that
you'll regret.  Then you'll see.  He does really want to shake her off."

Our friend had by this time so got into the vision that he almost
gasped.  "After all she has done for him?"

Miss Gostrey gave him a look which broke the next moment into a
wonderful smile.  "He's not so good as you think!"

They remained with him, these words, promising him, in their character
of warning, considerable help; but the support he tried to draw from
them found itself on each renewal of contact with Chad defeated by
something else.  What could it be, this disconcerting force, he asked
himself, but the sense, constantly renewed, that Chad WAS--quite in
fact insisted on being--as good as he thought?  It seemed somehow as if
he couldn't BUT be as good from the moment he wasn't as bad.  There was
a succession of days at all events when contact with him--and in its
immediate effect, as if it could produce no other--elbowed out of
Strether's consciousness everything but itself.  Little Bilham once
more pervaded the scene, but little Bilham became even in a higher
degree than he had originally been one of the numerous forms of the
inclusive relation; a consequence promoted, to our friend's sense, by
two or three incidents with which we have yet to make acquaintance.
Waymarsh himself, for the occasion, was drawn into the eddy; it
absolutely, though but temporarily, swallowed him down, and there were
days when Strether seemed to bump against him as a sinking swimmer
might brush a submarine object.  The fathomless medium held
them--Chad's manner was the fathomless medium; and our friend felt as
if they passed each other, in their deep immersion, with the round
impersonal eye of silent fish.  It was practically produced between
them that Waymarsh was giving him then his chance; and the shade of
discomfort that Strether drew from the allowance resembled not a little
the embarrassment he had known at school, as a boy, when members of his
family had been present at exhibitions.  He could perform before
strangers, but relatives were fatal, and it was now as if,
comparatively, Waymarsh were a relative.  He seemed to hear him say
"Strike up then!" and to enjoy a foretaste of conscientious domestic
criticism.  He HAD struck up, so far as he actually could; Chad knew by
this time in profusion what he wanted; and what vulgar violence did his
fellow pilgrim expect of him when he had really emptied his mind?  It
went somehow to and fro that what poor Waymarsh meant was "I told you
so--that you'd lose your immortal soul!" but it was also fairly
explicit that Strether had his own challenge and that, since they must
go to the bottom of things, he wasted no more virtue in watching Chad
than Chad wasted in watching him.  His dip for duty's sake--where was
it worse than Waymarsh's own?  For HE needn't have stopped resisting
and refusing, needn't have parleyed, at that rate, with the foe.

The strolls over Paris to see something or call somewhere were
accordingly inevitable and natural, and the late sessions in the
wondrous troisieme, the lovely home, when men dropped in and the
picture composed more suggestively through the haze of tobacco, of
music more or less good and of talk more or less polyglot, were on a
principle not to be distinguished from that of the mornings and the
afternoons.  Nothing, Strether had to recognise as he leaned back and
smoked, could well less resemble a scene of violence than even the
liveliest of these occasions.  They were occasions of discussion, none
the less, and Strether had never in his life heard so many opinions on
so many subjects.  There were opinions at Woollett, but only on three
or four.  The differences were there to match; if they were doubtless
deep, though few, they were quiet--they were, as might be said, almost
as shy as if people had been ashamed of them.  People showed little
diffidence about such things, on the other hand, in the Boulevard
Malesherbes, and were so far from being ashamed of them--or indeed of
anything else--that they often seemed to have invented them to avert
those agreements that destroy the taste of talk.  No one had ever done
that at Woollett, though Strether could remember times when he himself
had been tempted to it without quite knowing why.  He saw why at
present--he had but wanted to promote intercourse.

These, however, were but parenthetic memories, and the turn taken by
his affair on the whole was positively that if his nerves were on the
stretch it was because he missed violence.  When he asked himself if
none would then, in connexion with it, ever come at all, he might
almost have passed as wondering how to provoke it. It would be too
absurd if such a vision as THAT should have to be invoked for relief;
it was already marked enough as absurd that he should actually have
begun with flutters and dignities on the score of a single accepted
meal.  What sort of a brute had he expected Chad to be,
anyway?--Strether had occasion to make the enquiry but was careful to
make it in private.  He could himself, comparatively recent as it
was--it was truly but the fact of a few days since--focus his primal
crudity; but he would on the approach of an observer, as if handling an
illicit possession, have slipped the reminiscence out of sight.  There
were echoes of it still in Mrs. Newsome's letters, and there were
moments when these echoes made him exclaim on her want of tact.  He
blushed of course, at once, still more for the explanation than for the
ground of it:  it came to him in time to save his manners that she
couldn't at the best become tactful as quickly as he.  Her tact had to
reckon with the Atlantic Ocean, the General Post-Office and the
extravagant curve of the globe.  Chad had one day offered tea at the
Boulevard Malesherbes to a chosen few, a group again including the
unobscured Miss Barrace; and Strether had on coming out walked away
with the acquaintance whom in his letters to Mrs. Newsome he always
spoke of as the little artist-man.  He had had full occasion to mention
him as the other party, so oddly, to the only close personal alliance
observation had as yet detected in Chad's existence.  Little Bilham's
way this afternoon was not Strether's, but he had none the less kindly
come with him, and it was somehow a part of his kindness that as it had
sadly begun to rain they suddenly found themselves seated for
conversation at a cafe in which they had taken refuge.  He had passed
no more crowded hour in Chad's society than the one just ended; he had
talked with Miss Barrace, who had reproached him with not having come
to see her, and he had above all hit on a happy thought for causing
Waymarsh's tension to relax.  Something might possibly be extracted for
the latter from the idea of his success with that lady, whose quick
apprehension of what might amuse her had given Strether a free hand.
What had she meant if not to ask whether she couldn't help him with his
splendid encumbrance, and mightn't the sacred rage at any rate be kept
a little in abeyance by thus creating for his comrade's mind even in a
world of irrelevance the possibility of a relation?  What was it but a
relation to be regarded as so decorative and, in especial, on the
strength of it, to be whirled away, amid flounces and feathers, in a
coupe lined, by what Strether could make out, with dark blue brocade?
He himself had never been whirled away--never at least in a coupe and
behind a footman; he had driven with Miss Gostrey in cabs, with Mrs.
Pocock, a few times, in an open buggy, with Mrs. Newsome in a
four-seated cart and, occasionally up at the mountains, on a buckboard;
but his friend's actual adventure transcended his personal experience.
He now showed his companion soon enough indeed how inadequate, as a
general monitor, this last queer quantity could once more feel itself.

"What game under the sun is he playing?"  He signified the next moment
that his allusion was not to the fat gentleman immersed in dominoes on
whom his eyes had begun by resting, but to their host of the previous
hour, as to whom, there on the velvet bench, with a final collapse of
all consistency, he treated himself to the comfort of indiscretion.
"Where do you see him come out?"

Little Bilham, in meditation, looked at him with a kindness almost
paternal. "Don't you like it over here?"

Strether laughed out--for the tone was indeed droll; he let himself go.
"What has that to do with it?  The only thing I've any business to like
is to feel that I'm moving him.  That's why I ask you whether you
believe I AM?  Is the creature"--and he did his best to show that he
simply wished to ascertain--"honest?"

His companion looked responsible, but looked it through a small dim
smile.  "What creature do you mean?"

It was on this that they did have for a little a mute interchange. "Is
it untrue that he's free?  How then," Strether asked wondering "does he
arrange his life?"

"Is the creature you mean Chad himself?" little Bilham said.

Strether here, with a rising hope, just thought, "We must take one of
them at a time."  But his coherence lapsed.  "IS there some woman?  Of
whom he's really afraid of course I mean--or who does with him what she
likes."

"It's awfully charming of you," Bilham presently remarked, "not to have
asked me that before."

"Oh I'm not fit for my job!"

The exclamation had escaped our friend, but it made little Bilham more
deliberate.  "Chad's a rare case!" he luminously observed. "He's
awfully changed," he added.

"Then you see it too?"

"The way he has improved?  Oh yes--I think every one must see it. But
I'm not sure," said little Bilham, "that I didn't like him about as
well in his other state."

"Then this IS really a new state altogether?"

"Well," the young man after a moment returned, "I'm not sure he was
really meant by nature to be quite so good.  It's like the new edition
of an old book that one has been fond of--revised and amended, brought
up to date, but not quite the thing one knew and loved.  However that
may be at all events," he pursued, "I don't think, you know, that he's
really playing, as you call it, any game.  I believe he really wants to
go back and take up a career. He's capable of one, you know, that will
improve and enlarge him still more.  He won't then," little Bilham
continued to remark, "be my pleasant well-rubbed old-fashioned volume
at all.  But of course I'm beastly immoral.  I'm afraid it would be a
funny world altogether--a world with things the way I like them.  I
ought, I dare say, to go home and go into business myself.  Only I'd
simply rather die--simply.  And I've not the least difficulty in making
up my mind not to, and in knowing exactly why, and in defending my
ground against all comers.  All the same," he wound up, "I assure you I
don't say a word against it--for himself, I mean--to Chad.  I seem to
see it as much the best thing for him.  You see he's not happy."

"DO I?"--Strether stared.  "I've been supposing I see just the
opposite--an extraordinary case of the equilibrium arrived at and
assured."

"Oh there's a lot behind it."

"Ah there you are!" Strether exclaimed.  "That's just what I want to
get at.  You speak of your familiar volume altered out of recognition.
Well, who's the editor?"

Little Bilham looked before him a minute in silence.  "He ought to get
married.  THAT would do it.  And he wants to."

"Wants to marry her?"

Again little Bilham waited, and, with a sense that he had information,
Strether scarce knew what was coming.  "He wants to be free.  He isn't
used, you see," the young man explained in his lucid way, "to being so
good."

Strether hesitated.  "Then I may take it from you that he IS good?"

His companion matched his pause, but making it up with a quiet fulness.
"DO take it from me."

"Well then why isn't he free?  He swears to me he is, but meanwhile
does nothing--except of course that he's so kind to me--to prove it;
and couldn't really act much otherwise if he weren't.  My question to
you just now was exactly on this queer impression of his diplomacy:  as
if instead of really giving ground his line were to keep me on here and
set me a bad example."

As the half-hour meanwhile had ebbed Strether paid his score, and the
waiter was presently in the act of counting out change.  Our friend
pushed back to him a fraction of it, with which, after an emphatic
recognition, the personage in question retreated.  "You give too much,"
little Bilham permitted himself benevolently to observe.

"Oh I always give too much!" Strether helplessly sighed.  "But you
don't," he went on as if to get quickly away from the contemplation of
that doom, "answer my question.  Why isn't he free?"

Little Bilham had got up as if the transaction with the waiter had been
a signal, and had already edged out between the table and the divan.
The effect of this was that a minute later they had quitted the place,
the gratified waiter alert again at the open door. Strether had found
himself deferring to his companion's abruptness as to a hint that he
should be answered as soon as they were more isolated.  This happened
when after a few steps in the outer air they had turned the next comer.
There our friend had kept it up. "Why isn't he free if he's good?"

Little Bilham looked him full in the face.  "Because it's a virtuous
attachment."

This had settled the question so effectually for the time--that is for
the next few days--that it had given Strether almost a new lease of
life.  It must be added however that, thanks to his constant habit of
shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he
presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.
His imagination had in other words already dealt with his young
friend's assertion; of which it had made something that sufficiently
came out on the very next occasion of his seeing Maria Gostrey.  This
occasion moreover had been determined promptly by a new circumstance--a
circumstance he was the last man to leave her for a day in ignorance
of.  "When I said to him last night," he immediately began, "that
without some definite word from him now that will enable me to speak to
them over there of our sailing--or at least of mine, giving them some
sort of date--my responsibility becomes uncomfortable and my situation
awkward; when I said that to him what do you think was his reply?"  And
then as she this time gave it up:  "Why that he has two particular
friends, two ladies, mother and daughter, about to arrive in
Paris--coming back from an absence; and that he wants me so furiously
to meet them, know them and like them, that I shall oblige him by
kindly not bringing our business to a crisis till he has had a chance
to see them again himself.  Is that," Strether enquired, "the way he's
going to try to get off?  These are the people," he explained, "that he
must have gone down to see before I arrived.  They're the best friends
he has in the world, and they take more interest than any one else in
what concerns him.  As I'm his next best he sees a thousand reasons why
we should comfortably meet.  He hasn't broached the question sooner
because their return was uncertain--seemed in fact for the present
impossible.  But he more than intimates that--if you can believe
it--their desire to make my acquaintance has had to do with their
surmounting difficulties."

"They're dying to see you?" Miss Gostrey asked.

"Dying.  Of course," said Strether, "they're the virtuous attachment."
He had already told her about that--had seen her the day after his talk
with little Bilham; and they had then threshed out together the bearing
of the revelation.  She had helped him to put into it the logic in
which little Bilham had left it slightly deficient Strether hadn't
pressed him as to the object of the preference so unexpectedly
described; feeling in the presence of it, with one of his irrepressible
scruples, a delicacy from which he had in the quest of the quite other
article worked himself sufficiently free.  He had held off, as on a
small principle of pride, from permitting his young friend to mention a
name; wishing to make with this the great point that Chad's virtuous
attachments were none of his business.  He had wanted from the first
not to think too much of his dignity, but that was no reason for not
allowing it any little benefit that might turn up.  He had often enough
wondered to what degree his interference might pass for interested; so
that there was no want of luxury in letting it be seen whenever he
could that he didn't interfere.  That had of course at the same time
not deprived him of the further luxury of much private astonishment;
which however he had reduced to some order before communicating his
knowledge.  When he had done this at last it was with the remark that,
surprised as Miss Gostrey might, like himself, at first be, she would
probably agree with him on reflexion that such an account of the matter
did after all fit the confirmed appearances.  Nothing certainly, on all
the indications, could have been a greater change for him than a
virtuous attachment, and since they had been in search of the "word" as
the French called it, of that change, little Bilham's
announcement--though so long and so oddly delayed--would serve as well
as another. She had assured Strether in fact after a pause that the
more she thought of it the more it did serve; and yet her assurance
hadn't so weighed with him as that before they parted he hadn't
ventured to challenge her sincerity.  Didn't she believe the attachment
was virtuous?--he had made sure of her again with the aid of that
question. The tidings he brought her on this second occasion were
moreover such as would help him to make surer still.

She showed at first none the less as only amused.  "You say there are
two?  An attachment to them both then would, I suppose, almost
necessarily be innocent."

Our friend took the point, but he had his clue.  "Mayn't he be still in
the stage of not quite knowing which of them, mother or daughter, he
likes best?"

She gave it more thought.  "Oh it must be the daughter--at his age."

"Possibly.  Yet what do we know," Strether asked, "about hers?  She may
be old enough."

"Old enough for what?"

"Why to marry Chad.  That may be, you know, what they want.  And if
Chad wants it too, and little Bilham wants it, and even we, at a pinch,
could do with it--that is if she doesn't prevent repatriation--why it
may be plain sailing yet."

It was always the case for him in these counsels that each of his
remarks, as it came, seemed to drop into a deeper well.  He had at all
events to wait a moment to hear the slight splash of this one. "I don't
see why if Mr. Newsome wants to marry the young lady he hasn't already
done it or hasn't been prepared with some statement to you about it.
And if he both wants to marry her and is on good terms with them why
isn't he 'free'?"

Strether, responsively, wondered indeed.  "Perhaps the girl herself
doesn't like him."

"Then why does he speak of them to you as he does?"

Strether's mind echoed the question, but also again met it.  "Perhaps
it's with the mother he's on good terms."

"As against the daughter?"

"Well, if she's trying to persuade the daughter to consent to him, what
could make him like the mother more?  Only," Strether threw out, "why
shouldn't the daughter consent to him?"

"Oh," said Miss Gostrey, "mayn't it be that every one else isn't quite
so struck with him as you?"

"Doesn't regard him you mean as such an 'eligible' young man?  Is that
what I've come to?" he audibly and rather gravely sought to know.
"However," he went on, "his marriage is what his mother most
desires--that is if it will help.  And oughtn't ANY marriage to help?
They must want him"--he had already worked it out--"to be better off.
Almost any girl he may marry will have a direct interest in his taking
up his chances.  It won't suit HER at least that he shall miss them."

Miss Gostrey cast about.  "No--you reason well! But of course on the
other hand there's always dear old Woollett itself."

"Oh yes," he mused--"there's always dear old Woollett itself."

She waited a moment.  "The young lady mayn't find herself able to
swallow THAT quantity.  She may think it's paying too much; she may
weigh one thing against another."

Strether, ever restless in such debates, took a vague turn "It will all
depend on who she is.  That of course--the proved ability to deal with
dear old Woollett, since I'm sure she does deal with it--is what makes
so strongly for Mamie."

"Mamie?"

He stopped short, at her tone, before her; then, though seeing that it
represented not vagueness, but a momentary embarrassed fulness, let his
exclamation come.  "You surely haven't forgotten about Mamie!"

"No, I haven't forgotten about Mamie," she smiled.  "There's no doubt
whatever that there's ever so much to be said for her. Mamie's MY
girl!" she roundly declared.

Strether resumed for a minute his walk.  "She's really perfectly
lovely, you know.  Far prettier than any girl I've seen over here yet."

"That's precisely on what I perhaps most build."  And she mused a
moment in her friend's way.  "I should positively like to take her in
hand!"

He humoured the fancy, though indeed finally to deprecate it.  "Oh but
don't, in your zeal, go over to her! I need you most and can't, you
know, be left."

But she kept it up.  "I wish they'd send her out to me!"

"If they knew you," he returned, "they would."

"Ah but don't they?--after all that, as I've understood you you've told
them about me?"

He had paused before her again, but he continued his course "They
WILL--before, as you say, I've done."  Then he came out with the point
he had wished after all most to make.  "It seems to give away now his
game.  This is what he has been doing--keeping me along for.  He has
been waiting for them."

Miss Gostrey drew in her lips.  "You see a good deal in it!"

"I doubt if I see as much as you.  Do you pretend," he went on, "that
you don't see--?"

"Well, what?"--she pressed him as he paused.

"Why that there must be a lot between them--and that it has been going
on from the first; even from before I came."

She took a minute to answer.  "Who are they then--if it's so grave?"

"It mayn't be grave--it may be gay.  But at any rate it's marked. Only
I don't know," Strether had to confess, "anything about them. Their
name for instance was a thing that, after little Bilham's information,
I found it a kind of refreshment not to feel obliged to follow up."

"Oh," she returned, "if you think you've got off--!"

Her laugh produced in him a momentary gloom.  "I don't think I've got
off.  I only think I'm breathing for about five minutes.  I dare say I
SHALL have, at the best, still to get on."  A look, over it all, passed
between them, and the next minute he had come back to good humour.  "I
don't meanwhile take the smallest interest in their name."

"Nor in their nationality?--American, French, English, Polish?"

"I don't care the least little 'hang,'" he smiled, "for their
nationality.  It would be nice if they're Polish!" he almost
immediately added.

"Very nice indeed."  The transition kept up her spirits.  "So you see
you do care."

He did this contention a modified justice.  "I think I should if they
WERE Polish.  Yes," he thought--"there might be joy in THAT."

"Let us then hope for it."  But she came after this nearer to the
question.  "If the girl's of the right age of course the mother can't
be.  I mean for the virtuous attachment.  If the girl's twenty--and she
can't be less--the mother must be at least forty. So it puts the mother
out.  SHE'S too old for him."

Strether, arrested again, considered and demurred.  "Do you think so?
Do you think any one would be too old for him?  I'M eighty, and I'm too
young.  But perhaps the girl," he continued, "ISn't twenty. Perhaps
she's only ten--but such a little dear that Chad finds himself counting
her in as an attraction of the acquaintance. Perhaps she's only five.
Perhaps the mother's but five-and-twenty--a charming young widow."

Miss Gostrey entertained the suggestion.  "She IS a widow then?"

"I haven't the least idea!"  They once more, in spite of this
vagueness, exchanged a look--a look that was perhaps the longest yet.
It seemed in fact, the next thing, to require to explain itself; which
it did as it could.  "I only feel what I've told you--that he has some
reason."

Miss Gostrey's imagination had taken its own flight.  "Perhaps she's
NOT a widow."

Strether seemed to accept the possibility with reserve.  Still he
accepted it.  "Then that's why the attachment--if it's to her--is
virtuous."

But she looked as if she scarce followed.  "Why is it virtuous
if--since she's free--there's nothing to impose on it any condition?"

He laughed at her question.  "Oh I perhaps don't mean as virtuous as
THAT! Your idea is that it can be virtuous--in any sense worthy of the
name--only if she's NOT free?  But what does it become then," he asked,
"for HER?"

"Ah that's another matter."  He said nothing for a moment, and she soon
went on.  "I dare say you're right, at any rate, about Mr. Newsome's
little plan.  He HAS been trying you--has been reporting on you to
these friends."

Strether meanwhile had had time to think more.  "Then where's his
straightness?"

"Well, as we say, it's struggling up, breaking out, asserting itself as
it can.  We can be on the side, you see, of his straightness. We can
help him.  But he has made out," said Miss Gostrey, "that you'll do."

"Do for what?"

"Why, for THEM--for ces dames.  He has watched you, studied you, liked
you--and recognised that THEY must.  It's a great compliment to you, my
dear man; for I'm sure they're particular.  You came out for a success.
Well," she gaily declared, "you're having it!"

He took it from her with momentary patience and then turned abruptly
away.  It was always convenient to him that there were so many fine
things in her room to look at.  But the examination of two or three of
them appeared soon to have determined a speech that had little to do
with them.  "You don't believe in it!"

"In what?"

"In the character of the attachment.  In its innocence."

But she defended herself.  "I don't pretend to know anything about it.
Everything's possible.  We must see."

"See?" he echoed with a groan.  "Haven't we seen enough?"

"I haven't," she smiled.

"But do you suppose then little Bilham has lied?"

"You must find out."

It made him almost turn pale.  "Find out any MORE?"

He had dropped on a sofa for dismay; but she seemed, as she stood over
him, to have the last word.  "Wasn't what you came out for to find out
ALL?"

Book Fifth

Strether and Chad spend a good deal of time with one another, and Strether tells Chad about his friendship with Maria. In writing to Mrs. Newsome, Strether conveys his conviction that it is not a woman who keeps Chad from returning to Woollett, but he senses that he will not be fully believed. Strether tells Maria that he thinks Chad will return home, but she disagrees: "No -- he won't. . . . He's not free." Maria is convinced that Chad is deeply involved with a woman and cautions Strether not to pass judgment on the matter until he has met her. She also suggests that Chad is trying to disengage himself from this woman, to "shake her off." Strether is reluctant to believe this of Chad, but Maria tells him, "He's not so good as you think!" Strether talks with Little Bilham in hopes of finding out more about Chad's relationship. "Why isn't he free?" he asks. When Bilham replies that the relationship between Chad and the woman is a "virtuous attachment," Strether is immensely relieved. Later, when Strether asks Chad for some definite word on Chad's plans to return to Woollett, the young man announces that "two particular friends" of his, a mother and daughter, are arriving in Paris and want to see Strether. Maria and Strether know that one of these women is the object of their speculations, but they cannot agree whether it is the mother or daughter. They also discuss the possibility that Bilham has not been truthful about the nature of Chad's relations with the woman.

After Maria's first warning about Chad, "He's not so good as you think!" Strether seems particularly anxious to establish that Chad is as "good" as he believes him to be. Bilham seems to agree but warns, "He isn't used . . . to being so good." Maria's speculation about Chad will, as is often the case with her "guesses," prove to be completely accurate. Bilham's phrase, "virtuous attachment," will play an important part in the subsequent development of the story. Strether's reaction in this chapter should be kept in mind when the phrase recurs later and when Strether is required to draw a different meaning from it. Strether's bantering remark to Maria about the mother and daughter -- "It would be nice if they're Polish"-derives from the fact that many upper-class Polish exiles were in Western Europe at the time.


The Sunday of the next week was a wonderful day, and Chad Newsome had
let his friend know in advance that he had provided for it. There had
already been a question of his taking him to see the great Gloriani,
who was at home on Sunday afternoons and at whose house, for the most
part, fewer bores were to be met than elsewhere; but the project,
through some accident, had not had instant effect, and now revived in
happier conditions.  Chad had made the point that the celebrated
sculptor had a queer old garden, for which the weather--spring at last
frank and fair--was propitious; and two or three of his other allusions
had confirmed for Strether the expectation of something special.  He
had by this time, for all introductions and adventures, let himself
recklessly go, cherishing the sense that whatever the young man showed
him he was showing at least himself.  He could have wished indeed, so
far as this went, that Chad were less of a mere cicerone; for he was
not without the impression--now that the vision of his game, his plan,
his deep diplomacy, did recurrently assert itself--of his taking refuge
from the realities of their intercourse in profusely dispensing, as our
friend mentally phrased et panem et circenses. Our friend continued to
feel rather smothered in flowers, though he made in his other moments
the almost angry inference that this was only because of his odious
ascetic suspicion of any form of beauty.  He periodically assured
himself--for his reactions were sharp--that he shouldn't reach the
truth of anything till he had at least got rid of that.

He had known beforehand that Madame de Vionnet and her daughter would
probably be on view, an intimation to that effect having constituted
the only reference again made by Chad to his good friends from the
south.  The effect of Strether's talk about them with Miss Gostrey had
been quite to consecrate his reluctance to pry; something in the very
air of Chad's silence--judged in the light of that talk--offered it to
him as a reserve he could markedly match.  It shrouded them about with
he scarce knew what, a consideration, a distinction; he was in presence
at any rate--so far as it placed him there--of ladies; and the one
thing that was definite for him was that they themselves should be, to
the extent of his responsibility, in presence of a gentleman.  Was it
because they were very beautiful, very clever, or even very good--was
it for one of these reasons that Chad was, so to speak, nursing his
effect?  Did he wish to spring them, in the Woollett phrase, with a
fuller force--to confound his critic, slight though as yet the
criticism, with some form of merit exquisitely incalculable? The most
the critic had at all events asked was whether the persons in question
were French; and that enquiry had been but a proper comment on the
sound of their name.  "Yes.  That is no!" had been Chad's reply; but he
had immediately added that their English was the most charming in the
world, so that if Strether were wanting an excuse for not getting on
with them he wouldn't in the least find one.  Never in fact had
Strether--in the mood into which the place had quickly launched
him--felt, for himself, less the need of an excuse.  Those he might
have found would have been, at the worst, all for the others, the
people before him, in whose liberty to be as they were he was aware
that he positively rejoiced.  His fellow guests were multiplying, and
these things, their liberty, their intensity, their variety, their
conditions at large, were in fusion in the admirable medium of the
scene.

The place itself was a great impression--a small pavilion, clear-faced
and sequestered, an effect of polished parquet, of fine white panel and
spare sallow gilt, of decoration delicate and rare, in the heart of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain and on the edge of a cluster of gardens attached
to old noble houses.  Far back from streets and unsuspected by crowds,
reached by a long passage and a quiet court, it was as striking to the
unprepared mind, he immediately saw, as a treasure dug up; giving him
too, more than anything yet, the note of the range of the immeasurable
town and sweeping away, as by a last brave brush, his usual landmarks
and terms. It was in the garden, a spacious cherished remnant, out of
which a dozen persons had already passed, that Chad's host presently
met them while the tall bird-haunted trees, all of a twitter with the
spring and the weather, and the high party-walls, on the other side of
which grave hotels stood off for privacy, spoke of survival,
transmission, association, a strong indifferent persistent order.  The
day was so soft that the little party had practically adjourned to the
open air but the open air was in such conditions all a chamber of
state.  Strether had presently the sense of a great convent, a convent
of missions, famous for he scarce knew what, a nursery of young
priests, of scattered shade, of straight alleys and chapel-bells, that
spread its mass in one quarter; he had the sense of names in the air,
of ghosts at the windows, of signs and tokens, a whole range of
expression, all about him, too thick for prompt discrimination.

This assault of images became for a moment, in the address of the
distinguished sculptor, almost formidable:  Gloriani showed him, in
such perfect confidence, on Chad's introduction of him, a fine worn
handsome face, a face that was like an open letter in a foreign tongue.
With his genius in his eyes, his manners on his lips, his long career
behind him and his honours and rewards all round, the great artist, in
the course of a single sustained look and a few words of delight at
receiving him, affected our friend as a dazzling prodigy of type.
Strether had seen in museums--in the Luxembourg as well as, more
reverently, later on, in the New York of the billionaires--the work of
his hand; knowing too that after an earlier time in his native Rome he
had migrated, in mid-career, to Paris, where, with a personal lustre
almost violent, he shone in a constellation:  all of which was more
than enough to crown him, for his guest, with the light, with the
romance, of glory.  Strether, in contact with that element as he had
never yet so intimately been, had the consciousness of opening to it,
for the happy instant, all the windows of his mind, of letting this
rather grey interior drink in for once the sun of a clime not marked in
his old geography.  He was to remember again repeatedly the medal-like
Italian face, in which every line was an artist's own, in which time
told only as tone and consecration; and he was to recall in especial,
as the penetrating radiance, as the communication of the illustrious
spirit itself, the manner in which, while they stood briefly, in
welcome and response, face to face, he was held by the sculptor's eyes.
He wasn't soon to forget them, was to think of them, all unconscious,
unintending, preoccupied though they were, as the source of the deepest
intellectual sounding to which he had ever been exposed.  He was in
fact quite to cherish his vision of it, to play with it in idle hours;
only speaking of it to no one and quite aware he couldn't have spoken
without appearing to talk nonsense.  Was what it had told him or what
it had asked him the greater of the mysteries? Was it the most special
flare, unequalled, supreme, of the aesthetic torch, lighting that
wondrous world for ever, or was it above all the long straight shaft
sunk by a personal acuteness that life had seasoned to steel?  Nothing
on earth could have been stranger and no one doubtless more surprised
than the artist himself, but it was for all the world to Strether just
then as if in the matter of his accepted duty he had positively been on
trial. The deep human expertness in Gloriani's charming smile--oh the
terrible life behind it!--was flashed upon him as a test of his stuff.

Chad meanwhile, after having easily named his companion, had still more
easily turned away and was already greeting other persons present. He
was as easy, clever Chad, with the great artist as with his obscure
compatriot, and as easy with every one else as with either: this fell
into its place for Strether and made almost a new light, giving him, as
a concatenation, something more he could enjoy. He liked Gloriani, but
should never see him again; of that he was sufficiently sure.  Chad
accordingly, who was wonderful with both of them, was a kind of link
for hopeless fancy, an implication of possibilities--oh if everything
had been different! Strether noted at all events that he was thus on
terms with illustrious spirits, and also that--yes, distinctly--he
hadn't in the least swaggered about it.  Our friend hadn't come there
only for this figure of Abel Newsome's son, but that presence
threatened to affect the observant mind as positively central. Gloriani
indeed, remembering something and excusing himself, pursued Chad to
speak to him, and Strether was left musing on many things.  One of them
was the question of whether, since he had been tested, he had passed.
Did the artist drop him from having made out that he wouldn't do? He
really felt just to-day that he might do better than usual. Hadn't he
done well enough, so far as that went, in being exactly so dazzled? and
in not having too, as he almost believed, wholly hidden from his host
that he felt the latter's plummet?  Suddenly, across the garden, he saw
little Bilham approach, and it was a part of the fit that was on him
that as their eyes met he guessed also HIS knowledge. If he had said to
him on the instant what was uppermost he would have said:  "HAVE I
passed?--for of course I know one has to pass here." Little Bilham
would have reassured him, have told him that he exaggerated, and have
adduced happily enough the argument of little Bilham's own very
presence; which, in truth, he could see, was as easy a one as
Gloriani's own or as Chad's.  He himself would perhaps then after a
while cease to be frightened, would get the point of view for some of
the faces--types tremendously alien, alien to Woollett--that he had
already begun to take in.  Who were they all, the dispersed groups and
couples, the ladies even more unlike those of Woollett than the
gentlemen?--this was the enquiry that, when his young friend had
greeted him, he did find himself making.

"Oh they're every one--all sorts and sizes; of course I mean within
limits, though limits down perhaps rather more than limits up.  There
are always artists--he's beautiful and inimitable to the cher confrere;
and then gros bonnets of many kinds--ambassadors, cabinet ministers,
bankers, generals, what do I know? even Jews. Above all always some
awfully nice women--and not too many; sometimes an actress, an artist,
a great performer--but only when they're not monsters; and in
particular the right femmes du monde. You can fancy his history on that
side--I believe it's fabulous: they NEVER give him up.  Yet he keeps
them down:  no one knows how he manages; it's too beautiful and bland.
Never too many--and a mighty good thing too; just a perfect choice. But
there are not in any way many bores; it has always been so; he has some
secret. It's extraordinary.  And you don't find it out.  He's the same
to every one.  He doesn't ask questions.'

"Ah doesn't he?" Strether laughed.

Bilham met it with all his candour.  "How then should I be here?

"Oh for what you tell me.  You're part of the perfect choice."

Well, the young man took in the scene.  "It seems rather good to-day."

Strether followed the direction of his eyes.  "Are they all, this time,
femmes du monde?"

Little Bilham showed his competence.  "Pretty well."

This was a category our friend had a feeling for; a light, romantic and
mysterious, on the feminine element, in which he enjoyed for a little
watching it.  "Are there any Poles?"

His companion considered.  "I think I make out a 'Portuguee.' But I've
seen Turks."

Strether wondered, desiring justice.  "They seem--all the women--very
harmonious."

"Oh in closer quarters they come out!" And then, while Strether was
aware of fearing closer quarters, though giving himself again to the
harmonies, "Well," little Bilham went on, "it IS at the worst rather
good, you know.  If you like it, you feel it, this way, that shows
you're not in the least out But you always know things," he handsomely
added, "immediately."

Strether liked it and felt it only too much; so "I say, don't lay traps
for me!" he rather helplessly murmured.

"Well," his companion returned, "he's wonderfully kind to us."

"To us Americans you mean?"

"Oh no--he doesn't know anything about THAT.  That's half the battle
here--that you can never hear politics.  We don't talk them. I mean to
poor young wretches of all sorts.  And yet it's always as charming as
this; it's as if, by something in the air, our squalor didn't show.  It
puts us all back--into the last century."

"I'm afraid," Strether said, amused, "that it puts me rather forward:
oh ever so far!"

"Into the next? But isn't that only," little Bilham asked, "because
you're really of the century before?"

"The century before the last? Thank you!" Strether laughed.  "If I ask
you about some of the ladies it can't be then that I may hope, as such
a specimen of the rococo, to please them."

"On the contrary they adore--we all adore here--the rococo, and where
is there a better setting for it than the whole thing, the pavilion and
the garden, together? There are lots of people with collections,"
little Bilham smiled as he glanced round.  "You'll be secured!"

It made Strether for a moment give himself again to contemplation.
There were faces he scarce knew what to make of.  Were they charming or
were they only strange? He mightn't talk politics, yet he suspected a
Pole or two.  The upshot was the question at the back of his head from
the moment his friend had joined him.  "Have Madame de Vionnet and her
daughter arrived?"

"I haven't seen them yet, but Miss Gostrey has come.  She's in the
pavilion looking at objects.  One can see SHE'S a collector," little
Bilham added without offence.

"Oh yes, she's a collector, and I knew she was to come.  Is Madame de
Vionnet a collector?" Strether went on.

"Rather, I believe; almost celebrated."  The young man met, on it, a
little, his friend's eyes.  "I happen to know--from Chad, whom I saw
last night--that they've come back; but only yesterday. He wasn't
sure--up to the last.  This, accordingly," little Bilham went on, "will
be--if they ARE here--their first appearance after their return."

Strether, very quickly, turned these things over.  "Chad told you last
night? To me, on our way here, he said nothing about it."

"But did you ask him?"

Strether did him the justice.  "I dare say not."

"Well," said little Bilham, "you're not a person to whom it's easy to
tell things you don't want to know.  Though it is easy, I admit--it's
quite beautiful," he benevolently added, "when you do want to."

Strether looked at him with an indulgence that matched his
intelligence.  "Is that the deep reasoning on which--about these
ladies--you've been yourself so silent?"

Little Bilham considered the depth of his reasoning.  "I haven't been
silent.  I spoke of them to you the other day, the day we sat together
after Chad's tea-party."

Strether came round to it.  "They then are the virtuous attachment?"

"I can only tell you that it's what they pass for.  But isn't that
enough? What more than a vain appearance does the wisest of us know? I
commend you," the young man declared with a pleasant emphasis, "the
vain appearance."

Strether looked more widely round, and what he saw, from face to face,
deepened the effect of his young friend's words.  "Is it so good?"

"Magnificent."

Strether had a pause.  "The husband's dead?"

"Dear no.  Alive."

"Oh!" said Strether.  After which, as his companion laughed: "How then
can it be so good?"

"You'll see for yourself.  One does see."

"Chad's in love with the daughter?"

"That's what I mean."

Strether wondered.  "Then where's the difficulty?"

"Why, aren't you and I--with our grander bolder ideas?"

"Oh mine--!" Strether said rather strangely.  But then as if to
attenuate:  "You mean they won't hear of Woollett?"

Little Bilham smiled.  "Isn't that just what you must see about?"

It had brought them, as she caught the last words, into relation with
Miss Barrace, whom Strether had already observed--as he had never
before seen a lady at a party--moving about alone.  Coming within sound
of them she had already spoken, and she took again, through her
long-handled glass, all her amused and amusing possession.  "How much,
poor Mr. Strether, you seem to have to see about! But you can't say,"
she gaily declared, "that I don't do what I can to help you.  Mr.
Waymarsh is placed.  I've left him in the house with Miss Gostrey."

"The way," little Bilham exclaimed, "Mr. Strether gets the ladies to
work for him! He's just preparing to draw in another; to pounce--don't
you see him?--on Madame de Vionnet."

"Madame de Vionnet?  Oh, oh, oh!" Miss Barrace cried in a wonderful
crescendo.  There was more in it, our friend made out, than met the
ear.  Was it after all a joke that he should be serious about anything?
He envied Miss Barrace at any rate her power of not being.  She seemed,
with little cries and protests and quick recognitions, movements like
the darts of some fine high-feathered free-pecking bird, to stand
before life as before some full shop-window.  You could fairly hear, as
she selected and pointed, the tap of her tortoise-shell against the
glass.  "It's certain that we do need seeing about; only I'm glad it's
not I who have to do it. One does, no doubt, begin that way; then
suddenly one finds that one has given it up.  It's too much, it's too
difficult.  You're wonderful, you people," she continued to Strether,
"for not feeling those things--by which I mean impossibilities.  You
never feel them. You face them with a fortitude that makes it a lesson
to watch you."

"Ah but"--little Bilham put it with discouragement--"what do we achieve
after all? We see about you and report--when we even go so far as
reporting.  But nothing's done."

"Oh you, Mr. Bilham," she replied as with an impatient rap on the
glass, "you're not worth sixpence! You come over to convert the
savages--for I know you verily did, I remember you--and the savages
simply convert YOU."

"Not even!" the young man woefully confessed:  "they haven't gone
through that form.  They've simply--the cannibals!--eaten me; converted
me if you like, but converted me into food.  I'm but the bleached bones
of a Christian."

"Well then there we are!  Only"--and Miss Barrace appealed again to
Strether--"don't let it discourage you.  You'll break down soon enough,
but you'll meanwhile have had your moments.  Il faut en avoir.  I
always like to see you while you last.  And I'll tell you who WILL
last."

"Waymarsh?"--he had already taken her up.

She laughed out as at the alarm of it.  "He'll resist even Miss
Gostrey:  so grand is it not to understand.  He's wonderful."

"He is indeed," Strether conceded.  "He wouldn't tell me of this
affair--only said he had an engagement; but with such a gloom, you must
let me insist, as if it had been an engagement to be hanged. Then
silently and secretly he turns up here with you.  Do you call THAT
'lasting'?"

"Oh I hope it's lasting!" Miss Barrace said.  "But he only, at the
best, bears with me.  He doesn't understand--not one little scrap. He's
delightful.  He's wonderful," she repeated.

"Michelangelesque!"--little Bilham completed her meaning.  "He IS a
success.  Moses, on the ceiling, brought down to the floor;
overwhelming, colossal, but somehow portable."

"Certainly, if you mean by portable," she returned, "looking so well in
one's carriage.  He's too funny beside me in his comer; he looks like
somebody, somebody foreign and famous, en exil; so that people
wonder--it's very amusing--whom I'm taking about.  I show him Paris,
show him everything, and he never turns a hair.  He's like the Indian
chief one reads about, who, when he comes up to Washington to see the
Great Father, stands wrapt in his blanket and gives no sign.  I might
be the Great Father--from the way he takes everything."  She was
delighted at this hit of her identity with that personage--it fitted so
her character; she declared it was the title she meant henceforth to
adopt.  "And the way he sits, too, in the corner of my room, only
looking at my visitors very hard and as if he wanted to start
something! They wonder what he does want to start.  But he's
wonderful," Miss Barrace once more insisted.  "He has never started
anything yet."

It presented him none the less, in truth, to her actual friends, who
looked at each other in intelligence, with frank amusement on Bilham's
part and a shade of sadness on Strether's.  Strether's sadness
sprang--for the image had its grandeur--from his thinking how little he
himself was wrapt in his blanket, how little, in marble halls, all too
oblivious of the Great Father, he resembled a really majestic
aboriginal.  But he had also another reflexion. "You've all of you here
so much visual sense that you've somehow all 'run' to it.  There are
moments when it strikes one that you haven't any other."

"Any moral," little Bilham explained, watching serenely, across the
garden, the several femmes du monde.  "But Miss Barrace has a moral
distinction," he kindly continued; speaking as if for Strether's
benefit not less than for her own.

"HAVE you?" Strether, scarce knowing what he was about, asked of her
almost eagerly.

"Oh not a distinction"--she was mightily amused at his tone--"Mr.
Bilham's too good.  But I think I may say a sufficiency.  Yes, a
sufficiency. Have you supposed strange things of me?"--and she fixed
him again, through all her tortoise-shell, with the droll interest of
it. "You ARE all indeed wonderful.  I should awfully disappoint you. I
do take my stand on my sufficiency.  But I know, I confess," she went
on, "strange people.  I don't know how it happens; I don't do it on
purpose; it seems to be my doom--as if I were always one of their
habits:  it's wonderful! I dare say moreover," she pursued with an
interested gravity, "that I do, that we all do here, run too much to
mere eye.  But how can it be helped? We're all looking at each
other--and in the light of Paris one sees what things resemble.  That's
what the light of Paris seems always to show.  It's the fault of the
light of Paris--dear old light!"

"Dear old Paris!" little Bilham echoed.

"Everything, every one shows," Miss Barrace went on.

"But for what they really are?" Strether asked.

"Oh I like your Boston 'reallys'!  But sometimes--yes."

"Dear old Paris then!" Strether resignedly sighed while for a moment
they looked at each other.  Then he broke out:  "Does Madame de Vionnet
do that? I mean really show for what she is?"

Her answer was prompt.  "She's charming.  She's perfect."

"Then why did you a minute ago say 'Oh, oh, oh!' at her name?"

She easily remembered.  "Why just because--!  She's wonderful."

"Ah she too?"--Strether had almost a groan.

But Miss Barrace had meanwhile perceived relief.  "Why not put your
question straight to the person who can answer it best?"

"No," said little Bilham; "don't put any question; wait, rather--it
will be much more fun--to judge for yourself.  He has come to take you
to her."

One week later, Strether goes with Chad to a party at the home of Gloriani, a famous sculptor, in order to meet Madame de Vionnet and her daughter, who will also be there. The home and garden impress Strether very strongly, and he feels under a formidable "assault of images." Gloriani, too, makes a deep impression on him; the sculptor's eyes seem to Strether "the source of the deepest intellectual sounding to which he had ever been exposed." It is in this atmosphere and among people "tremendously alien, alien to Woollett" that Strether asks Bilham if Madame de Vionnet and her daughter are "the virtuous attachment." Bilham acknowledges this and tells Strether that Madame de Vionnet's husband is not dead. Strether assumes, then, that it is the daughter whom Chad loves. Miss Barrace comes up to join the conversation, and they speak further about Madame de Vionnet and Paris. Chad then returns to take Strether to Madame de Vionnet.

The atmosphere at Gloriani's gathering -- the house, garden, and guests -- serves to prepare and condition Strether  for what will come in the next chapter: the meeting between Strether and Madame de Vionnet and, more important at this juncture, Strether's speech to Bilham. In this connection, notice how carefully James creates the impressions that make up this atmosphere; examine in particular the third paragraph of the chapter.


On which Strether saw that Chad was again at hand, and he afterwards
scarce knew, absurd as it may seem, what had then quickly occurred. The
moment concerned him, he felt, more deeply than he could have
explained, and he had a subsequent passage of speculation as to
whether, on walking off with Chad, he hadn't looked either pale or red.
The only thing he was clear about was that, luckily, nothing indiscreet
had in fact been said and that Chad himself was more than ever, in Miss
Barrace's great sense, wonderful.  It was one of the connexions--though
really why it should be, after all, was none so apparent--in which the
whole change in him came out as most striking.  Strether recalled as
they approached the house that he had impressed him that first night as
knowing how to enter a box.  Well, he impressed him scarce less now as
knowing how to make a presentation.  It did something for Strether's
own quality--marked it as estimated; so that our poor friend, conscious
and passive, really seemed to feel himself quite handed over and
delivered; absolutely, as he would have said, made a present of, given
away.  As they reached the house a young woman, about to come forth,
appeared, unaccompanied, on the steps; at the exchange with whom of a
word on Chad's part Strether immediately perceived that, obligingly,
kindly, she was there to meet them. Chad had left her in the house, but
she had afterwards come halfway and then the next moment had joined
them in the garden. Her air of youth, for Strether, was at first almost
disconcerting, while his second impression was, not less sharply, a
degree of relief at there not having just been, with the others, any
freedom used about her.  It was upon him at a touch that she was no
subject for that, and meanwhile, on Chad's introducing him, she had
spoken to him, very simply and gently, in an English clearly of the
easiest to her, yet unlike any other he had ever heard.  It wasn't as
if she tried; nothing, he could see after they had been a few minutes
together, was as if she tried; but her speech, charming correct and
odd, was like a precaution against her passing for a Pole.  There were
precautions, he seemed indeed to see, only when there were really
dangers.

Later on he was to feel many more of them, but by that time he was to
feel other things besides.  She was dressed in black, but in black that
struck him as light and transparent; she was exceedingly fair, and,
though she was as markedly slim, her face had a roundness, with eyes
far apart and a little strange. Her smile was natural and dim; her hat
not extravagant; he had only perhaps a sense of the clink, beneath her
fine black sleeves, of more gold bracelets and bangles than he had ever
seen a lady wear. Chad was excellently free and light about their
encounter; it was one of the occasions on which Strether most wished he
himself might have arrived at such ease and such humour:  "Here you are
then, face to face at last; you're made for each other--vous allez
voir; and I bless your union."  It was indeed, after he had gone off,
as if he had been partly serious too.  This latter motion had been
determined by an enquiry from him about "Jeanne"; to which her mother
had replied that she was probably still in the house with Miss Gostrey,
to whom she had lately committed her.  "Ah but you know," the young man
had rejoined, "he must see her"; with which, while Strether pricked up
his ears, he had started as if to bring her, leaving the other objects
of his interest together. Strether wondered to find Miss Gostrey
already involved, feeling that he missed a link; but feeling also, with
small delay, how much he should like to talk with her of Madame de
Vionnet on this basis of evidence.

The evidence as yet in truth was meagre; which, for that matter, was
perhaps a little why his expectation had had a drop.  There was somehow
not quite a wealth in her; and a wealth was all that, in his
simplicity, he had definitely prefigured.  Still, it was too much to be
sure already that there was but a poverty.  They moved away from the
house, and, with eyes on a bench at some distance, he proposed that
they should sit down.  "I've heard a great deal about you," she said as
they went; but he had an answer to it that made her stop short.  "Well,
about YOU, Madame de Vionnet, I've heard, I'm bound to say, almost
nothing"--those struck him as the only words he himself could utter
with any lucidity; conscious as he was, and as with more reason, of the
determination to be in respect to the rest of his business perfectly
plain and go perfectly straight.  It hadn't at any rate been in the
least his idea to spy on Chad's proper freedom.  It was possibly,
however, at this very instant and under the impression of Madame de
Vionnet's pause, that going straight began to announce itself as a
matter for care.  She had only after all to smile at him ever so gently
in order to make him ask himself if he weren't already going crooked.
It might be going crooked to find it of a sudden just only clear that
she intended very definitely to be what he would have called nice to
him.  This was what passed between them while, for another instant,
they stood still; he couldn't at least remember afterwards what else it
might have been.  The thing indeed really unmistakeable was its rolling
over him as a wave that he had been, in conditions incalculable and
unimaginable, a subject of discussion.  He had been, on some ground
that concerned her, answered for; which gave her an advantage he should
never be able to match.

"Hasn't Miss Gostrey," she asked, "said a good word for me?"

What had struck him first was the way he was bracketed with that lady;
and he wondered what account Chad would have given of their
acquaintance.  Something not as yet traceable, at all events, had
obviously happened.  "I didn't even know of her knowing you."

"Well, now she'll tell you all.  I'm so glad you're in relation with
her."

This was one of the things--the "all" Miss Gostrey would now tell
him--that, with every deference to present preoccupation, was uppermost
for Strether after they had taken their seat.  One of the others was,
at the end of five minutes, that she--oh incontestably, yes--DIFFERED
less; differed, that is, scarcely at all--well, superficially speaking,
from Mrs. Newsome or even from Mrs. Pocock. She was ever so much
younger than the one and not so young as the other; but what WAS there
in her, if anything, that would have made it impossible he should meet
her at Woollett? And wherein was her talk during their moments on the
bench together not the same as would have been found adequate for a
Woollett garden-party?--unless perhaps truly in not being quite so
bright.  She observed to him that Mr. Newsome had, to her knowledge,
taken extraordinary pleasure in his visit; but there was no good lady
at Woollett who wouldn't have been at least up to that. Was there in
Chad, by chance, after all, deep down, a principle of aboriginal
loyalty that had made him, for sentimental ends, attach himself to
elements, happily encountered, that would remind him most of the old
air and the old soil? Why accordingly be in a flutter--Strether could
even put it that way--about this unfamiliar phenomenon of the femme du
monde?  On these terms Mrs. Newsome herself was as much of one.  Little
Bilham verily had testified that they came out, the ladies of the type,
in close quarters; but it was just in these quarters--now comparatively
close--that he felt Madame de Vionnet's common humanity.  She did come
out, and certainly to his relief, but she came out as the usual thing.
There might be motives behind, but so could there often be even at
Woollett.  The only thing was that if she showed him she wished to like
him--as the motives behind might conceivably prompt--it would possibly
have been more thrilling for him that she should have shown as more
vividly alien.  Ah she was neither Turk nor Pole!--which would be
indeed flat once more for Mrs. Newsome and Mrs. Pocock.  A lady and two
gentlemen had meanwhile, however, approached their bench, and this
accident stayed for the time further developments.

They presently addressed his companion, the brilliant strangers; she
rose to speak to them, and Strether noted how the escorted lady, though
mature and by no means beautiful, had more of the bold high look, the
range of expensive reference, that he had, as might have been said,
made his plans for.  Madame de Vionnet greeted her as "Duchesse" and
was greeted in turn, while talk started in French, as "Ma toute-belle";
little facts that had their due, their vivid interest for Strether.
Madame de Vionnet didn't, none the less, introduce him--a note he was
conscious of as false to the Woollett scale and the Woollett humanity;
though it didn't prevent the Duchess, who struck him as confident and
free, very much what he had obscurely supposed duchesses, from looking
at him as straight and as hard--for it WAS hard--as if she would have
liked, all the same, to know him.  "Oh yes, my dear, it's all right,
it's ME; and who are YOU, with your interesting wrinkles and your most
effective (is it the handsomest, is it the ugliest?) of noses?"--some
such loose handful of bright flowers she seemed, fragrantly enough, to
fling at him.  Strether almost wondered--at such a pace was he
going--if some divination of the influence of either party were what
determined Madame de Vionnet's abstention.  One of the gentlemen, in
any case, succeeded in placing himself in close relation with our
friend's companion; a gentleman rather stout and importantly short, in
a hat with a wonderful wide curl to its brim and a frock coat buttoned
with an effect of superlative decision.  His French had quickly turned
to equal English, and it occurred to Strether that he might well be one
of the ambassadors.  His design was evidently to assert a claim to
Madame de Vionnet's undivided countenance, and he made it good in the
course of a minute--led her away with a trick of three words; a trick
played with a social art of which Strether, looking after them as the
four, whose backs were now all turned, moved off, felt himself no
master.

He sank again upon his bench and, while his eyes followed the party,
reflected, as he had done before, on Chad's strange communities.  He
sat there alone for five minutes, with plenty to think of; above all
with his sense of having suddenly been dropped by a charming woman
overlaid now by other impressions and in fact quite cleared and
indifferent.  He hadn't yet had so quiet a surrender; he didn't in the
least care if nobody spoke to him more.  He might have been, by his
attitude, in for something of a march so broad that the want of
ceremony with which he had just been used could fall into its place as
but a minor incident of the procession.  Besides, there would be
incidents enough, as he felt when this term of contemplation was closed
by the reappearance of little Bilham, who stood before him a moment
with a suggestive "Well?" in which he saw himself reflected as
disorganised, as possibly floored.  He replied with a "Well!" intended
to show that he wasn't floored in the least.  No indeed; he gave it
out, as the young man sat down beside him, that if, at the worst, he
had been overturned at all, he had been overturned into the upper air,
the sublimer element with which he had an affinity and in which he
might be trusted a while to float.  It wasn't a descent to earth to say
after an instant and in sustained response to the reference: "You're
quite sure her husband's living?"

"Oh dear, yes."

"Ah then--!"

"Ah then what?"

Strether had after all to think.  "Well, I'm sorry for them."  But it
didn't for the moment matter more than that.  He assured his young
friend he was quite content.  They wouldn't stir; were all right as
they were.  He didn't want to be introduced; had been introduced
already about as far as he could go.  He had seen moreover an
immensity; liked Gloriani, who, as Miss Barrace kept saying, was
wonderful; had made out, he was sure, the half-dozen other 'men who
were distinguished, the artists, the critics and oh the great
dramatist--HIM it was easy to spot; but wanted--no, thanks, really--to
talk with none of them; having nothing at all to say and finding it
would do beautifully as it was; do beautifully because what it
was--well, was just simply too late. And when after this little Bilham,
submissive and responsive, but with an eye to the consolation nearest,
easily threw off some "Better late than never!" all he got in return
for it was a sharp "Better early than late!"  This note indeed the next
thing overflowed for Strether into a quiet stream of demonstration that
as soon as he had let himself go he felt as the real relief.  It had
consciously gathered to a head, but the reservoir had filled sooner
than he knew, and his companion's touch was to make the waters spread.
There were some things that had to come in time if they were to come at
all.  If they didn't come in time they were lost for ever.  It was the
general sense of them that had overwhelmed him with its long slow rush.

"It's not too late for YOU, on any side, and you don't strike me as in
danger of missing the train; besides which people can be in general
pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock of their freedom ticking
as loud as it seems to do here--to keep an eye on the fleeting hour.
All the same don't forget that you're young--blessedly young; be glad
of it on the contrary and live up to it. Live all you can; it's a
mistake not to.  It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular,
so long as you have your life.  If you haven't had that what HAVE you
had? This place and these impressions--mild as you may find them to
wind a man up so; all my impressions of Chad and of people I've seen at
HIS place--well, have had their abundant message for me, have just
dropped THAT into my mind.  I see it now.  I haven't done so enough
before--and now I'm old; too old at any rate for what I see.  Oh I DO
see, at least; and more than you'd believe or I can express.  It's too
late. And it's as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me
without my having had the gumption to know it was there. Now I hear its
faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses
one loses; make no mistake about that.  The affair--I mean the affair
of life--couldn't, no doubt, have been different for me; for it's at
the best a tin mould, either fluted and embossed, with ornamental
excrescences, or else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a
helpless jelly, one's consciousness is poured--so that one 'takes' the
form as the great cook says, and is more or less compactly held by it:
one lives in fine as one can. Still, one has the illusion of freedom;
therefore don't be, like me, without the memory of that illusion.  I
was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have
it; I don't quite know which. Of course at present I'm a case of
reaction against the mistake; and the voice of reaction should, no
doubt, always be taken with an allowance.  But that doesn't affect the
point that the right time is now yours.  The right time is ANY time
that one is still so lucky as to have.  You've plenty; that's the great
thing; you're, as I say, damn you, so happily and hatefully young.
Don't at any rate miss things out of stupidity.  Of course I don't take
you for a fool, or I shouldn't be addressing you thus awfully.  Do what
you like so long as you don't make MY mistake.  For it was a mistake.
Live!" ... Slowly and sociably, with full pauses and straight
dashes, Strether had so delivered himself; holding little Bilham from
step to step deeply and gravely attentive.  The end of all was that the
young man had turned quite solemn, and that this was a contradiction of
the innocent gaiety the speaker had wished to promote.  He watched for
a moment the consequence of his words, and then, laying a hand on his
listener's knee and as if to end with the proper joke:  "And now for
the eye I shall keep on you!"

"Oh but I don't know that I want to be, at your age, too different from
you!"

"Ah prepare while you're about it," said Strether, "to be more amusing."

Little Bilham continued to think, but at last had a smile.  "Well, you
ARE amusing--to ME."

"Impayable, as you say, no doubt.  But what am I to myself?" Strether
had risen with this, giving his attention now to an encounter that, in
the middle of the garden, was in the act of taking place between their
host and the lady at whose side Madame de Vionnet had quitted him. This
lady, who appeared within a few minutes to have left her friends,
awaited Gloriani's eager approach with words on her lips that Strether
couldn't catch, but of which her interesting witty face seemed to give
him the echo. He was sure she was prompt and fine, but also that she
had met her match, and he liked--in the light of what he was quite sure
was the Duchess's latent insolence--the good humour with which the
great artist asserted equal resources.  Were they, this pair, of the
"great world"?--and was he himself, for the moment and thus related to
them by his observation, IN it? Then there was something in the great
world covertly tigerish, which came to him across the lawn and in the
charming air as a waft from the jungle. Yet it made him admire most of
the two, made him envy, the glossy male tiger, magnificently marked.
These absurdities of the stirred sense, fruits of suggestion ripening
on the instant, were all reflected in his next words to little Bilham.
"I know--if we talk of that--whom I should enjoy being like!"

Little Bilham followed his eyes; but then as with a shade of knowing
surprise:  "Gloriani?"

Our friend had in fact already hesitated, though not on the hint of his
companion's doubt, in which there were depths of critical reserve.  He
had just made out, in the now full picture, something and somebody
else; another impression had been superimposed.  A young girl in a
white dress and a softly plumed white hat had suddenly come into view,
and what was presently clear was that her course was toward them.  What
was clearer still was that the handsome young man at her side was Chad
Newsome, and what was clearest of all was that she was therefore
Mademoiselle de Vionnet, that she was unmistakeably pretty--bright
gentle shy happy wonderful--and that Chad now, with a consummate
calculation of effect, was about to present her to his old friend's
vision. What was clearest of all indeed was something much more than
this, something at the single stroke of which--and wasn't it simply
juxtaposition?--all vagueness vanished.  It was the click of a
spring--he saw the truth.  He had by this time also met Chad's look;
there was more of it in that; and the truth, accordingly, so far as
Bilham's enquiry was concerned, had thrust in the answer. "Oh
Chad!"--it was that rare youth he should have enjoyed being "like." The
virtuous attachment would be all there before him; the virtuous
attachment would be in the very act of appeal for his blessing; Jeanne
de Vionnet, this charming creature, would be exquisitely, intensely
now--the object of it.  Chad brought her straight up to him, and Chad
was, oh yes, at this moment--for the glory of Woollett or
whatever--better still even than Gloriani.  He had plucked this
blossom; he had kept it over-night in water; and at last as he held it
up to wonder he did enjoy his effect.  That was why Strether had felt
at first the breath of calculation--and why moreover, as he now knew,
his look at the girl would be, for the young man, a sign of the
latter's success.  What young man had ever paraded about that way,
without a reason, a maiden in her flower?  And there was nothing in his
reason at present obscure.  Her type sufficiently told of it--they
wouldn't, they couldn't, want her to go to Woollett.  Poor Woollett,
and what it might miss!--though brave Chad indeed too, and what it
might gain! Brave Chad however had just excellently spoken.  "This is a
good little friend of mine who knows all about you and has moreover a
message for you.  And this, my dear"--he had turned to the child
herself--"is the best man in the world, who has it in his power to do a
great deal for us and whom I want you to like and revere as nearly as
possible as much as I do."

She stood there quite pink, a little frightened, prettier and prettier
and not a bit like her mother.  There was in this last particular no
resemblance but that of youth to youth; and here was in fact suddenly
Strether's sharpest impression.  It went wondering, dazed, embarrassed,
back to the woman he had just been talking with; it was a revelation in
the light of which he already saw she would become more interesting. So
slim and fresh and fair, she had yet put forth this perfection; so that
for really believing it of her, for seeing her to any such developed
degree as a mother, comparison would be urgent.  Well, what was it now
but fairly thrust upon him?  "Mamma wishes me to tell you before we
go," the girl said, "that she hopes very much you'll come to see us
very soon. She has something important to say to you."

"She quite reproaches herself," Chad helpfully explained:  "you were
interesting her so much when she accidentally suffered you to be
interrupted."

"Ah don't mention it!" Strether murmured, looking kindly from one to
the other and wondering at many things.

"And I'm to ask you for myself," Jeanne continued with her hands
clasped together as if in some small learnt prayer--"I'm to ask you for
myself if you won't positively come."

"Leave it to me, dear--I'll take care of it!" Chad genially declared in
answer to this, while Strether himself almost held his breath.  What
was in the girl was indeed too soft, too unknown for direct dealing; so
that one could only gaze at it as at a picture, quite staying one's own
hand.  But with Chad he was now on ground--Chad he could meet; so
pleasant a confidence in that and in everything did the young man
freely exhale.  There was the whole of a story in his tone to his
companion, and he spoke indeed as if already of the family.  It made
Strether guess the more quickly what it might be about which Madame de
Vionnet was so urgent.  Having seen him then she had found him easy;
she wished to have it out with him that some way for the young people
must be discovered, some way that would not impose as a condition the
transplantation of her daughter.  He already saw himself discussing
with this lady the attractions of Woollett as a residence for Chad's
companion. Was that youth going now to trust her with the affair--so
that it would be after all with one of his "lady-friends" that his
mother's missionary should be condemned to deal?  It was quite as if
for an instant the two men looked at each other on this question.  But
there was no mistaking at last Chad's pride in the display of such a
connexion.  This was what had made him so carry himself while, three
minutes before, he was bringing it into view; what had caused his
friend, first catching sight of him, to be so struck with his air.  It
was, in a word, just when he thus finally felt Chad putting things
straight off on him that he envied him, as he had mentioned to little
Bilham, most.  The whole exhibition however was but a matter of three
or four minutes, and the author of it had soon explained that, as
Madame de Vionnet was immediately going "on," this could be for Jeanne
but a snatch.  They would all meet again soon, and Strether was
meanwhile to stay and amuse himself--"I'll pick you up again in plenty
of time." He took the girl off as he had brought her, and Strether,
with the faint sweet foreignness of her "Au revoir, monsieur!" in his
ears as a note almost unprecedented, watched them recede side by side
and felt how, once more, her companion's relation to her got an accent
from it.  They disappeared among the others and apparently into the
house; whereupon our friend turned round to give out to little Bilham
the conviction of which he was full.  But there was no little Bilham
any more; little Bilham had within the few moments, for reasons of his
own, proceeded further:  a circumstance by which, in its order,
Strether was also sensibly affected.

Chad leads Strether to Madame de Vionnet, and, as they approach, Strether finds her youthful air "almost disconcerting." He is impressed by her English -- "charming correct and odd" -- and struck by her appearance; she is "exceedingly fair, and, though she was as markedly slim, her face had a roundness, with eyes far apart and a little strange. Her smile was natural." Chad leaves them, and they take seats on a bench in the garden. After five minutes, Strether decides that she "differed . . . scarcely at all -- well, superficially speaking, from Mrs. Newsome or even from Mrs. Pocock . . . to his relief she came out as the usual thing." They speak only briefly and at no depth, then a lady and two gentlemen approach; Madame de Vionnet goes off with one of the gentlemen, leaving Strether alone. Bilham returns to Strether's side, and Strether then unburdens himself of feelings that have been building in him: "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had? This place and these impressions -- mild as you may find them to wind a man up so . . . have had their abundant message for me. . . . I see it now. I haven't done so enough before -- and now I'm old; too old at any rate for what I see. . . . one lives in fine as one can. . . . the affair of life -- couldn't, no doubt, have been different for me. . . . Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don't be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. . . . Do what you like so long as you don't make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!" A young girl in a white dress and a plumed white hat approaches with Chad at her side; it is Mademoiselle Jeanne de Vionnet, "unmistakably pretty -- bright gentle shy happy wonderful -- ." Strether suddenly realizes how much he would have enjoyed being like Chad: "The virtuous attachment would be all there before him." Jeanne tells Strether that her mother would like him to visit her because she has something important to tell him. Strether is sure she will tell him "that some way for the young people must be discovered, some way that would not impose as a condition the transplantation of her daughter." After another minute or so, she and Chad withdraw. Strether turns to find that Bilham is also gone.

Although Strether at last meets Madame de Vionnet in this chapter, the scene is underplayed by James; the focus of the chapter is on Strether's speech to Bilham, which may properly be regarded as the climax of the first half of The Ambassadors. Strether's remarks are less an appeal to Bilham than a declaration of Strether's perception that he himself has not fully lived. The reader will recall how in the first chapter of the novel, Strether and Maria speak of "the failure to enjoy"; the scene here is a culmination of the import of that earlier moment. Strether now realizes what Europe has done for Chad; he has enjoyed, he has "lived." James remarks in his "Preface" to The Ambassadors: "Nothing is more easy than to state the subject of The Ambassadors . . . the whole case, in fine, is in Lambert Strether's irrepressible outbreak to little Bilham on the Sunday afternoon in Gloriani's garden." In a notebook entry for 1895, James reveals the "germ" of the story of The Ambassadors by recounting how William Dean Howells delivered to James' intimate friend Jonathan Sturges substantially the same speech that Strether makes to Bilham. James remarks that, "as usual," he saw in it the subject for a novel.