Chad was not in fact on this occasion to keep his promise of coming
back; but Miss Gostrey had soon presented herself with an explanation
of his failure.  There had been reasons at the last for his going off
with ces dames; and he had asked her with much instance to come out and
take charge of their friend.  She did so, Strether felt as she took her
place beside him, in a manner that left nothing to desire.  He had
dropped back on his bench, alone again for a time, and the more
conscious for little Bilham's defection of his unexpressed thought; in
respect to which however this next converser was a still more capacious
vessel.  "It's the child!" he had exclaimed to her almost as soon as
she appeared; and though her direct response was for some time delayed
he could feel in her meanwhile the working of this truth.  It might
have been simply, as she waited, that they were now in presence
altogether of truth spreading like a flood and not for the moment to be
offered her in the mere cupful; inasmuch as who should ces dames prove
to be but persons about whom--once thus face to face with them--she
found she might from the first have told him almost everything? This
would have freely come had he taken the simple precaution of giving her
their name.  There could be no better example--and she appeared to note
it with high amusement--than the way, making things out already so much
for himself, he was at last throwing precautions to the winds.  They
were neither more nor less, she and the child's mother, than old
school-friends--friends who had scarcely met for years but whom this
unlooked-for chance had brought together with a rush.  It was a relief,
Miss Gostrey hinted, to feel herself no longer groping; she was
unaccustomed to grope and as a general thing, he might well have seen,
made straight enough for her clue.  With the one she had now picked up
in her hands there need be at least no waste of wonder.  "She's coming
to see me--that's for YOU," Strether's counsellor continued; "but I
don't require it to know where I am."

The waste of wonder might be proscribed; but Strether,
characteristically, was even by this time in the immensity of space.
"By which you mean that you know where SHE is?"

She just hesitated.  "I mean that if she comes to see me I shall--now
that I've pulled myself round a bit after the shock--not be at home."

Strether hung poised.  "You call it--your recognition--a shock?"

She gave one of her rare flickers of impatience.  "It was a surprise,
an emotion.  Don't be so literal.  I wash my hands of her."

Poor Strether's face lengthened.  "She's impossible--?"

"She's even more charming than I remembered her."

"Then what's the matter?"

She had to think how to put it.  "Well, I'M impossible.  It's
impossible.  Everything's impossible."

He looked at her an instant.  "I see where you're coming out.
Everything's possible." Their eyes had on it in fact an exchange of
some duration; after which he pursued:  "Isn't it that beautiful
child?" Then as she still said nothing:  "Why don't you mean to receive
her?"

Her answer in an instant rang clear.  "Because I wish to keep out of
the business."

It provoked in him a weak wail.  "You're going to abandon me NOW?"

"No, I'm only going to abandon HER.  She'll want me to help her with
you.  And I won't."

"You'll only help me with her?  Well then--!"  Most of the persons
previously gathered had, in the interest of tea, passed into the house,
and they had the gardens mainly to themselves.  The shadows were long,
the last call of the birds, who had made a home of their own in the
noble interspaced quarter, sounded from the high trees in the other
gardens as well, those of the old convent and of the old hotels; it was
as if our friends had waited for the full charm to come out. Strether's
impressions were still present; it was as if something had happened
that "nailed" them, made them more intense; but he was to ask himself
soon afterwards, that evening, what really HAD happened--conscious as
he could after all remain that for a gentleman taken, and taken the
first time, into the "great world," the world of ambassadors and
duchesses, the items made a meagre total.  It was nothing new to him,
however, as we know, that a man might have--at all events such a man as
he--an amount of experience out of any proportion to his adventures; so
that, though it was doubtless no great adventure to sit on there with
Miss Gostrey and hear about Madame de Vionnet, the hour, the picture,
the immediate, the recent, the possible--as well as the communication
itself, not a note of which failed to reverberate--only gave the
moments more of the taste of history.

It was history, to begin with, that Jeanne's mother had been
three-and-twenty years before, at Geneva, schoolmate and good
girlfriend to Maria Gostrey, who had moreover enjoyed since then,
though interruptedly and above all with a long recent drop, other
glimpses of her.  Twenty-three years put them both on, no doubt; and
Madame de Vionnet--though she had married straight after
school--couldn't be today an hour less than thirty-eight. This made her
ten years older than Chad--though ten years, also, if Strether liked,
older than she looked; the least, at any rate, that a prospective
mother-in-law could be expected to do with.  She would be of all
mothers-in-law the most charming; unless indeed, through some
perversity as yet insupposeable, she should utterly belie herself in
that relation.  There was none surely in which, as Maria remembered
her, she mustn't be charming; and this frankly in spite of the stigma
of failure in the tie where failure always most showed.  It was no test
there--when indeed WAS it a test there?--for Monsieur de Vionnet had
been a brute.  She had lived for years apart from him--which was of
course always a horrid position; but Miss Gostrey's impression of the
matter had been that she could scarce have made a better thing of it
had she done it on purpose to show she was amiable.  She was so amiable
that nobody had had a word to say; which was luckily not the case for
her husband.  He was so impossible that she had the advantage of all
her merits.

It was still history for Strether that the Comte de Vionnet--it being
also history that the lady in question was a Countess--should now,
under Miss Gostrey's sharp touch, rise before him as a high
distinguished polished impertinent reprobate, the product of a
mysterious order; it was history, further, that the charming girl so
freely sketched by his companion should have been married out of hand
by a mother, another figure of striking outline, full of dark personal
motive; it was perhaps history most of all that this company was, as a
matter of course, governed by such considerations as put divorce out of
the question.  "Ces gens-la don't divorce, you know, any more than they
emigrate or abjure--they think it impious and vulgar"; a fact in the
light of which they seemed but the more richly special.  It was all
special; it was all, for Strether's imagination, more or less rich. The
girl at the Genevese school, an isolated interesting attaching
creature, then both sensitive and violent, audacious but always
forgiven, was the daughter of a French father and an English mother
who, early left a widow, had married again--tried afresh with a
foreigner; in her career with whom she had apparently given her child
no example of comfort.  All these people--the people of the English
mother's side--had been of condition more or less eminent; yet with
oddities and disparities that had often since made Maria, thinking them
over, wonder what they really quite rhymed to.  It was in any case her
belief that the mother, interested and prone to adventure, had been
without conscience, had only thought of ridding herself most quickly of
a possible, an actual encumbrance.  The father, by her impression, a
Frenchman with a name one knew, had been a different matter, leaving
his child, she clearly recalled, a memory all fondness, as well as an
assured little fortune which was unluckily to make her more or less of
a prey later on.  She had been in particular, at school, dazzlingly,
though quite booklessly, clever; as polyglot as a little Jewess (which
she wasn't, oh no!) and chattering French, English, German, Italian,
anything one would, in a way that made a clean sweep, if not of prizes
and parchments, at least of every "part," whether memorised or
improvised, in the curtained costumed school repertory, and in especial
of all mysteries of race and vagueness of reference, all swagger about
"home," among their variegated mates.

It would doubtless be difficult to-day, as between French and English,
to name her and place her; she would certainly show, on knowledge, Miss
Gostrey felt, as one of those convenient types who don't keep you
explaining--minds with doors as numerous as the many-tongued cluster of
confessionals at Saint Peter's.  You might confess to her with
confidence in Roumelian, and even Roumelian sins.  Therefore--! But
Strether's narrator covered her implication with a laugh; a laugh by
which his betrayal of a sense of the lurid in the picture was also
perhaps sufficiently protected.  He had a moment of wondering, while
his friend went on, what sins might be especially Roumelian.  She went
on at all events to the mention of her having met the young
thing--again by some Swiss lake--in her first married state, which had
appeared for the few intermediate years not at least violently
disturbed.  She had been lovely at that moment, delightful to HER, full
of responsive emotion, of amused recognitions and amusing reminders,
and then once more, much later, after a long interval, equally but
differently charming--touching and rather mystifying for the five
minutes of an encounter at a railway-station en province, during which
it had come out that her life was all changed.  Miss Gostrey had
understood enough to see, essentially, what had happened, and yet had
beautifully dreamed that she was herself faultless.  There were
doubtless depths in her, but she was all right; Strether would see if
she wasn't.  She was another person however--that had been promptly
marked--from the small child of nature at the Geneva school, a little
person quite made over (as foreign women WERE, compared with American)
by marriage.  Her situation too had evidently cleared itself up; there
would have been--all that was possible--a judicial separation.  She had
settled in Paris, brought up her daughter, steered her boat.  It was no
very pleasant boat--especially there--to be in; but Marie de Vionnet
would have headed straight.  She would have friends, certainly--and
very good ones.  There she was at all events--and it was very
interesting.  Her knowing Mr. Chad didn't in the least prove she hadn't
friends; what it proved was what good ones HE had. "I saw that," said
Miss Gostrey, "that night at the Francais; it came out for me in three
minutes.  I saw HER--or somebody like her. And so," she immediately
added, "did you."

"Oh no--not anybody like her!" Strether laughed.  "But you mean," he as
promptly went on, "that she has had such an influence on him?"

Miss Gostrey was on her feet; it was time for them to go.  "She has
brought him up for her daughter."

Their eyes, as so often, in candid conference, through their settled
glasses, met over it long; after which Strether's again took in the
whole place.  They were quite alone there now.  "Mustn't she rather--in
the time then--have rushed it?"

"Ah she won't of course have lost an hour.  But that's just the good
mother--the good French one.  You must remember that of her--that as a
mother she's French, and that for them there's a special providence. It
precisely however--that she mayn't have been able to begin as far back
as she'd have liked--makes her grateful for aid."

Strether took this in as they slowly moved to the house on their way
out.  "She counts on me then to put the thing through?"

"Yes--she counts on you.  Oh and first of all of course," Miss Gostrey
added, "on her--well, convincing you."

"Ah," her friend returned, "she caught Chad young!"

"Yes, but there are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're
the most wonderful sort."

She had laughed the words out, but they brought her companion, the next
thing, to a stand.  "Is what you mean that she'll try to make a fool of
me?"

"Well, I'm wondering what she WILL--with an opportunity--make."

"What do you call," Strether asked, "an opportunity?  My going to see
her?"

"Ah you must go to see her"--Miss Gostrey was a trifle evasive. "You
can't not do that.  You'd have gone to see the other woman.  I mean if
there had been one--a different sort.  It's what you came out for."

It might be; but Strether distinguished.  "I didn't come out to see
THIS sort."

She had a wonderful look at him now.  "Are you disappointed she isn't
worse?"

He for a moment entertained the question, then found for it the
frankest of answers.  "Yes.  If she were worse she'd be better for our
purpose.  It would be simpler."

"Perhaps," she admitted.  "But won't this be pleasanter?"

"Ah you know," he promptly replied, "I didn't come out--wasn't that
just what you originally reproached me with?--for the pleasant."

"Precisely.  Therefore I say again what I said at first.  You must take
things as they come.  Besides," Miss Gostrey added, "I'm not afraid for
myself."

"For yourself--?"

"Of your seeing her.  I trust her.  There's nothing she'll say about
me.  In fact there's nothing she CAN."

Strether wondered--little as he had thought of this.  Then he broke
out.  "Oh you women!"

There was something in it at which she flushed.  "Yes--there we are.
We're abysses." At last she smiled.  "But I risk her!"

He gave himself a shake.  "Well then so do I!"  But he added as they
passed into the house that he would see Chad the first thing in the
morning.

This was the next day the more easily effected that the young man, as
it happened, even before he was down, turned up at his hotel. Strether
took his coffee, by habit, in the public room; but on his descending
for this purpose Chad instantly proposed an adjournment to what he
called greater privacy.  He had himself as yet had nothing--they would
sit down somewhere together; and when after a few steps and a turn into
the Boulevard they had, for their greater privacy, sat down among
twenty others, our friend saw in his companion's move a fear of the
advent of Waymarsh.  It was the first time Chad had to that extent
given this personage "away"; and Strether found himself wondering of
what it was symptomatic.  He made out in a moment that the youth was in
earnest as he hadn't yet seen him; which in its turn threw a ray
perhaps a trifle startling on what they had each up to that time been
treating as earnestness. It was sufficiently flattering however that
the real thing--if this WAS at last the real thing--should have been
determined, as appeared, precisely by an accretion of Strether's
importance.  For this was what it quickly enough came to--that Chad,
rising with the lark, had rushed down to let him know while his morning
consciousness was yet young that he had literally made the afternoon
before a tremendous impression.  Madame de Vionnet wouldn't, couldn't
rest till she should have some assurance from him that he WOULD consent
again to see her.  The announcement was made, across their
marble-topped table, while the foam of the hot milk was in their cups
and its plash still in the air, with the smile of Chad's easiest
urbanity; and this expression of his face caused our friend's doubts to
gather on the spot into a challenge of the lips.  "See here"--that was
all; he only for the moment said again "See here." Chad met it with all
his air of straight intelligence, while Strether remembered again that
fancy of the first impression of him, the happy young Pagan, handsome
and hard but oddly indulgent, whose mysterious measure he had under the
street-lamp tried mentally to take.  The young Pagan, while a long look
passed between them, sufficiently understood.  Strether scarce needed
at last to say the rest--"I want to know where I am." But he said it,
adding before any answer something more.  "Are you engaged to be
married--is that your secret?--to the young lady?"

Chad shook his head with the slow amenity that was one of his ways of
conveying that there was time for everything.  "I have no
secret--though I may have secrets! I haven't at any rate that one.
We're not engaged.  No."

"Then where's the hitch?"

"Do you mean why I haven't already started with you?" Chad, beginning
his coffee and buttering his roll, was quite ready to explain. "Nothing
would have induced me--nothing will still induce me--not to try to keep
you here as long as you can be made to stay. It's too visibly good for
you." Strether had himself plenty to say about this, but it was amusing
also to measure the march of Chad's tone.  He had never been more a man
of the world, and it was always in his company present to our friend
that one was seeing how in successive connexions a man of the world
acquitted himself.  Chad kept it up beautifully. "My idea--voyons!--is
simply that you should let Madame de Vionnet know you, simply that you
should consent to know HER.  I don't in the least mind telling you
that, clever and charming as she is, she's ever so much in my
confidence. All I ask of you is to let her talk to you. You've asked me
about what you call my hitch, and so far as it goes she'll explain it
to you.  She's herself my hitch, hang it--if you must really have it
all out.  But in a sense," he hastened in the most wonderful manner to
add, "that you'll quite make out for yourself. She's too good a friend,
confound her.  Too good, I mean, for me to leave without--without--" It
was his first hesitation.

"Without what?"

"Well, without my arranging somehow or other the damnable terms of my
sacrifice."

"It WILL be a sacrifice then?"

"It will be the greatest loss I ever suffered.  I owe her so much."

It was beautiful, the way Chad said these things, and his plea was now
confessedly--oh quite flagrantly and publicly--interesting.  The moment
really took on for Strether an intensity.  Chad owed Madame de Vionnet
so much?  What DID that do then but clear up the whole mystery?  He was
indebted for alterations, and she was thereby in a position to have
sent in her bill for expenses incurred in reconstruction.  What was
this at bottom but what had been to be arrived at?  Strether sat there
arriving at it while he munched toast and stirred his second cup.  To
do this with the aid of Chad's pleasant earnest face was also to do
more besides.  No, never before had he been so ready to take him as he
was.  What was it that had suddenly so cleared up?  It was just
everybody's character; that is everybody's but--in a measure--his own.
Strether felt HIS character receive for the instant a smutch from all
the wrong things he had suspected or believed.  The person to whom Chad
owed it that he could positively turn out such a comfort to other
persons--such a person was sufficiently raised above any "breath" by
the nature of her work and the young man's steady light.  All of which
was vivid enough to come and go quickly; though indeed in the midst of
it Strether could utter a question.  "Have I your word of honour that
if I surrender myself to Madame de Vionnet you'll surrender yourself to
me?"

Chad laid his hand firmly on his friend's.  "My dear man, you have it."

There was finally something in his felicity almost embarrassing and
oppressive--Strether had begun to fidget under it for the open air and
the erect posture.  He had signed to the waiter that he wished to pay,
and this transaction took some moments, during which he thoroughly
felt, while he put down money and pretended--it was quite hollow--to
estimate change, that Chad's higher spirit, his youth, his practice,
his paganism, his felicity, his assurance, his impudence, whatever it
might be, had consciously scored a success. Well, that was all right so
far as it went; his sense of the thing in question covered our friend
for a minute like a veil through which--as if he had been muffled--he
heard his interlocutor ask him if he mightn't take him over about five.
"Over" was over the river, and over the river was where Madame de
Vionnet lived, and five was that very afternoon.  They got at last out
of the place--got out before he answered.  He lighted, in the street, a
cigarette, which again gave him more time.  But it was already sharp
for him that there was no use in time.  "What does she propose to do to
me?" he had presently demanded.

Chad had no delays.  "Are you afraid of her?"

"Oh immensely.  Don't you see it?"

"Well," said Chad, "she won't do anything worse to you than make you
like her."

"It's just of that I'm afraid."

"Then it's not fair to me."

Strether cast about.  "It's fair to your mother."

"Oh," said Chad, "are you afraid of HER?"

"Scarcely less.  Or perhaps even more.  But is this lady against your
interests at home?" Strether went on.

"Not directly, no doubt; but she's greatly in favour of them here."

"And what--'here'--does she consider them to be?"

"Well, good relations!"

"With herself?"

"With herself."

"And what is it that makes them so good?"

"What?  Well, that's exactly what you'll make out if you'll only go, as
I'm supplicating you, to see her."

Strether stared at him with a little of the wanness, no doubt, that the
vision of more to "make out" could scarce help producing.  "I mean HOW
good are they?"

"Oh awfully good."

Again Strether had faltered, but it was brief.  It was all very well,
but there was nothing now he wouldn't risk.  "Excuse me, but I must
really--as I began by telling you--know where I am.  Is she bad?"

"'Bad'?"--Chad echoed it, but without a shock.  "Is that what's
implied--?"

"When relations are good?" Strether felt a little silly, and was even
conscious of a foolish laugh, at having it imposed on him to have
appeared to speak so.  What indeed was he talking about?  His stare had
relaxed; he looked now all round him.  But something in him brought him
back, though he still didn't know quite how to turn it.  The two or
three ways he thought of, and one of them in particular, were, even
with scruples dismissed, too ugly.  He none the less at last found
something.  "Is her life without reproach?"

It struck him, directly he had found it, as pompous and priggish; so
much so that he was thankful to Chad for taking it only in the right
spirit.  The young man spoke so immensely to the point that the effect
was practically of positive blandness.  "Absolutely without reproach. A
beautiful life.  Allez donc voir!"

These last words were, in the liberality of their confidence, so
imperative that Strether went through no form of assent; but before
they separated it had been confirmed that he should be picked up at a
quarter to five.

Book Sixth

When Chad doesn't return from his walk with Jeanne, good old Maria Gostrey comes over to Strether saying that Chad has asked her to keep him company. Maria is amazed to realize that the de Vionnets have been the women Strether has talked to her about all along . Basically, Maria knows Madame de Vionnet from way back, and could have told Strether everything he needed to know about her. Miss Gostrey realizes that now that Madame de Vionnet knows she's in town, she'll try to visit. But Gostrey plans on avoiding her. It's not because she doesn't like Madame de Vionnet. It's because she doesn't want to get caught up in Strether's drama. She's happy to be a spectator to the whole thing, but doesn't want to be an actor. Based on what Maria Gostrey tells Strether, he realizes that Madame de Vionnet can't be a day younger than 38 years old, which makes her at least eight years older than Chad. Although Strether is also willing to admit that de Vionnet looks more like 28 than 38. He also learns that Madame de Vionnet is actually a Countess, meaning that she's from an old aristocratic French family. So he knows that she comes from a privileged background. This is when the alarm bells reminding us of the time Maria said maybe Chad's girlfriend was too good for his own fam start ring-a-dinging in our heads. Maria announces that she thinks that Madame de Vionnet has molded Chad into a cultured man for the sake of marrying him to her daughter, Jeanne. Further, she thinks that de Vionnet is going to try to get Strether's blessing for the marriage, since she knows that Chad respects Strether. This makes Strether feel a bit used, but he's still not complaining about having so many women suddenly interested in his opinion. Strether says that he's not sure if he wants to go meet Madame de Vionnet alone. But Maria insists that he has to, since he would have done the same had he tracked down the "evil" woman he expected to find Chad with. Maria also mentions that she's confident Madame de Vionnet won't tell Strether anything about her past that she doesn't want him to know. It's an odd statement, but Strether will let it slide for now. After this meeting, Strether goes to see Chad again, and he asks him outright if he's engaged to Jeanne de Vionnet. Chad shakes his head and says nope. And that's that. But wait, Strether says. Then whey can't Chad come back to the States? He just won't accept the fact that Chad doesn't want to go back to boring old Woollett. Basically, Chad says that he owes everything to Madame de Vionnet for transforming him into such a classy, smart man with sexy grey streaks in his hair. He can't bear the thought of leaving her and seeming ungrateful. Strether answers this by making Chad a deal: if he goes to see Madame de Vionnet with an open mind, Chad has to have an open mind about coming home. Chad says deal, and away we go. Strether mentions that he's afraid of Madame de Vionnet in a strange way. But Chad says there's nothing to be afraid of, other than liking the woman too much. Uh huh. Predictably, Strether then admits that he's afraid of this very thing, because he's even more afraid of doing something to anger Chad's mother, Mrs. Newsome. Before ending their meeting, Strether feels like he has to ask Chad one last thing--is Madame de Vionnet a virtuous person. Or in other words, does she lead a moral life without boozing or sleeping around. Chad replies that her life is indeed "virtuous." Once again, Strether never asks for confirmation on what this word actually means. The uncertainties go on.


It was quite by half-past five--after the two men had been together in
Madame de Vionnet's drawing-room not more than a dozen minutes--that
Chad, with a look at his watch and then another at their hostess, said
genially, gaily:  "I've an engagement, and I know you won't complain if
I leave him with you.  He'll interest you immensely; and as for her,"
he declared to Strether, "I assure you, if you're at all nervous, she's
perfectly safe."

He had left them to be embarrassed or not by this guarantee, as they
could best manage, and embarrassment was a thing that Strether wasn't
at first sure Madame de Vionnet escaped.  He escaped it himself, to his
surprise; but he had grown used by this time to thinking of himself as
brazen.  She occupied, his hostess, in the Rue de Bellechasse, the
first floor of an old house to which our visitors had had access from
an old clean court.  The court was large and open, full of revelations,
for our friend, of the habit of privacy, the peace of intervals, the
dignity of distances and approaches; the house, to his restless sense,
was in the high homely style of an elder day, and the ancient Paris
that he was always looking for--sometimes intensely felt, sometimes
more acutely missed--was in the immemorial polish of the wide waxed
staircase and in the fine boiseries, the medallions, mouldings,
mirrors, great clear spaces, of the greyish-white salon into which he
had been shown.  He seemed at the very outset to see her in the midst
of possessions not vulgarly numerous, but hereditary cherished
charming.  While his eyes turned after a little from those of his
hostess and Chad freely talked--not in the least about HIM, but about
other people, people he didn't know, and quite as if he did know
them--he found himself making out, as a background of the occupant,
some glory, some prosperity of the First Empire, some Napoleonic
glamour, some dim lustre of the great legend; elements clinging still
to all the consular chairs and mythological brasses and sphinxes' heads
and faded surfaces of satin striped with alternate silk.

The place itself went further back--that he guessed, and how old Paris
continued in a manner to echo there; but the post-revolutionary period,
the world he vaguely thought of as the world of Chateaubriand, of
Madame de Stael, even of the young Lamartine, had left its stamp of
harps and urns and torches, a stamp impressed on sundry small objects,
ornaments and relics.  He had never before, to his knowledge, had
present to him relics, of any special dignity, of a private
order--little old miniatures, medallions, pictures, books; books in
leather bindings, pinkish and greenish, with gilt garlands on the back,
ranged, together with other promiscuous properties, under the glass of
brass-mounted cabinets.  His attention took them all tenderly into
account. They were among the matters that marked Madame de Vionnet's
apartment as something quite different from Miss Gostrey's little
museum of bargains and from Chad's lovely home; he recognised it as
founded much more on old accumulations that had possibly from time to
time shrunken than on any contemporary method of acquisition or form of
curiosity.  Chad and Miss Gostrey had rummaged and purchased and picked
up and exchanged, sifting, selecting, comparing; whereas the mistress
of the scene before him, beautifully passive under the spell of
transmission--transmission from her father's line, he quite made up his
mind--had only received, accepted and been quiet.  When she hadn't been
quiet she had been moved at the most to some occult charity for some
fallen fortune.  There had been objects she or her predecessors might
even conceivably have parted with under need, but Strether couldn't
suspect them of having sold old pieces to get "better" ones.  They
would have felt no difference as to better or worse.  He could but
imagine their having felt--perhaps in emigration, in proscription, for
his sketch was slight and confused--the pressure of want or the
obligation of sacrifice.

The pressure of want--whatever might be the case with the other
force--was, however, presumably not active now, for the tokens of a
chastened ease still abounded after all, many marks of a taste whose
discriminations might perhaps have been called eccentric.  He guessed
at intense little preferences and sharp little exclusions, a deep
suspicion of the vulgar and a personal view of the right. The general
result of this was something for which he had no name on the spot quite
ready, but something he would have come nearest to naming in speaking
of it as the air of supreme respectability, the consciousness, small,
still, reserved, but none the less distinct and diffused, of private
honour.  The air of supreme respectability--that was a strange blank
wall for his adventure to have brought him to break his nose against.
It had in fact, as he was now aware, filled all the approaches, hovered
in the court as he passed, hung on the staircase as he mounted, sounded
in the grave rumble of the old bell, as little electric as possible, of
which Chad, at the door, had pulled the ancient but neatly-kept tassel;
it formed in short the clearest medium of its particular kind that he
had ever breathed.  He would have answered for it at the end of a
quarter of an hour that some of the glass cases contained swords and
epaulettes of ancient colonels and generals; medals and orders once
pinned over hearts that had long since ceased to beat; snuff-boxes
bestowed on ministers and envoys; copies of works presented, with
inscriptions, by authors now classic.  At bottom of it all for him was
the sense of her rare unlikeness to the women he had known.  This sense
had grown, since the day before, the more he recalled her, and had been
above all singularly fed by his talk with Chad in the morning.
Everything in fine made her immeasurably new, and nothing so new as the
old house and the old objects.  There were books, two or three, on a
small table near his chair, but they hadn't the lemon-coloured covers
with which his eye had begun to dally from the hour of his arrival and
to the opportunity of a further acquaintance with which he had for a
fortnight now altogether succumbed.  On another table, across the room,
he made out the great _Revue_; but even that familiar face, conspicuous
in Mrs. Newsome's parlours, scarce counted here as a modern note.  He
was sure on the spot--and he afterwards knew he was right--that this
was a touch of Chad's own hand.  What would Mrs. Newsome say to the
circumstance that Chad's interested "influence" kept her paper-knife in
the _Revue_?  The interested influence at any rate had, as we say, gone
straight to the point--had in fact soon left it quite behind.

She was seated, near the fire, on a small stuffed and fringed chair one
of the few modern articles in the room, and she leaned back in it with
her hands clasped in her lap and no movement, in all her person, but
the fine prompt play of her deep young face.  The fire, under the low
white marble, undraped and academic, had burnt down to the silver ashes
of light wood, one of the windows, at a distance, stood open to the
mildness and stillness, out of which, in the short pauses, came the
faint sound, pleasant and homely, almost rustic, of a plash and a
clatter of sabots from some coach-house on the other side of the court.
Madame de Vionnet, while Strether sat there, wasn't to shift her
posture by an inch. "I don't think you seriously believe in what you're
doing," she said; "but all the same, you know, I'm going to treat you
quite as if I did."

"By which you mean," Strether directly replied, "quite as if you
didn't!  I assure you it won't make the least difference with me how
you treat me."

"Well," she said, taking that menace bravely and philosophically
enough, "the only thing that really matters is that you shall get on
with me."

"Ah but I don't!" he immediately returned.

It gave her another pause; which, however, she happily enough shook
off.  "Will you consent to go on with me a little--provisionally--as if
you did?"

Then it was that he saw how she had decidedly come all the way; and
there accompanied it an extraordinary sense of her raising from
somewhere below him her beautiful suppliant eyes.  He might have been
perched at his door-step or at his window and she standing in the road.
For a moment he let her stand and couldn't moreover have spoken.  It
had been sad, of a sudden, with a sadness that was like a cold breath
in his face.  "What can I do," he finally asked, "but listen to you as
I promised Chadwick?"

"Ah but what I'm asking you," she quickly said, "isn't what Mr. Newsome
had in mind." She spoke at present, he saw, as if to take courageously
ALL her risk.  "This is my own idea and a different thing."

It gave poor Strether in truth--uneasy as it made him too--something of
the thrill of a bold perception justified.  "Well," he answered kindly
enough, "I was sure a moment since that some idea of your own had come
to you."

She seemed still to look up at him, but now more serenely.  "I made out
you were sure--and that helped it to come.  So you see," she continued,
"we do get on."

"Oh but it appears to me I don't at all meet your request.  How can I
when I don't understand it?"

"It isn't at all necessary you should understand; it will do quite well
enough if you simply remember it.  Only feel I trust you--and for
nothing so tremendous after all.  Just," she said with a wonderful
smile, "for common civility."

Strether had a long pause while they sat again face to face, as they
had sat, scarce less conscious, before the poor lady had crossed the
stream.  She was the poor lady for Strether now because clearly she had
some trouble, and her appeal to him could only mean that her trouble
was deep.  He couldn't help it; it wasn't his fault; he had done
nothing; but by a turn of the hand she had somehow made their encounter
a relation.  And the relation profited by a mass of things that were
not strictly in it or of it; by the very air in which they sat, by the
high cold delicate room, by the world outside and the little plash in
the court, by the First Empire and the relics in the stiff cabinets, by
matters as far off as those and by others as near as the unbroken clasp
of her hands in her lap and the look her expression had of being most
natural when her eyes were most fixed.  "You count upon me of course
for something really much greater than it sounds."

"Oh it sounds great enough too!" she laughed at this.

He found himself in time on the point of telling her that she was, as
Miss Barrace called it, wonderful; but, catching himself up, he said
something else instead.  "What was it Chad's idea then that you should
say to me?"

"Ah his idea was simply what a man's idea always is--to put every
effort off on the woman."

"The 'woman'--?" Strether slowly echoed.

"The woman he likes--and just in proportion as he likes her.  In
proportion too--for shifting the trouble--as she likes HIM."

Strether followed it; then with an abruptness of his own: "How much do
you like Chad?"

"Just as much as THAT--to take all, with you, on myself." But she got
at once again away from this.  "I've been trembling as if we were to
stand or fall by what you may think of me; and I'm even now," she went
on wonderfully, "drawing a long breath--and, yes, truly taking a great
courage--from the hope that I don't in fact strike you as impossible."

"That's at all events, clearly," he observed after an instant, "the way
I don't strike YOU."

"Well," she so far assented, "as you haven't yet said you WON'T have
the little patience with me I ask for--"

"You draw splendid conclusions?  Perfectly.  But I don't understand
them," Strether pursued.  "You seem to me to ask for much more than you
need.  What, at the worst for you, what at the best for myself, can I
after all do?  I can use no pressure that I haven't used.  You come
really late with your request.  I've already done all that for myself
the case admits of.  I've said my say, and here I am."

"Yes, here you are, fortunately!" Madame de Vionnet laughed.  "Mrs.
Newsome," she added in another tone, "didn't think you can do so
little."

He had an hesitation, but he brought the words out.  "Well, she thinks
so now."

"Do you mean by that--?" But she also hung fire.

"Do I mean what?"

She still rather faltered.  "Pardon me if I touch on it, but if I'm
saying extraordinary things, why, perhaps, mayn't I?  Besides, doesn't
it properly concern us to know?"

"To know what?" he insisted as after thus beating about the bush she
had again dropped.

She made the effort.  "Has she given you up?"

He was amazed afterwards to think how simply and quietly he had met it.
"Not yet." It was almost as if he were a trifle disappointed--had
expected still more of her freedom.  But he went straight on. "Is that
what Chad has told you will happen to me?"

She was evidently charmed with the way he took it.  "If you mean if
we've talked of it--most certainly.  And the question's not what has
had least to do with my wishing to see you."

"To judge if I'm the sort of man a woman CAN--?"

"Precisely," she exclaimed--"you wonderful gentleman! I do judge--I
HAVE judged.  A woman can't.  You're safe--with every right to be.
You'd be much happier if you'd only believe it."

Strether was silent a little; then he found himself speaking with a
cynicism of confidence of which even at the moment the sources were
strange to him.  "I try to believe it.  But it's a marvel," he
exclaimed, "how YOU already get at it!"

Oh she was able to say.  "Remember how much I was on the way to it
through Mr. Newsome--before I saw you.  He thinks everything of your
strength."

"Well, I can bear almost anything!" our friend briskly interrupted.
Deep and beautiful on this her smile came back, and with the effect of
making him hear what he had said just as she had heard it.  He easily
enough felt that it gave him away, but what in truth had everything
done but that?  It had been all very well to think at moments that he
was holding her nose down and that he had coerced her:  what had he by
this time done but let her practically see that he accepted their
relation?  What was their relation moreover--though light and brief
enough in form as yet--but whatever she might choose to make it?
Nothing could prevent her--certainly he couldn't--from making it
pleasant.  At the back of his head, behind everything, was the sense
that she was--there, before him, close to him, in vivid imperative
form--one of the rare women he had so often heard of, read of, thought
of, but never met, whose very presence, look, voice, the mere
contemporaneous FACT of whom, from the moment it was at all presented,
made a relation of mere recognition.  That was not the kind of woman he
had ever found Mrs. Newsome, a contemporaneous fact who had been
distinctly slow to establish herself; and at present, confronted with
Madame de Vionnet, he felt the simplicity of his original impression of
Miss Gostrey.  She certainly had been a fact of rapid growth; but the
world was wide, each day was more and more a new lesson.  There were at
any rate even among the stranger ones relations and relations. "Of
course I suit Chad's grand way," he quickly added.  "He hasn't had much
difficulty in working me in."

She seemed to deny a little, on the young man's behalf, by the rise of
her eyebrows, an intention of any process at all inconsiderate. "You
must know how grieved he'd be if you were to lose anything.  He
believes you can keep his mother patient."

Strether wondered with his eyes on her.  "I see.  THAT'S then what you
really want of me.  And how am I to do it?  Perhaps you'll tell me
that."

"Simply tell her the truth."

"And what do you call the truth?"

"Well, any truth--about us all--that you see yourself.  I leave it to
you."

"Thank you very much.  I like," Strether laughed with a slight
harshness, "the way you leave things!"

But she insisted kindly, gently, as if it wasn't so bad.  "Be perfectly
honest.  Tell her all."

"All?" he oddly echoed.

"Tell her the simple truth," Madame de Vionnet again pleaded.

"But what is the simple truth?  The simple truth is exactly what I'm
trying to discover."

She looked about a while, but presently she came back to him.  "Tell
her, fully and clearly, about US."

Strether meanwhile had been staring.  "You and your daughter?"

"Yes--little Jeanne and me.  Tell her," she just slightly quavered,
"you like us."

"And what good will that do me?  Or rather"--he caught himself
up--"what good will it do YOU?"

She looked graver.  "None, you believe, really?"

Strether debated.  "She didn't send me out to 'like' you."

"Oh," she charmingly contended, "she sent you out to face the facts."

He admitted after an instant that there was something in that.  "But
how can I face them till I know what they are?  Do you want him," he
then braced himself to ask, "to marry your daughter?"

She gave a headshake as noble as it was prompt.  "No--not that."

"And he really doesn't want to himself?"

She repeated the movement, but now with a strange light in her face.
"He likes her too much."

Strether wondered.  "To be willing to consider, you mean, the question
of taking her to America?"

"To be willing to do anything with her but be immensely kind and
nice--really tender of her.  We watch over her, and you must help us.
You must see her again."

Strether felt awkward.  "Ah with pleasure--she's so remarkably
attractive."

The mother's eagerness with which Madame de Vionnet jumped at this was
to come back to him later as beautiful in its grace.  "The dear thing
DID please you?" Then as he met it with the largest "Oh!" of
enthusiasm:  "She's perfect.  She's my joy."

"Well, I'm sure that--if one were near her and saw more of her--she'd
be mine."

"Then," said Madame de Vionnet, "tell Mrs. Newsome that!"

He wondered the more.  "What good will that do you?" As she appeared
unable at once to say, however, he brought out something else.  "Is
your daughter in love with our friend?"

"Ah," she rather startlingly answered, "I wish you'd find out!"

He showed his surprise.  "I?  A stranger?"

"Oh you won't be a stranger--presently.  You shall see her quite, I
assure you, as if you weren't."

It remained for him none the less an extraordinary notion.  "It seems
to me surely that if her mother can't--"

"Ah little girls and their mothers to-day!" she rather inconsequently
broke in.  But she checked herself with something she seemed to give
out as after all more to the point.  "Tell her I've been good for him.
Don't you think I have?"

It had its effect on him--more than at the moment he quite measured.
Yet he was consciously enough touched.  "Oh if it's all you--!"

"Well, it may not be 'all,'" she interrupted, "but it's to a great
extent.  Really and truly," she added in a tone that was to take its
place with him among things remembered.

"Then it's very wonderful."  He smiled at her from a face that he felt
as strained, and her own face for a moment kept him so.  At last she
also got up.  "Well, don't you think that for that--"

"I ought to save you?"  So it was that the way to meet her--and the
way, as well, in a manner, to get off--came over him.  He heard himself
use the exorbitant word, the very sound of which helped to determine
his flight.  "I'll save you if I can."

New scene: Chad and Strether are sitting next to each other again, but this time it's in Madame de Vionnet's drawing room. Without hesitating, Chad glances at his watch and says, "Hey, I totally need to be somewhere." So he gets up and leaves Strether alone in de Vionnet's house. Strether is surprised to find that this doesn't really surprise or scare him, in spite of his previous afraid-in-a-strange-way stuff. He can sense that he's changing, becoming less anxious and more confident in his social abilities while he's in Paris. And he likes the feeling quite a bit. The first thing Madame de Vionnet tells Strether is that she doesn't believe that Strether has faith in his mission to bring Chad home, but that she'll agree to talk to him as if he does. She doesn't lose points for candor, that's for sure. At first, Strether is pretty hostile because it's more or less his duty not to like Madame de Vionnet. But she asks if he's willing to pretend that they do get along, and he finally agrees because he promised Chad he'd keep an open mind. They spend the next ten minutes talking around one another and saying how charming they find each other. But neither one really says anything concrete. Finally, Madame de Vionnet makes the first jab and asks Strether if Mrs. Newsome has dumped him. Strether automatically responds, "Not yet," which definitely suggests he has some commitment issues. She also adds that she thinks Strether might be happier if he just stayed in Paris. He dodges the statement and keeps talking around the point. He wants to learn something concrete that he can report back to Mrs. Newsome. Madame de Vionnet advises him to just tell Mrs. Newsome everything he's seen. The trouble is, though, that Strether's looking for something negative to report on and hasn't found it yet. He knows Mrs. Newsome will find it suspicious if he only writes back about good things. Strether finally admits that he finds de Vionnet's daughter very charming and attractive. Again, Madame de Vionnet tells him to say so to Mrs. Newsome, but he repeats that he can't possibly say this in a letter. Strether ends the conversation by telling de Vionnet that he'll "save her" if he can. She doesn't know what he means by this, and neither does he. Yup, typical cliffhanger for our buddy James.


In Chad's lovely home, however, one evening ten days later, he felt
himself present at the collapse of the question of Jeanne de Vionnet's
shy secret.  He had been dining there in the company of that young lady
and her mother, as well as of other persons, and he had gone into the
petit salon, at Chad's request, on purpose to talk with her. The young
man had put this to him as a favour--"I should like so awfully to know
what you think of her.  It will really be a chance for you," he had
said, "to see the jeune fille--I mean the type--as she actually is, and
I don't think that, as an observer of manners, it's a thing you ought
to miss.  It will be an impression that--whatever else you take--you
can carry home with you, where you'll find again so much to compare it
with."

Strether knew well enough with what Chad wished him to compare it, and
though he entirely assented he hadn't yet somehow been so deeply
reminded that he was being, as he constantly though mutely expressed
it, used.  He was as far as ever from making out exactly to what end;
but he was none the less constantly accompanied by a sense of the
service he rendered.  He conceived only that this service was highly
agreeable to those who profited by it; and he was indeed still waiting
for the moment at which he should catch it in the act of proving
disagreeable, proving in some degree intolerable, to himself.  He
failed quite to see how his situation could clear up at all logically
except by some turn of events that would give him the pretext of
disgust.  He was building from day to day on the possibility of
disgust, but each day brought forth meanwhile a new and more engaging
bend of the road.  That possibility was now ever so much further from
sight than on the eve of his arrival, and he perfectly felt that,
should it come at all, it would have to be at best inconsequent and
violent.  He struck himself as a little nearer to it only when he asked
himself what service, in such a life of utility, he was after all
rendering Mrs. Newsome.  When he wished to help himself to believe that
he was still all right he reflected--and in fact with wonder--on the
unimpaired frequency of their correspondence; in relation to which what
was after all more natural than that it should become more frequent
just in proportion as their problem became more complicated?

Certain it is at any rate that he now often brought himself balm by the
question, with the rich consciousness of yesterday's letter, "Well,
what can I do more than that--what can I do more than tell her
everything?"  To persuade himself that he did tell her, had told her,
everything, he used to try to think of particular things he hadn't told
her.  When at rare moments and in the watches of the night he pounced
on one it generally showed itself to be--to a deeper scrutiny--not
quite truly of the essence.  When anything new struck him as coming up,
or anything already noted as reappearing, he always immediately wrote,
as if for fear that if he didn't he would miss something; and also that
he might be able to say to himself from time to time "She knows it
NOW--even while I worry." It was a great comfort to him in general not
to have left past things to be dragged to light and explained; not to
have to produce at so late a stage anything not produced, or anything
even veiled and attenuated, at the moment.  She knew it now:  that was
what he said to himself to-night in relation to the fresh fact of
Chad's acquaintance with the two ladies--not to speak of the fresher
one of his own.  Mrs. Newsome knew in other words that very night at
Woollett that he himself knew Madame de Vionnet and that he had
conscientiously been to see her; also that he had found her remarkably
attractive and that there would probably be a good deal more to tell.
But she further knew, or would know very soon, that, again
conscientiously, he hadn't repeated his visit; and that when Chad had
asked him on the Countess's behalf--Strether made her out vividly, with
a thought at the back of his head, a Countess--if he wouldn't name a
day for dining with her, he had replied lucidly: "Thank you very
much--impossible."  He had begged the young man would present his
excuses and had trusted him to understand that it couldn't really
strike one as quite the straight thing.  He hadn't reported to Mrs.
Newsome that he had promised to "save" Madame de Vionnet; but, so far
as he was concerned with that reminiscence, he hadn't at any rate
promised to haunt her house.  What Chad had understood could only, in
truth, be inferred from Chad's behaviour, which had been in this
connexion as easy as in every other.  He was easy, always, when he
understood; he was easier still, if possible, when he didn't; he had
replied that he would make it all right; and he had proceeded to do
this by substituting the present occasion--as he was ready to
substitute others--for any, for every occasion as to which his old
friend should have a funny scruple.

"Oh but I'm not a little foreign girl; I'm just as English as I can
be," Jeanne de Vionnet had said to him as soon as, in the petit salon,
he sank, shyly enough on his own side, into the place near her vacated
by Madame Gloriani at his approach.  Madame Gloriani, who was in black
velvet, with white lace and powdered hair, and whose somewhat massive
majesty melted, at any contact, into the graciousness of some
incomprehensible tongue, moved away to make room for the vague
gentleman, after benevolent greetings to him which embodied, as he
believed, in baffling accents, some recognition of his face from a
couple of Sundays before.  Then he had remarked--making the most of the
advantage of his years--that it frightened him quite enough to find
himself dedicated to the entertainment of a little foreign girl.  There
were girls he wasn't afraid of--he was quite bold with little
Americans.  Thus it was that she had defended herself to the end--"Oh
but I'm almost American too.  That's what mamma has wanted me to be--I
mean LIKE that; for she has wanted me to have lots of freedom.  She has
known such good results from it."

She was fairly beautiful to him--a faint pastel in an oval frame: he
thought of her already as of some lurking image in a long gallery, the
portrait of a small old-time princess of whom nothing was known but
that she had died young.  Little Jeanne wasn't, doubtless, to die
young, but one couldn't, all the same, bear on her lightly enough.  It
was bearing hard, it was bearing as HE, in any case, wouldn't bear, to
concern himself, in relation to her, with the question of a young man.
Odious really the question of a young man; one didn't treat such a
person as a maid-servant suspected of a "follower."  And then young
men, young men--well, the thing was their business simply, or was at
all events hers.  She was fluttered, fairly fevered--to the point of a
little glitter that came and went in her eyes and a pair of pink spots
that stayed in her cheeks--with the great adventure of dining out and
with the greater one still, possibly, of finding a gentleman whom she
must think of as very, very old, a gentleman with eye-glasses,
wrinkles, a long grizzled moustache.  She spoke the prettiest English,
our friend thought, that he had ever heard spoken, just as he had
believed her a few minutes before to be speaking the prettiest French.
He wondered almost wistfully if such a sweep of the lyre didn't react
on the spirit itself; and his fancy had in fact, before he knew it,
begun so to stray and embroider that he finally found himself, absent
and extravagant, sitting with the child in a friendly silence.  Only by
this time he felt her flutter to have fortunately dropped and that she
was more at her ease.  She trusted him, liked him, and it was to come
back to him afterwards that she had told him things.  She had dipped
into the waiting medium at last and found neither surge nor
chill--nothing but the small splash she could herself make in the
pleasant warmth, nothing but the safety of dipping and dipping again.
At the end of the ten minutes he was to spend with her his
impression--with all it had thrown off and all it had taken in--was
complete.  She had been free, as she knew freedom, partly to show him
that, unlike other little persons she knew, she had imbibed that ideal.
She was delightfully quaint about herself, but the vision of what she
had imbibed was what most held him.  It really consisted, he was soon
enough to feel, in just one great little matter, the fact that,
whatever her nature, she was thoroughly--he had to cast about for the
word, but it came--bred. He couldn't of course on so short an
acquaintance speak for her nature, but the idea of breeding was what
she had meanwhile dropped into his mind.  He had never yet known it so
sharply presented.  Her mother gave it, no doubt; but her mother, to
make that less sensible, gave so much else besides, and on neither of
the two previous occasions, extraordinary woman, Strether felt,
anything like what she was giving tonight.  Little Jeanne was a case,
an exquisite case of education; whereas the Countess, whom it so amused
him to think of by that denomination, was a case, also exquisite,
of--well, he didn't know what.

"He has wonderful taste, notre jeune homme":  this was what Gloriani
said to him on turning away from the inspection of a small picture
suspended near the door of the room.  The high celebrity in question
had just come in, apparently in search of Mademoiselle de Vionnet, but
while Strether had got up from beside her their fellow guest, with his
eye sharply caught, had paused for a long look.  The thing was a
landscape, of no size, but of the French school, as our friend was glad
to feel he knew, and also of a quality--which he liked to think he
should also have guessed; its frame was large out of proportion to the
canvas, and he had never seen a person look at anything, he thought,
just as Gloriani, with his nose very near and quick movements of the
head from side to side and bottom to top, examined this feature of
Chad's collection.  The artist used that word the next moment smiling
courteously, wiping his nippers and looking round him further--paying
the place in short by the very manner of his presence and by something
Strether fancied he could make out in this particular glance, such a
tribute as, to the latter's sense, settled many things once for all.
Strether was conscious at this instant, for that matter, as he hadn't
yet been, of how, round about him, quite without him, they WERE
consistently settled.  Gloriani's smile, deeply Italian, he considered,
and finely inscrutable, had had for him, during dinner, at which they
were not neighbours, an indefinite greeting; but the quality in it was
gone that had appeared on the other occasion to turn him inside out; it
was as if even the momentary link supplied by the doubt between them
had snapped.  He was conscious now of the final reality, which was that
there wasn't so much a doubt as a difference altogether; all the more
that over the difference the famous sculptor seemed to signal almost
condolingly, yet oh how vacantly! as across some great flat sheet of
water.  He threw out the bridge of a charming hollow civility on which
Strether wouldn't have trusted his own full weight a moment.  That
idea, even though but transient and perhaps belated, had performed the
office of putting Strether more at his ease, and the blurred picture
had already dropped--dropped with the sound of something else said and
with his becoming aware, by another quick turn, that Gloriani was now
on the sofa talking with Jeanne, while he himself had in his ears again
the familiar friendliness and the elusive meaning of the "Oh, oh, oh!"
that had made him, a fortnight before, challenge Miss Barrace in vain.
She had always the air, this picturesque and original lady, who struck
him, so oddly, as both antique and modern--she had always the air of
taking up some joke that one had already had out with her.  The point
itself, no doubt, was what was antique, and the use she made of it what
was modern.  He felt just now that her good-natured irony did bear on
something, and it troubled him a little that she wouldn't be more
explicit only assuring him, with the pleasure of observation so visible
in her, that she wouldn't tell him more for the world.  He could take
refuge but in asking her what she had done with Waymarsh, though it
must be added that he felt himself a little on the way to a clue after
she had answered that this personage was, in the other room, engaged in
conversation with Madame de Vionnet.  He stared a moment at the image
of such a conjunction; then, for Miss Barrace's benefit, he wondered.
"Is she too then under the charm--?"

"No, not a bit"--Miss Barrace was prompt.  "She makes nothing of him.
She's bored.  She won't help you with him."

"Oh," Strether laughed, "she can't do everything.

"Of course not--wonderful as she is.  Besides, he makes nothing of HER.
She won't take him from me--though she wouldn't, no doubt, having other
affairs in hand, even if she could.  I've never," said Miss Barrace,
"seen her fail with any one before.  And to-night, when she's so
magnificent, it would seem to her strange--if she minded.  So at any
rate I have him all.  Je suis tranquille!"

Strether understood, so far as that went; but he was feeling for his
clue.  "She strikes you to-night as particularly magnificent?"

"Surely.  Almost as I've never seen her.  Doesn't she you? Why it's FOR
you."

He persisted in his candour.  "'For' me--?"

"Oh, oh, oh!" cried Miss Barrace, who persisted in the opposite of that
quality.

"Well," he acutely admitted, "she IS different.  She's gay."

"She's gay!" Miss Barrace laughed.  "And she has beautiful
shoulders--though there's nothing different in that."

"No," said Strether, "one was sure of her shoulders. It isn't her
shoulders."

His companion, with renewed mirth and the finest sense,  between the
puffs of her cigarette, of the drollery of things, appeared to find
their conversation highly delightful.  "Yes, it isn't her shoulders ."

"What then is it?" Strether earnestly enquired.

"Why, it's SHE--simply.  It's her mood.  It's her charm."

"Of course it's her charm, but we're speaking of the difference."
"Well," Miss Barrace explained, "she's just brilliant, as we used to
say.  That's all.  She's various.  She's fifty women."

"Ah but only one"--Strether kept it clear--"at a time."

"Perhaps.  But in fifty times--!"

"Oh we shan't come to that," our friend declared; and the next moment
he had moved in another direction.  "Will you answer me a plain
question?  Will she ever divorce?"

Miss Barrace looked at him through all her tortoise-shell.  "Why should
she?"

It wasn't what he had asked for, he signified; but he met it well
enough.  "To marry Chad."

"Why should she marry Chad?"

"Because I'm convinced she's very fond of him.  She has done wonders
for him."

"Well then, how could she do more?  Marrying a man, or woman either,"
Miss Barrace sagely went on, "is never the wonder for any Jack and Jill
can bring THAT off.  The wonder is their doing such things without
marrying."

Strether considered a moment this proposition.  "You mean it's so
beautiful for our friends simply to go on so?"

But whatever he said made her laugh.  "Beautiful."

He nevertheless insisted.  "And THAT because it's disinterested?"

She was now, however, suddenly tired of the question.  "Yes then--call
it that.  Besides, she'll never divorce.  Don't, moreover," she added,
"believe everything you hear about her husband."

"He's not then," Strether asked, "a wretch?"

"Oh yes.  But charming."

"Do you know him?"

"I've met him.  He's bien aimable."

"To every one but his wife?"

"Oh for all I know, to her too--to any, to every woman.  I hope you at
any rate," she pursued with a quick change, "appreciate the care I take
of Mr. Waymarsh."

"Oh immensely." But Strether was not yet in line.  "At all events," he
roundly brought out, "the attachment's an innocent one."

"Mine and his?  Ah," she laughed, "don't rob it of ALL interest!"

"I mean our friend's here--to the lady we've been speaking of." That
was what he had settled to as an indirect but none the less closely
involved consequence of his impression of Jeanne.  That was where he
meant to stay.  "It's innocent," he repeated--"I see the whole thing."

Mystified by his abrupt declaration, she had glanced over at Gloriani
as at the unnamed subject of his allusion, but the next moment she had
understood; though indeed not before Strether had noticed her momentary
mistake and wondered what might possibly be behind that too.  He
already knew that the sculptor admired Madame de Vionnet; but did this
admiration also represent an attachment of which the innocence was
discussable?  He was moving verily in a strange air and on ground not
of the firmest.  He looked hard for an instant at Miss Barrace, but she
had already gone on.  "All right with Mr. Newsome?  Why of course she
is!"--and she got gaily back to the question of her own good friend. "I
dare say you're surprised that I'm not worn out with all I see--it
being so much!--of Sitting Bull.  But I'm not, you know--I don't mind
him; I bear up, and we get on beautifully.  I'm very strange; I'm like
that; and often I can't explain.  There are people who are supposed
interesting or remarkable or whatever, and who bore me to death; and
then there are others as to whom nobody can understand what anybody
sees in them--in whom I see no end of things."  Then after she had
smoked a moment, "He's touching, you know," she said.

"'Know'?" Strether echoed--"don't I, indeed?  We must move you almost
to tears."

"Oh but I don't mean YOU!" she laughed.

"You ought to then, for the worst sign of all--as I must have it for
you--is that you can't help me.  That's when a woman pities."

"Ah but I do help you!" she cheerfully insisted.

Again he looked at her hard, and then after a pause:  "No you don't!"

Her tortoise-shell, on its long chain, rattled down.  "I help you with
Sitting Bull.  That's a good deal."

"Oh that, yes."  But Strether hesitated.  "Do you mean he talks of me?"

"So that I have to defend you?  No, never.'

"I see," Strether mused.  "It's too deep."

"That's his only fault," she returned--"that everything, with him, is
too deep.  He has depths of silence--which he breaks only at the
longest intervals by a remark.  And when the remark comes it's always
something he has seen or felt for himself--never a bit banal THAT would
be what one might have feared and what would kill me But never."  She
smoked again as she thus, with amused complacency, appreciated her
acquisition.  "And never about you.  We keep clear of you.  We're
wonderful.  But I'll tell you what he does do," she continued:  "he
tries to make me presents."

"Presents?" poor Strether echoed, conscious with a pang that HE hadn't
yet tried that in any quarter.

"Why you see," she explained, "he's as fine as ever in the victoria; so
that when I leave him, as I often do almost for hours--he likes it
so--at the doors of shops, the sight of him there helps me, when I come
out, to know my carriage away off in the rank.  But sometimes, for a
change, he goes with me into the shops, and then I've all I can do to
prevent his buying me things."

"He wants to 'treat' you?"  Strether almost gasped at all he himself
hadn't thought of.  He had a sense of admiration.  "Oh he's much more
in the real tradition than I.  Yes," he mused, "it's the sacred rage."

"The sacred rage, exactly!"--and Miss Barrace, who hadn't before heard
this term applied, recognised its bearing with a clap of her gemmed
hands.  "Now I do know why he's not banal.  But I do prevent him all
the same--and if you saw what he sometimes selects--from buying.  I
save him hundreds and hundreds.  I only take flowers."

"Flowers?" Strether echoed again with a rueful reflexion.  How many
nosegays had her present converser sent?

"Innocent flowers," she pursued, "as much as he likes.  And he sends me
splendours; he knows all the best places--he has found them for
himself; he's wonderful."

"He hasn't told them to me," her friend smiled, "he has a life of his
own."  But Strether had swung back to the consciousness that for
himself after all it never would have done.  Waymarsh hadn't Mrs.
Waymarsh in the least to consider, whereas Lambert Strether had
constantly, in the inmost honour of his thoughts, to consider Mrs.
Newsome.  He liked moreover to feel how much his friend was in the real
tradition.  Yet he had his conclusion.  "WHAT a rage it is!" He had
worked it out.  "It's an opposition."

She followed, but at a distance.  "That's what I feel.  Yet to what?"

"Well, he thinks, you know, that I'VE a life of my own.  And I haven't!"

"You haven't?"  She showed doubt, and her laugh confirmed it. "Oh, oh,
oh!"

"No--not for myself.  I seem to have a life only for other people."

"Ah for them and WITH them! Just now for instance with--"

"Well, with whom?" he asked before she had had time to say.

His tone had the effect of making her hesitate and even, as he guessed,
speak with a difference.  "Say with Miss Gostrey.  What do you do for
HER?"  It really made him wonder.  "Nothing at all!"

Another ten days have gone by, and Strether is hanging out at Chad's house. By now, you have to figure that the Newsomes are wondering whether Strether has fallen off the face of the Earth. Chad repeats that he really hopes Strether will get along with Madame de Vionnet and her daughter Jeanne. Strether admits that he likes both, and worse yet, that he's said as much in his most recent letter to Mrs. Newsome. We smell a scandal. Strether remembers meeting Jeanne de Vionnet and how she told him that she's not just some shy little European girl. She feels like she's almost American, too, since her mother brought her up in a semi-American fashion. Again, Strether doesn't really know what this means. The great sculptor Gloriani comes over to Chad's place and remarks on what good taste in art Chad has. Not a bad compliment from someone who puts "great" in front of his name. Meanwhile, Waymarsh has gone off to have a conversation with Madame de Vionnet. Which means: time to gossip about them. Strether asks Miss Barrace if Madame de Vionnet is charmed by Waymarsh the way Miss Barrace is. Unsurprisingly , the answer is no. De Vionnet finds Waymarsh a bucket of yawns. And Waymarsh doesn't seem to like her all that much, either. Strether suddenly comes out and asks Miss Barrace is Madame de Vionnet plans on getting divorced so she can marry Chad. Miss Barrace is shocked by the question and asks why Strether would think this. After all, she says, any two people can get married. It's keeping up a relationship without marrying that's truly remarkable. Predictably, agonizingly, and in keeping with the way things generally go in this book, this isn't an answer to Strether's question. Sure, it gives him more food for thought, but it doesn't tell us one way or the other if anything is going on between Chad and Madame de Vionnet. After some more beating around the bush, Strether decides again that Chad's relationship to both Madame de Vionnet and her daughter Jeanne is totally innocent. It's pretty much like he's doing the same math problem over and over again and keeps getting the same answer and is basically okay with it, but wants to do it again anyway. They get back to the subject to Waymarsh, and Miss Barrace criticizes him for taking everything in life too seriously. Though she also lets it drop that Waymarsh likes to give her presents. Not necessarily because he likes her, but because he likes to spend the money. Strether tells Miss Barrace that Waymarsh possesses a "sacred rage" , meaning that his Christian, puritan personality leads him to approach life with a constant sense of moral outrage and dissatisfaction. Yikes. Strether finishes the conversation with a comment about how he only seems to live his life for other people. Miss Barrace comes out and asks if this is the case, what does he do for Maria Gostrey? The answer: he says he has no clue why Maria likes spending time with him.


Madame de Vionnet, having meanwhile come in, was at present close to
them, and Miss Barrace hereupon, instead of risking a rejoinder, became
again with a look that measured her from top to toe all mere
long-handled appreciative tortoise-shell.  She had struck our friend,
from the first of her appearing, as dressed for a great occasion, and
she met still more than on either of the others the conception
reawakened in him at their garden-party, the idea of the femme du monde
in her habit as she lived.  Her bare shoulders and arms were white and
beautiful; the materials of her dress, a mixture, as he supposed, of
silk and crape, were of a silvery grey so artfully composed as to give
an impression of warm splendour; and round her neck she wore a collar
of large old emeralds, the green note of which was more dimly repeated,
at other points of her apparel, in embroidery, in enamel, in satin, in
substances and textures vaguely rich.  Her head, extremely fair and
exquisitely festal, was like a happy fancy, a notion of the antique, on
an old precious medal, some silver coin of the Renaissance; while her
slim lightness and brightness, her gaiety, her expression, her
decision, contributed to an effect that might have been felt by a poet
as half mythological and half conventional. He could have compared her
to a goddess still partly engaged in a morning cloud, or to a sea-nymph
waist-high in the summer surge. Above all she suggested to him the
reflexion that the femme du monde--in these finest developments of the
type--was, like Cleopatra in the play, indeed various and multifold.
She had aspects, characters, days, nights--or had them at least, showed
them by a mysterious law of her own, when in addition to everything she
happened also to be a woman of genius.  She was an obscure person, a
muffled person one day, and a showy person, an uncovered person the
next.  He thought of Madame de Vionnet to-night as showy and uncovered,
though he felt the formula rough, because, thanks to one of the
short-cuts of genius she had taken all his categories by surprise.
Twice during dinner he had met Chad's eyes in a longish look; but these
communications had in truth only stirred up again old ambiguities--so
little was it clear from them whether they were an appeal or an
admonition. "You see how I'm fixed," was what they appeared to convey;
yet how he was fixed was exactly what Strether didn't see.  However,
perhaps he should see now.

"Are you capable of the very great kindness of going to relieve
Newsome, for a few minutes, of the rather crushing responsibility of
Madame Gloriani, while I say a word, if he'll allow me, to Mr.
Strether, of whom I've a question to ask?  Our host ought to talk a bit
to those other ladies, and I'll come back in a minute to your rescue."
She made this proposal to Miss Barrace as if her consciousness of a
special duty had just flickered-up, but that lady's recognition of
Strether's little start at it--as at a betrayal on the speaker's part
of a domesticated state--was as mute as his own comment; and after an
instant, when their fellow guest had good-naturedly left them, he had
been given something else to think of.  "Why has Maria so suddenly
gone?  Do you know?"  That was the question Madame de Vionnet had
brought with her.

"I'm afraid I've no reason to give you but the simple reason I've had
from her in a note--the sudden obligation to join in the south a sick
friend who has got worse."

"Ah then she has been writing you?"

"Not since she went--I had only a brief explanatory word before she
started.  I went to see her," Strether explained--"it was the day after
I called on you--but she was already on her way, and her concierge told
me that in case of my coming I was to be informed she had written to
me.  I found her note when I got home."

Madame de Vionnet listened with interest and with her eyes on
Strether's face; then her delicately decorated head had a small
melancholy motion.  "She didn't write to ME.  I went to see her," she
added, "almost immediately after I had seen you, and as I assured her I
would do when I met her at Gloriani's.  She hadn't then told me she was
to be absent, and I felt at her door as if I understood. She's
absent--with all respect to her sick friend, though I know indeed she
has plenty--so that I may not see her.  She doesn't want to meet me
again.  Well," she continued with a beautiful conscious mildness, "I
liked and admired her beyond every one in the old time, and she knew
it--perhaps that's precisely what has made her go--and I dare say I
haven't lost her for ever."  Strether still said nothing; he had a
horror, as he now thought of himself, of being in question between
women--was in fact already quite enough on his way to that, and there
was moreover, as it came to him, perceptibly, something behind these
allusions and professions that, should he take it in, would square but
ill with his present resolve to simplify. It was as if, for him, all
the same, her softness and sadness were sincere.  He felt that not less
when she soon went on: "I'm extremely glad of her happiness."  But it
also left him mute--sharp and fine though the imputation it conveyed.
What it conveyed was that HE was Maria Gostrey's happiness, and for the
least little instant he had the impulse to challenge the thought.  He
could have done so however only by saying "What then do you suppose to
be between us?" and he was wonderfully glad a moment later not to have
spoken.  He would rather seem stupid any day than fatuous, and he drew
back as well, with a smothered inward shudder, from the consideration
of what women--of highly-developed type in particular--might think of
each other.  Whatever he had come out for he hadn't come to go into
that; so that he absolutely took up nothing his interlocutress had now
let drop.  Yet, though he had kept away from her for days, had laid
wholly on herself the burden of their meeting again, she hadn't a gleam
of irritation to show him.  "Well, about Jeanne now?" she smiled--it
had the gaiety with which she had originally come in. He felt it on the
instant to represent her motive and real errand. But he had been
schooling her of a truth to say much in proportion to his little.  "Do
you make out that she has a sentiment?  I mean for Mr. Newsome."

Almost resentful, Strether could at last be prompt.  "How can I make
out such things?"

She remained perfectly good-natured.  "Ah but they're beautiful little
things, and you make out--don't pretend--everything in the world.
Haven't you," she asked, "been talking with her?"

"Yes, but not about Chad.  At least not much."

"Oh you don't require 'much'!" she reassuringly declared.  But she
immediately changed her ground.  "I hope you remember your promise of
the other day."

"To 'save' you, as you called it?"

"I call it so still.  You WILL?" she insisted.  "You haven't repented?"

He wondered.  "No--but I've been thinking what I meant."

She kept it up.  "And not, a little, what I did?"

"No--that's not necessary.  It will be enough if I know what I meant
myself."

"And don't you know," she asked, "by this time?"

Again he had a pause.  "I think you ought to leave it to me. But how
long," he added, "do you give me?"

"It seems to me much more a question of how long you give ME. Doesn't
our friend here himself, at any rate," she went on, "perpetually make
me present to you?"

"Not," Strether replied, "by ever speaking of you to me."

"He never does that?"

"Never."

She considered, and, if the fact was disconcerting to her, effectually
concealed it.  The next minute indeed she had recovered. "No, he
wouldn't.  But do you NEED that?"

Her emphasis was wonderful, and though his eyes had been wandering he
looked at her longer now.  "I see what you mean."

"Of course you see what I mean."

Her triumph was gentle, and she really had tones to make justice weep.
"I've before me what he owes you."

"Admit then that that's something," she said, yet still with the same
discretion in her pride.

He took in this note but went straight on.  "You've made of him what I
see, but what I don't see is how in the world you've done it."

"Ah that's another question!" she smiled.  "The point is of what use is
your declining to know me when to know Mr. Newsome--as you do me the
honour to find him--IS just to know me."

"I see," he mused, still with his eyes on her.  "I shouldn't have met
you to-night."

She raised and dropped her linked hands.  "It doesn't matter.  If I
trust you why can't you a little trust me too?  And why can't you
also," she asked in another tone, "trust yourself?"  But she gave him
no time to reply.  "Oh I shall be so easy for you! And I'm glad at any
rate you've seen my child."

"I'm glad too," he said; "but she does you no good."

"No good?"--Madame de Vionnet had a clear stare.  "Why she's an angel
of light."

"That's precisely the reason.  Leave her alone.  Don't try to find out.
I mean," he explained, "about what you spoke to me of--the way she
feels."

His companion wondered.  "Because one really won't?"

"Well, because I ask you, as a favour to myself, not to.  She's the
most charming creature I've ever seen.  Therefore don't touch her.
Don't know--don't want to know.  And moreover--yes--you won't."

It was an appeal, of a sudden, and she took it in.  "As a favour to
you?"

"Well--since you ask me."

"Anything, everything you ask," she smiled.  "I shan't know
then--never. Thank you," she added with peculiar gentleness as she
turned away.

The sound of it lingered with him, making him fairly feel as if he had
been tripped up and had a fall.  In the very act of arranging with her
for his independence he had, under pressure from a particular
perception, inconsistently, quite stupidly, committed himself, and,
with her subtlety sensitive on the spot to an advantage, she had driven
in by a single word a little golden nail, the sharp intention of which
he signally felt.  He hadn't detached, he had more closely connected
himself, and his eyes, as he considered with some intensity this
circumstance, met another pair which had just come within their range
and which struck him as reflecting his sense of what he had done.  He
recognised them at the same moment as those of little Bilham, who had
apparently drawn near on purpose to speak to him, and little Bilham
wasn't, in the conditions, the person to whom his heart would be most
closed. They were seated together a minute later at the angle of the
room obliquely opposite the corner in which Gloriani was still engaged
with Jeanne de Vionnet, to whom at first and in silence their attention
had been benevolently given.  "I can't see for my life," Strether had
then observed, "how a young fellow of any spirit--such a one as you for
instance--can be admitted to the sight of that young lady without being
hard hit.  Why don't you go in, little Bilham?"  He remembered the tone
into which he had been betrayed on the garden-bench at the sculptor's
reception, and this might make up for that by being much more the right
sort of thing to say to a young man worthy of any advice at all. "There
WOULD be some reason."

"Some reason for what?"

"Why for hanging on here."

"To offer my hand and fortune to Mademoiselle de Vionnet?"

"Well," Strether asked, "to what lovelier apparition COULD you offer
them?  She's the sweetest little thing I've ever seen."

"She's certainly immense.  I mean she's the real thing.  I believe the
pale pink petals are folded up there for some wondrous efflorescence in
time; to open, that is, to some great golden sun. I'M unfortunately but
a small farthing candle.  What chance in such a field for a poor little
painter-man?"

"Oh you're good enough," Strether threw out.

"Certainly I'm good enough.  We're good enough, I consider, nous
autres, for anything.  But she's TOO good.  There's the difference.
They wouldn't look at me."

Strether, lounging on his divan and still charmed by the young girl,
whose eyes had consciously strayed to him, he fancied, with a vague
smile--Strether, enjoying the whole occasion as with dormant pulses at
last awake and in spite of new material thrust upon him, thought over
his companion's words.  "Whom do you mean by 'they'? She and her
mother?"

"She and her mother.  And she has a father too, who, whatever else he
may be, certainly can't be indifferent to the possibilities she
represents.  Besides, there's Chad."

Strether was silent a little.  "Ah but he doesn't care for her--not, I
mean, it appears, after all, in the sense I'm speaking of.  He's NOT in
love with her."

"No--but he's her best friend; after her mother.  He's very fond of
her.  He has his ideas about what can be done for her."

"Well, it's very strange!" Strether presently remarked with a sighing
sense of fulness.

"Very strange indeed.  That's just the beauty of it.  Isn't it very
much the kind of beauty you had in mind," little Bilham went on, "when
you were so wonderful and so inspiring to me the other day? Didn't you
adjure me, in accents I shall never forget, to see, while I've a
chance, everything I can?--and REALLY to see, for it must have been
that only you meant.  Well, you did me no end of good, and I'm doing my
best.  I DO make it out a situation."

"So do I!" Strether went on after a moment.  But he had the next minute
an inconsequent question.  "How comes Chad so mixed up, anyway?"

"Ah, ah, ah!"--and little Bilham fell back on his cushions.

It reminded our friend of Miss Barrace, and he felt again the brush of
his sense of moving in a maze of mystic closed allusions.  Yet he kept
hold of his thread.  "Of course I understand really; only the general
transformation makes me occasionally gasp.  Chad with such a voice in
the settlement of the future of a little countess--no," he declared,
"it takes more time! You say moreover," he resumed, "that we're
inevitably, people like you and me, out of the running.  The curious
fact remains that Chad himself isn't.  The situation doesn't make for
it, but in a different one he could have her if he would."

"Yes, but that's only because he's rich and because there's a
possibility of his being richer.  They won't think of anything but a
great name or a great fortune."

"Well," said Strether, "he'll have no great fortune on THESE lines. He
must stir his stumps."

"Is that," little Bilham enquired, "what you were saying to Madame de
Vionnet?"

"No--I don't say much to her.  Of course, however," Strether continued,
"he can make sacrifices if he likes."

Little Bilham had a pause.  "Oh he's not keen for sacrifices; or
thinks, that is, possibly, that he has made enough."

"Well, it IS virtuous," his companion observed with some decision.

"That's exactly," the young man dropped after a moment, "what I mean."

It kept Strether himself silent a little.  "I've made it out for
myself," he then went on; "I've really, within the last half-hour, got
hold of it.  I understand it in short at last; which at first--when you
originally spoke to me--I didn't.  Nor when Chad originally spoke to me
either."

"Oh," said little Bilham, "I don't think that at that time you believed
me."

"Yes--I did; and I believed Chad too.  It would have been odious and
unmannerly--as well as quite perverse--if I hadn't.  What interest have
you in deceiving me?"

The young man cast about.  "What interest have I?"

"Yes.  Chad MIGHT have.  But you?"

"Ah, ah, ah!" little Bilham exclaimed.

It might, on repetition, as a mystification, have irritated our friend
a little, but he knew, once more, as we have seen, where he was, and
his being proof against everything was only another attestation that he
meant to stay there.  "I couldn't, without my own impression, realise.
She's a tremendously clever brilliant capable woman, and with an
extraordinary charm on top of it all--the charm we surely all of us
this evening know what to think of. It isn't every clever brilliant
capable woman that has it.  In fact it's rare with any woman.  So there
you are," Strether proceeded as if not for little Bilham's benefit
alone.  "I understand what a relation with such a woman--what such a
high fine friendship--may be.  It can't be vulgar or coarse,
anyway--and that's the point."

"Yes, that's the point," said little Bilham.  "It can't be vulgar or
coarse.  And, bless us and save us, it ISn't!  It's, upon my word, the
very finest thing I ever saw in my life, and the most distinguished."

Strether, from beside him and leaning back with him as he leaned,
dropped on him a momentary look which filled a short interval and of
which he took no notice.  He only gazed before him with intent
participation.  "Of course what it has done for him," Strether at all
events presently pursued, "of course what it has done for him--that is
as to HOW it has so wonderfully worked--isn't a thing I pretend to
understand.  I've to take it as I find it.  There he is."

"There he is!" little Bilham echoed.  "And it's really and truly she. I
don't understand either, even with my longer and closer opportunity.
But I'm like you," he added; "I can admire and rejoice even when I'm a
little in the dark.  You see I've watched it for some three years, and
especially for this last.  He wasn't so bad before it as I seem to have
made out that you think--"

"Oh I don't think anything now!" Strether impatiently broke in: "that
is but what I DO think! I mean that originally, for her to have cared
for him--"

"There must have been stuff in him?  Oh yes, there was stuff indeed,
and much more of it than ever showed, I dare say, at home.  Still, you
know," the young man in all fairness developed, "there was room for
her, and that's where she came in.  She saw her chance and took it.
That's what strikes me as having been so fine.  But of course," he
wound up, "he liked her first."

"Naturally," said Strether.

"I mean that they first met somehow and somewhere--I believe in some
American house--and she, without in the least then intending it, made
her impression.  Then with time and opportunity he made his; and after
THAT she was as bad as he."

Strether vaguely took it up.  "As 'bad'?"

"She began, that is, to care--to care very much.  Alone, and in her
horrid position, she found it, when once she had started, an interest.
It was, it is, an interest, and it did--it continues to do--a lot for
herself as well.  So she still cares.  She cares in fact," said little
Bilham thoughtfully "more."

Strether's theory that it was none of his business was somehow not
damaged by the way he took this.  "More, you mean, than he?"  On which
his companion looked round at him, and now for an instant their eyes
met.  "More than he?" he repeated.

Little Bilham, for as long, hung fire.  "Will you never tell any one?"

Strether thought.  "Whom should I tell?"

"Why I supposed you reported regularly--"

"To people at home?"--Strether took him up.  "Well, I won't tell them
this."

The young man at last looked away.  "Then she does now care more than
he."

"Oh!" Strether oddly exclaimed.

But his companion immediately met it.  "Haven't you after all had your
impression of it?  That's how you've got hold of him."

"Ah but I haven't got hold of him!"

"Oh I say!"  But it was all little Bilham said.

"It's at any rate none of my business.  I mean," Strether explained,
"nothing else than getting hold of him is."  It appeared, however, to
strike him as his business to add:  "The fact remains nevertheless that
she has saved him."

Little Bilham just waited.  "I thought that was what you were to do."

But Strether had his answer ready.  "I'm speaking--in connexion with
her--of his manners and morals, his character and life.  I'm speaking
of him as a person to deal with and talk with and live with--speaking
of him as a social animal."

"And isn't it as a social animal that you also want him?"

"Certainly; so that it's as if she had saved him FOR us."

"It strikes you accordingly then," the young man threw out, "as for you
all to save HER?"

"Oh for us 'all'--!" Strether could but laugh at that.  It brought him
back, however, to the point he had really wished to make. "They've
accepted their situation--hard as it is.  They're not free--at least
she's not; but they take what's left to them.  It's a friendship, of a
beautiful sort; and that's what makes them so strong.  They're
straight, they feel; and they keep each other up. It's doubtless she,
however, who, as you yourself have hinted, feels it most."

Little Bilham appeared to wonder what he had hinted.  "Feels most that
they're straight?"

"Well, feels that SHE is, and the strength that comes from it.  She
keeps HIM up--she keeps the whole thing up.  When people are able to
it's fine.  She's wonderful, wonderful, as Miss Barrace says; and he
is, in his way, too; however, as a mere man, he may sometimes rebel and
not feel that he finds his account in it.  She has simply given him an
immense moral lift, and what that can explain is prodigious. That's why
I speak of it as a situation.  It IS one, if there ever was."  And
Strether, with his head back and his eyes on the ceiling, seemed to
lose himself in the vision of it.

His companion attended deeply.  "You state it much better than I
could." "Oh you see it doesn't concern you."

Little Bilham considered.  "I thought you said just now that it doesn't
concern you either."

"Well, it doesn't a bit as Madame de Vionnet's affair.  But as we were
again saying just now, what did I come out for but to save him?"

"Yes--to remove him."

"To save him by removal; to win him over to HIMSELF thinking it best he
shall take up business--thinking he must immediately do therefore
what's necessary to that end."

"Well," said little Bilham after a moment, "you HAVE won him over. He
does think it best.  He has within a day or two again said to me as
much."

"And that," Strether asked, "is why you consider that he cares less
than she?"

"Cares less for her than she for him?  Yes, that's one of the reasons.
But other things too have given me the impression.  A man, don't you
think?" little Bilham presently pursued, "CAN'T, in such conditions,
care so much as a woman.  It takes different conditions to make him,
and then perhaps he cares more.  Chad," he wound up, "has his possible
future before him."

"Are you speaking of his business future?"

"No--on the contrary; of the other, the future of what you so justly
call their situation.  M. de Vionnet may live for ever."

"So that they can't marry?"

The young man waited a moment.  "Not being able to marry is all they've
with any confidence to look forward to.  A woman--a particular
woman--may stand that strain.  But can a man?" he propounded.

Strether's answer was as prompt as if he had already, for himself,
worked it out.  "Not without a very high ideal of conduct.  But that's
just what we're attributing to Chad.  And how, for that matter," he
mused, "does his going to America diminish the particular strain?
Wouldn't it seem rather to add to it?"

"Out of sight out of mind!" his companion laughed.  Then more bravely:
"Wouldn't distance lessen the torment?"  But before Strether could
reply, "The thing is, you see, Chad ought to marry!" he wound up.

Strether, for a little, appeared to think of it.  "If you talk of
torments you don't diminish mine!" he then broke out.  The next moment
he was on his feet with a question.  "He ought to marry whom?"

Little Bilham rose more slowly.  "Well, some one he CAN--some
thoroughly nice girl."

Strether's eyes, as they stood together, turned again to Jeanne. "Do
you mean HER?"

His friend made a sudden strange face.  "After being in love with her
mother?  No."

"But isn't it exactly your idea that he ISn't in love with her mother?"

His friend once more had a pause.  "Well, he isn't at any rate in love
with Jeanne."

"I dare say not."

"How CAN he be with any other woman?"

"Oh that I admit.  But being in love isn't, you know, here"--little
Bilham spoke in friendly reminder--"thought necessary, in strictness,
for marriage."

"And what torment--to call a torment--can there ever possibly be with a
woman like that?"  As if from the interest of his own question Strether
had gone on without hearing.  "Is it for her to have turned a man out
so wonderfully, too, only for somebody else?" He appeared to make a
point of this, and little Bilham looked at him now.  "When it's for
each other that people give things up they don't miss them."  Then he
threw off as with an extravagance of which he was conscious: "Let them
face the future together!"

Little Bilham looked at him indeed.  "You mean that after all he
shouldn't go back?"

"I mean that if he gives her up--!"

"Yes?"

"Well, he ought to be ashamed of himself."  But Strether spoke with a
sound that might have passed for a laugh.

Volume II

Book Seventh

Strether is at some swanky joint and Chad, Miss Barrace, and the Vionnets are all in attendance. Madame de Vionnet marches right up to him and asks why Maria Gostrey has suddenly left Paris. Strether has no clue. Madame says she just got a sudden note from Maria saying that Maria has had to go to the south of France to visit a sick friend. Which sounds kind of made up. De Vionnet is worried that Maria doesn't like her. But she doesn't know what Strether does--that Maria doesn't want to get herself in the middle of the whole Chad drama. Plus, Madame de Vionnet wants Strether to stop being so cagey around her. If he feels like he's buddies with the new-and-improved Chad Newsome, well, that means he better get better with Madame de Vionnet too, since Chad is basically her creation. Strether breaks away from the conversation and wanders over to hang with Bilham some more. He asks Bilham if he would ever propose marriage to Jeanne de Vionnet. Bilham is shocked at the question, since he's just a poor artist and Jeanne is a Countess' daughter. Strether says off-handedly that Bilham is good enough for her. But the claim lacks conviction. Looks like he's just trying to get a rise outta someone... Bilham says that he needs to think of Chad's feelings. Strether, sensing a chance for information, tells Bilham that Chad isn't in love with Jeanne. Bilham agrees, but says that Chad is Jeanne's best friend and it might still be weird for Bilham to get involved with her. Like a bromance before romance sort of thing, but with some of the roles switched. They return to the oft-discussed idea that Chad's connection to Madame de Vionnet and her daughter is a totally "virtuous" one. Strether mentions that up until this moment, he never fully believed it. But now he does. Bilham agrees that the relationship between Chad and the Vionnets is one of the finest things he's ever seen. Don't forget, words like "fine" and "virtuous" are very vague. Bilham adds a comment about how a man usually can't care as much about a relationship as a woman can. He seems to be referring to Chad and Madame de Vionnet. Bilham says that things would be better if Chad got married. But it's tough because he loves Madame de Vionnet. Strether hears this and says, "You mean in a platonic way, right?" and Bilham pretty much says, "Uh yeah, sure." Strether concludes the conversation by saying that Chad shouldn't go back to America; he owes too much to Madame de Vionnet to leave her. Whoa, about-face!