Strether couldn't have said he had during the previous hours definitely
expected it; yet when, later on, that morning--though no later indeed
than for his coming forth at ten o'clock--he saw the concierge produce,
on his approach, a petit bleu delivered since his letters had been sent
up, he recognised the appearance as the first symptom of a sequel.  He
then knew he had been thinking of some early sign from Chad as more
likely, after all, than not; and this would be precisely the early
sign.  He took it so for granted that he opened the petit bleu just
where he had stopped, in the pleasant cool draught of the
porte-cochere--only curious to see where the young man would, at such a
juncture, break out.  His curiosity, however, was more than gratified;
the small missive, whose gummed edge he had detached without attention
to the address, not being from the young man at all, but from the
person whom the case gave him on the spot as still more worth while.
Worth while or not, he went round to the nearest telegraph-office, the
big one on the Boulevard, with a directness that almost confessed to a
fear of the danger of delay.  He might have been thinking that if he
didn't go before he could think he wouldn't perhaps go at all.  He at
any rate kept, in the lower side-pocket of his morning coat, a very
deliberate hand on his blue missive, crumpling it up rather tenderly
than harshly.  He wrote a reply, on the Boulevard, also in the form of
a petit bleu--which was quickly done, under pressure of the place,
inasmuch as, like Madame de Vionnet's own communication, it consisted
of the fewest words.  She had asked him if he could do her the very
great kindness of coming to see her that evening at half-past nine, and
he answered, as if nothing were easier, that he would present himself
at the hour she named.  She had added a line of postscript, to the
effect that she would come to him elsewhere and at his own hour if he
preferred; but he took no notice of this, feeling that if he saw her at
all half the value of it would be in seeing her where he had already
seen her best.  He mightn't see her at all; that was one of the
reflexions he made after writing and before he dropped his closed card
into the box; he mightn't see any one at all any more at all; he might
make an end as well now as ever, leaving things as they were, since he
was doubtless not to leave them better, and taking his way home so far
as should appear that a home remained to him.  This alternative was for
a few minutes so sharp that if he at last did deposit his missive it
was perhaps because the pressure of the place had an effect.

There was none other, however, than the common and constant pressure,
familiar to our friend under the rubric of Postes et Telegraphes--the
something in the air of these establishments; the vibration of the vast
strange life of the town, the influence of the types, the performers
concocting their messages; the little prompt Paris women, arranging,
pretexting goodness knew what, driving the dreadful needle-pointed
public pen at the dreadful sand-strewn public table: implements that
symbolised for Strether's too interpretative innocence something more
acute in manners, more sinister in morals, more fierce in the national
life.  After he had put in his paper he had ranged himself, he was
really amused to think, on the side of the fierce, the sinister, the
acute.  He was carrying on a correspondence, across the great city,
quite in the key of the Postes et Telegraphes in general; and it was
fairly as if the acceptance of that fact had come from something in his
state that sorted with the occupation of his neighbours.  He was mixed
up with the typical tale of Paris, and so were they, poor things--how
could they all together help being? They were no worse than he, in
short, and he no worse than they--if, queerly enough, no better; and at
all events he had settled his hash, so that he went out to begin, from
that moment, his day of waiting.  The great settlement was, as he felt,
in his preference for seeing his correspondent in her own best
conditions.  THAT was part of the typical tale, the part most
significant in respect to himself.  He liked the place she lived in,
the picture that each time squared itself, large and high and clear,
around her:  every occasion of seeing it was a pleasure of a different
shade.  Yet what precisely was he doing with shades of pleasure now,
and why hadn't he properly and logically compelled her to commit
herself to whatever of disadvantage and penalty the situation might
throw up?  He might have proposed, as for Sarah Pocock, the cold
hospitality of his own salon de lecture, in which the chill of Sarah's
visit seemed still to abide and shades of pleasure were dim; he might
have suggested a stone bench in the dusty Tuileries or a penny chair at
the back part of the Champs Elysees.  These things would have been a
trifle stern, and sternness alone now wouldn't be sinister.  An
instinct in him cast about for some form of discipline in which they
might meet--some awkwardness they would suffer from, some danger, or at
least some grave inconvenience, they would incur.  This would give a
sense--which the spirit required, rather ached and sighed in the
absence of--that somebody was paying something somewhere and somehow,
that they were at least not all floating together on the silver stream
of impunity.  Just instead of that to go and see her late in the
evening, as if, for all the world--well, as if he were as much in the
swim as anybody else:  this had as little as possible in common with
the penal form.

Even when he had felt that objection melt away, however, the practical
difference was small; the long stretch of his interval took the colour
it would, and if he lived on thus with the sinister from hour to hour
it proved an easier thing than one might have supposed in advance.  He
reverted in thought to his old tradition, the one he had been brought
up on and which even so many years of life had but little worn away;
the notion that the state of the wrongdoer, or at least this person's
happiness, presented some special difficulty.  What struck him now
rather was the ease of it--for nothing in truth appeared easier.  It
was an ease he himself fairly tasted of for the rest of the day; giving
himself quite up; not so much as trying to dress it out, in any
particular whatever, as a difficulty; not after all going to see
Maria--which would have been in a manner a result of such dressing;
only idling, lounging, smoking, sitting in the shade, drinking lemonade
and consuming ices.  The day had turned to heat and eventual thunder,
and he now and again went back to his hotel to find that Chad hadn't
been there.  He hadn't yet struck himself, since leaving Woollett, so
much as a loafer, though there had been times when he believed himself
touching bottom.  This was a deeper depth than any, and with no
foresight, scarcely with a care, as to what he should bring up.  He
almost wondered if he didn't LOOK demoralised and disreputable; he had
the fanciful vision, as he sat and smoked, of some accidental, some
motived, return of the Pococks, who would be passing along the
Boulevard and would catch this view of him. They would have distinctly,
on his appearance, every ground for scandal. But fate failed to
administer even that sternness; the Pococks never passed and Chad made
no sign.  Strether meanwhile continued to hold off from Miss Gostrey,
keeping her till to-morrow; so that by evening his irresponsibility,
his impunity, his luxury, had become--there was no other word for
them--immense.

Between nine and ten, at last, in the high clear picture--he was moving
in these days, as in a gallery, from clever canvas to clever canvas--he
drew a long breath:  it was so presented to him from the first that the
spell of his luxury wouldn't be broken.  He wouldn't have, that is, to
become responsible--this was admirably in the air: she had sent for him
precisely to let him feel it, so that he might go on with the comfort
(comfort already established, hadn't it been?) of regarding his ordeal,
the ordeal of the weeks of Sarah's stay and of their climax, as safely
traversed and left behind him.  Didn't she just wish to assure him that
SHE now took it all and so kept it; that he was absolutely not to worry
any more, was only to rest on his laurels and continue generously to
help her?  The light in her beautiful formal room was dim, though it
would do, as everything would always do; the hot night had kept out
lamps, but there was a pair of clusters of candles that glimmered over
the chimney-piece like the tall tapers of an altar. The windows were
all open, their redundant hangings swaying a little, and he heard once
more, from the empty court, the small plash of the fountain.  From
beyond this, and as from a great distance--beyond the court, beyond the
corps de logis forming the front--came, as if excited and exciting, the
vague voice of Paris. Strether had all along been subject to sudden
gusts of fancy in connexion with such matters as these--odd starts of
the historic sense, suppositions and divinations with no warrant but
their intensity.  Thus and so, on the eve of the great recorded dates,
the days and nights of revolution, the sounds had come in, the omens,
the beginnings broken out.  They were the smell of revolution, the
smell of the public temper--or perhaps simply the smell of blood.

It was at present queer beyond words, "subtle," he would have risked
saying, that such suggestions should keep crossing the scene; but it
was doubtless the effect of the thunder in the air, which had hung
about all day without release.  His hostess was dressed as for
thunderous times, and it fell in with the kind of imagination we have
just attributed to him that she should be in simplest coolest white, of
a character so old-fashioned, if he were not mistaken, that Madame
Roland must on the scaffold have worn something like it.  This effect
was enhanced by a small black fichu or scarf, of crape or gauze,
disposed quaintly round her bosom and now completing as by a mystic
touch the pathetic, the noble analogy. Poor Strether in fact scarce
knew what analogy was evoked for him as the charming woman, receiving
him and making him, as she could do such things, at once familiarly and
gravely welcome, moved over her great room with her image almost
repeated in its polished floor, which had been fully bared for summer.
The associations of the place, all felt again; the gleam here and
there, in the subdued light, of glass and gilt and parquet, with the
quietness of her own note as the centre--these things were at first as
delicate as if they had been ghostly, and he was sure in a moment that,
whatever he should find he had come for, it wouldn't be for an
impression that had previously failed him.  That conviction held him
from the outset, and, seeming singularly to simplify, certified to him
that the objects about would help him, would really help them both. No,
he might never see them again--this was only too probably the last
time; and he should certainly see nothing in the least degree like
them. He should soon be going to where such things were not, and it
would be a small mercy for memory, for fancy, to have, in that stress,
a loaf on the shelf.  He knew in advance he should look back on the
perception actually sharpest with him as on the view of something old,
old, old, the oldest thing he had ever personally touched; and he also
knew, even while he took his companion in as the feature among
features, that memory and fancy couldn't help being enlisted for her.
She might intend what she would, but this was beyond anything she could
intend, with things from far back--tyrannies of history, facts of type,
values, as the painters said, of expression--all working for her and
giving her the supreme chance, the chance of the happy, the really
luxurious few, the chance, on a great occasion, to be natural and
simple.  She had never, with him, been more so; or if it was the
perfection of art it would never--and that came to the same thing--be
proved against her.

What was truly wonderful was her way of differing so from time to time
without detriment to her simplicity.  Caprices, he was sure she felt,
were before anything else bad manners, and that judgement in her was by
itself a thing making more for safety of intercourse than anything that
in his various own past intercourses he had had to reckon on.  If
therefore her presence was now quite other than the one she had shown
him the night before, there was nothing of violence in the change--it
was all harmony and reason.  It gave him a mild deep person, whereas he
had had on the occasion to which their interview was a direct reference
a person committed to movement and surface and abounding in them; but
she was in either character more remarkable for nothing than for her
bridging of intervals, and this now fell in with what he understood he
was to leave to her.  The only thing was that, if he was to leave it
ALL to her, why exactly had she sent for him?  He had had, vaguely, in
advance, his explanation, his view of the probability of her wishing to
set something right, to deal in some way with the fraud so lately
practised on his presumed credulity.  Would she attempt to carry it
further or would she blot it out?  Would she throw over it some more or
less happy colour; or would she do nothing about it at all?  He
perceived soon enough at least that, however reasonable she might be,
she wasn't vulgarly confused, and it herewith pressed upon him that
their eminent "lie," Chad's and hers, was simply after all such an
inevitable tribute to good taste as he couldn't have wished them not to
render.  Away from them, during his vigil, he had seemed to wince at
the amount of comedy involved; whereas in his present posture he could
only ask himself how he should enjoy any attempt from her to take the
comedy back.  He shouldn't enjoy it at all; but, once more and yet once
more, he could trust her.  That is he could trust her to make deception
right.  As she presented things the ugliness--goodness knew why--went
out of them; none the less too that she could present them, with an art
of her own, by not so much as touching them.  She let the matter, at
all events, lie where it was--where the previous twenty-four hours had
placed it; appearing merely to circle about it respectfully, tenderly,
almost piously, while she took up another question.

She knew she hadn't really thrown dust in his eyes; this, the previous
night, before they separated, had practically passed between them; and,
as she had sent for him to see what the difference thus made for him
might amount to, so he was conscious at the end of five minutes that he
had been tried and tested.  She had settled with Chad after he left
them that she would, for her satisfaction, assure herself of this
quantity, and Chad had, as usual, let her have her way.  Chad was
always letting people have their way when he felt that it would somehow
turn his wheel for him; it somehow always did turn his wheel.  Strether
felt, oddly enough, before these facts, freshly and consentingly
passive; they again so rubbed it into him that the couple thus fixing
his attention were intimate, that his intervention had absolutely aided
and intensified their intimacy, and that in fine he must accept the
consequence of that.  He had absolutely become, himself, with his
perceptions and his mistakes, his concessions and his reserves, the
droll mixture, as it must seem to them, of his braveries and his fears,
the general spectacle of his art and his innocence, almost an added
link and certainly a common priceless ground for them to meet upon.  It
was as if he had been hearing their very tone when she brought out a
reference that was comparatively straight. "The last twice that you've
been here, you know, I never asked you," she said with an abrupt
transition--they had been pretending before this to talk simply of the
charm of yesterday and of the interest of the country they had seen.
The effort was confessedly vain; not for such talk had she invited him;
and her impatient reminder was of their having done for it all the
needful on his coming to her after Sarah's flight.  What she hadn't
asked him then was to state to her where and how he stood for her; she
had been resting on Chad's report of their midnight hour together in
the Boulevard Malesherbes.  The thing therefore she at present desired
was ushered in by this recall of the two occasions on which,
disinterested and merciful, she hadn't worried him.  To-night truly she
WOULD worry him, and this was her appeal to him to let her risk it.  He
wasn't to mind if she bored him a little: she had behaved, after
all--hadn't she?--so awfully, awfully well.

Strether receives a special delivery letter which he thinks is from Chad, but upon opening it, he is surprised to learn that it is from Madame de Vionnet, requesting him to visit her that evening. Quickly, "with a directness that almost confessed to a fear of the danger of delay," he sends her an affirmative reply, thinking, with amusement, that he has now "ranged himself . . . on the side of the fierce, the sinister, the acute." After spending the day in reflection and anticipation, he arrives at Madame de Vionnet's apartment at the appointed hour. Strether, finding his hostess at ease, becomes romantically in tune with the appearance of the room. Madame de Vionnet "might intend what we would, but this was beyond anything she could intend, with things from far back -- tyrannies of history, facts of types, values, as the painters said, of expression -- all working for her and giving her the supreme chance, the chance of the happy, the really luxurious few, the chance, on a great occasion, to be natural and simple. She had never, with him, been more so." He wonders why she has sent for him and whether or not she intends to extend the "lie" of her trip to the country with Chad. He had realized the night before that Madame de Vionnet was certain that he knew the truth. Now "she had sent for him to see what the difference thus made for him might amount to, so he was conscious at the end of five minutes that he had been tried and tested." Leaving their pretense to conversation about the country behind, she begins, "The last twice that you've been here, you know, I never asked you."

In the moments before Strether mails his reply to Madame de Vionnet, he is tempted to "make an end" to things then and there and return home. Once he has mailed the letter, he reflects that "they were no worse than he, and he no worse than they." Strether realizes that "properly and logically" he should have placed Madame de Vionnet at a disadvantage by arranging a meeting at a less comfortable place then her home. "An instinct in him," one obviously planted by the Puritanical atmosphere of Woollett, demands "some awkwardness," "some danger, or at least some grave inconvenience. . . . This would give a sense -- which the spirit required . . . -- that somebody was paying something somewhere and somehow" that they were not all to escape punishment.


"Oh, you're all right, you're all right," he almost impatiently
declared; his impatience being moreover not for her pressure, but for
her scruple.  More and more distinct to him was the tune to which she
would have had the matter out with Chad:  more and more vivid for him
the idea that she had been nervous as to what he might be able to
"stand." Yes, it had been a question if he had "stood" what the scene
on the river had given him, and, though the young man had doubtless
opined in favour of his recuperation, her own last word must have been
that she should feel easier in seeing for herself.  That was it,
unmistakeably; she WAS seeing for herself.  What he could stand was
thus, in these moments, in the balance for Strether, who reflected, as
he became fully aware of it, that he must properly brace himself.  He
wanted fully to appear to stand all he might; and there was a certain
command of the situation for him in this very wish not to look too much
at sea. She was ready with everything, but so, sufficiently, was he;
that is he was at one point the more prepared of the two, inasmuch as,
for all her cleverness, she couldn't produce on the spot--and it was
surprising--an account of the motive of her note.  He had the advantage
that his pronouncing her "all right" gave him for an enquiry.  "May I
ask, delighted as I've been to come, if you've wished to say something
special?"  He spoke as if she might have seen he had been waiting for
it--not indeed with discomfort, but with natural interest.  Then he saw
that she was a little taken aback, was even surprised herself at the
detail she had neglected--the only one ever yet; having somehow assumed
he would know, would recognise, would leave some things not to be said.
She looked at him, however, an instant as if to convey that if he
wanted them ALL--!

"Selfish and vulgar--that's what I must seem to you.  You've done
everything for me, and here I am as if I were asking for more.  But it
isn't," she went on, "because I'm afraid--though I AM of course afraid,
as a woman in my position always is.  I mean it isn't because one lives
in terror--it isn't because of that one is selfish, for I'm ready to
give you my word to-night that I don't care; don't care what still may
happen and what I may lose.  I don't ask you to raise your little
finger for me again, nor do I wish so much as to mention to you what
we've talked of before, either my danger or my safety, or his mother,
or his sister, or the girl he may marry, or the fortune he may make or
miss, or the right or the wrong, of any kind, he may do.  If after the
help one has had from you one can't either take care of one's self or
simply hold one's tongue, one must renounce all claim to be an object
of interest.  It's in the name of what I DO care about that I've tried
still to keep hold of you.  How can I be indifferent," she asked, "to
how I appear to you?"  And as he found himself unable immediately to
say:  "Why, if you're going, NEED you, after all? Is it impossible you
should stay on--so that one mayn't lose you?"

"Impossible I should live with you here instead of going home?"

"Not 'with' us, if you object to that, but near enough to us,
somewhere, for us to see you--well," she beautifully brought out, "when
we feel we MUST.  How shall we not sometimes feel it?  I've wanted to
see you often when I couldn't," she pursued, "all these last weeks. How
shan't I then miss you now, with the sense of your being gone forever?"
Then as if the straightness of this appeal, taking him unprepared, had
visibly left him wondering:  "Where IS your 'home' moreover now--what
has become of it?  I've made a change in your life, I know I have; I've
upset everything in your mind as well; in your sense of--what shall I
call it?--all the decencies and possibilities. It gives me a kind of
detestation--" She pulled up short.

Oh but he wanted to hear.  "Detestation of what?"

"Of everything--of life."

"Ah that's too much," he laughed--"or too little!"

"Too little, precisely"--she was eager.  "What I hate is myself--when I
think that one has to take so much, to be happy, out of the lives of
others, and that one isn't happy even then.  One does it to cheat one's
self and to stop one's mouth--but that's only at the best for a little.
The wretched self is always there, always making one somehow a fresh
anxiety.  What it comes to is that it's not, that it's never, a
happiness, any happiness at all, to TAKE. The only safe thing is to
give.  It's what plays you least false." Interesting, touching,
strikingly sincere as she let these things come from her, she yet
puzzled and troubled him--so fine was the quaver of her quietness.  He
felt what he had felt before with her, that there was always more
behind what she showed, and more and more again behind that.  "You know
so, at least," she added, "where you are!"

"YOU ought to know it indeed then; for isn't what you've been giving
exactly what has brought us together this way?  You've been making, as
I've so fully let you know I've felt," Strether said, "the most
precious present I've ever seen made, and if you can't sit down
peacefully on that performance you ARE, no doubt, born to torment
yourself.  But you ought," he wound up, "to be easy."

"And not trouble you any more, no doubt--not thrust on you even the
wonder and the beauty of what I've done; only let you regard our
business as over, and well over, and see you depart in a peace that
matches my own?  No doubt, no doubt, no doubt," she nervously
repeated--"all the more that I don't really pretend I believe you
couldn't, for yourself, NOT have done what you have.  I don't pretend
you feel yourself victimised, for this evidently is the way you live,
and it's what--we're agreed--is the best way.  Yes, as you say," she
continued after a moment, "I ought to be easy and rest on my work. Well
then here am I doing so.  I AM easy.  You'll have it for your last
impression.  When is it you say you go?" she asked with a quick change.

He took some time to reply--his last impression was more and more so
mixed a one.  It produced in him a vague disappointment, a drop that
was deeper even than the fall of his elation the previous night.  The
good of what he had done, if he had done so much, wasn't there to
enliven him quite to the point that would have been ideal for a grand
gay finale.  Women were thus endlessly absorbent, and to deal with them
was to walk on water.  What was at bottom the matter with her,
embroider as she might and disclaim as she might--what was at bottom
the matter with her was simply Chad himself. It was of Chad she was
after all renewedly afraid; the strange strength of her passion was the
very strength of her fear; she clung to HIM, Lambert Strether, as to a
source of safety she had tested, and, generous graceful truthful as she
might try to be, exquisite as she was, she dreaded the term of his
being within reach. With this sharpest perception yet, it was like a
chill in the air to him, it was almost appalling, that a creature so
fine could be, by mysterious forces, a creature so exploited.  For at
the end of all things they WERE mysterious:  she had but made Chad what
he was--so why could she think she had made him infinite? She had made
him better, she had made him best, she had made him anything one would;
but it came to our friend with supreme queerness that he was none the
less only Chad.  Strether had the sense that HE, a little, had made him
too; his high appreciation had as it were, consecrated her work The
work, however admirable, was nevertheless of the strict human order,
and in short it was marvellous that the companion of mere earthly joys,
of comforts, aberrations (however one classed them) within the common
experience should be so transcendently prized.  It might have made
Strether hot or shy, as such secrets of others brought home sometimes
do make us; but he was held there by something so hard that it was
fairly grim.  This was not the discomposure of last night; that had
quite passed--such discomposures were a detail; the real coercion was
to see a man ineffably adored.  There it was again--it took women, it
took women; if to deal with them was to walk on water what wonder that
the water rose?  And it had never surely risen higher than round this
woman.  He presently found himself taking a long look from her, and the
next thing he knew he had uttered all his thought.  "You're afraid for
your life!"

It drew out her long look, and he soon enough saw why.  A spasm came
into her face, the tears she had already been unable to hide overflowed
at first in silence, and then, as the sound suddenly comes from a
child, quickened to gasps, to sobs.  She sat and covered her face with
her hands, giving up all attempt at a manner. "It's how you see me,
it's how you see me"--she caught her breath with it--"and it's as I AM,
and as I must take myself, and of course it's no matter." Her emotion
was at first so incoherent that he could only stand there at a loss,
stand with his sense of having upset her, though of having done it by
the truth.  He had to listen to her in a silence that he made no
immediate effort to attenuate, feeling her doubly woeful amid all her
dim diffused elegance; consenting to it as he had consented to the
rest, and even conscious of some vague inward irony in the presence of
such a fine free range of bliss and bale.  He couldn't say it was NOT
no matter; for he was serving her to the end, he now knew,
anyway--quite as if what he thought of her had nothing to do with it.
It was actually moreover as if he didn't think of her at all, as if he
could think of nothing but the passion, mature, abysmal, pitiful, she
represented, and the possibilities she betrayed. She was older for him
to-night, visibly less exempt from the touch of time; but she was as
much as ever the finest and subtlest creature, the happiest apparition,
it had been given him, in all his years, to meet; and yet he could see
her there as vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as a maidservant crying
for her young man.  The only thing was that she judged herself as the
maidservant wouldn't; the weakness of which wisdom too, the dishonour
of which judgement, seemed but to sink her lower. Her collapse,
however, no doubt, was briefer and she had in a manner recovered
herself before he intervened.  "Of course I'm afraid for my life.  But
that's nothing.  It isn't that."

He was silent a little longer, as if thinking what it might be.
"There's something I have in mind that I can still do."

But she threw off at last, with a sharp sad headshake, drying her eyes,
what he could still do.  "I don't care for that.  Of course, as I've
said, you're acting, in your wonderful way, for yourself; and what's
for yourself is no more my business--though I may reach out unholy
hands so clumsily to touch it--than if it were something in Timbuctoo.
It's only that you don't snub me, as you've had fifty chances to
do--it's only your beautiful patience that makes one forget one's
manners.  In spite of your patience, all the same," she went on, "you'd
do anything rather than be with us here, even if that were possible.
You'd do everything for us but be mixed up with us--which is a
statement you can easily answer to the advantage of your own manners.
You can say 'What's the use of talking of things that at the best are
impossible?' What IS of course the use?  It's only my little madness.
You'd talk if you were tormented.  And I don't mean now about HIM.  Oh
for him--!" Positively, strangely, bitterly, as it seemed to Strether,
she gave "him," for the moment, away.  "You don't care what I think of
you; but I happen to care what you think of me.  And what you MIGHT,"
she added.  "What you perhaps even did."

He gained time.  "What I did--?"

"Did think before.  Before this.  DIDn't you think--?"

But he had already stopped her.  "I didn't think anything.  I never
think a step further than I'm obliged to."

"That's perfectly false, I believe," she returned--"except that you
may, no doubt, often pull up when things become TOO ugly; or even, I'll
say, to save you a protest, too beautiful.  At any rate, even so far as
it's true, we've thrust on you appearances that you've had to take in
and that have therefore made your obligation.  Ugly or beautiful--it
doesn't matter what we call them--you were getting on without them, and
that's where we're detestable.  We bore you--that's where we are.  And
we may well--for what we've cost you.  All you can do NOW is not to
think at all.  And I who should have liked to seem to you--well,
sublime!"

He could only after a moment re-echo Miss Barrace.  "You're wonderful!"

"I'm old and abject and hideous"--she went on as without hearing him.
"Abject above all.  Or old above all.  It's when one's old that it's
worst.  I don't care what becomes of it--let what WILL; there it is.
It's a doom--I know it; you can't see it more than I do myself.  Things
have to happen as they will." With which she came back again to what,
face to face with him, had so quite broken down.  "Of course you
wouldn't, even if possible, and no matter what may happen to you, be
near us.  But think of me, think of me--!" She exhaled it into air.

He took refuge in repeating something he had already said and that she
had made nothing of.  "There's something I believe I can still do." And
he put his hand out for good-bye.

She again made nothing of it; she went on with her insistence. "That
won't help you.  There's nothing to help you."

"Well, it may help YOU," he said.

She shook her head.  "There's not a grain of certainty in my
future--for the only certainty is that I shall be the loser in the end."

She hadn't taken his hand, but she moved with him to the door. "That's
cheerful," he laughed, "for your benefactor!"

"What's cheerful for ME," she replied, "is that we might, you and I,
have been friends.  That's it--that's it.  You see how, as I say, I
want everything.  I've wanted you too."

"Ah but you've HAD me!" he declared, at the door, with an emphasis that
made an end.

Although both Strether and Madame de Vionnet were prepared for the confrontation, Strether was "the more prepared of the two, inasmuch as, for all her cleverness, she couldn't produce on the spot -- and it was surprising -- an account of the motive of her note." Madame de Vionnet berates herself for what must seem to Strether her "selfish and vulgar" position, releasing him from his promise to help her any further: "I won't ask you to raise your little finger for me again." She tells him that she does, however, care how she appears to him. Madame de Vionnet asks him to stay in Paris, asking him, "Where is your 'home' moreover now? . . . I've upset everything in your mind . . . in your sense of . . . all the decencies and possibilities." But finally she asks, "When is it you say you go?" Strether realizes that what really bothers her is Chad, that "the strange strength of her passion was the very strength of her fear." He says, "You're afraid for your life!" Madame de Vionnet is visibly shaken by this pronouncement and can no longer control her emotions. Sobbing and gasping, she appears to Strether older and "less exempt from the touch of time but she was as much as ever the finest and subtlest creature" he had ever known. Recovering her composure somewhat, she calls herself "old and abject and hideous." Strether tries to comfort her by suggesting that there is something he can still do for her. She denies that she can be helped: "There's not a grain of certainty in my future -- for the only certainty is that I shall be the loser in the end." As Madame de Vionnet and Strether stand at the door, she says, "You see how, as I say, I want everything. I've wanted you too." "Ah but you've had me! . . . with an emphasis that made an end."

Implicit in this final scene between Strether and Madame de Vionnet is that Strether has for some time been in love with her; his love has been an idealized kind of love, and nothing she does here -- calling herself old and hideous, crying over Chad "like a maidservant crying for her young man" -- can diminish Strether's affection for her; he will carry back to America the unspoiled image of this remarkable person. Although Strether's romanticism has been tempered by the reality of the situation, he has not been overwhelmed by this reality. This is what Strether means when he tells Madame de Vionnet, "Ah but you've had me!"


His purpose had been to see Chad the next day, and he had prefigured
seeing him by an early call; having in general never stood on ceremony
in respect to visits at the Boulevard Malesherbes.  It had been more
often natural for him to go there than for Chad to come to the small
hotel, the attractions of which were scant; yet it nevertheless, just
now, at the eleventh hour, did suggest itself to Strether to begin by
giving the young man a chance.  It struck him that, in the inevitable
course, Chad would be "round," as Waymarsh used to say--Waymarsh who
already, somehow, seemed long ago.  He hadn't come the day before,
because it had been arranged between them that Madame de Vionnet should
see their friend first; but now that this passage had taken place he
would present himself, and their friend wouldn't have long to wait.
Strether assumed, he became aware, on this reasoning, that the
interesting parties to the arrangement would have met betimes, and that
the more interesting of the two--as she was after all--would have
communicated to the other the issue of her appeal.  Chad would know
without delay that his mother's messenger had been with her, and,
though it was perhaps not quite easy to see how she could qualify what
had occurred, he would at least have been sufficiently advised to feel
he could go on.  The day, however, brought, early or late, no word from
him, and Strether felt, as a result of this, that a change had
practically come over their intercourse.  It was perhaps a premature
judgement; or it only meant perhaps--how could he tell?--that the
wonderful pair he protected had taken up again together the excursion
he had accidentally checked.  They might have gone back to the country,
and gone back but with a long breath drawn; that indeed would best mark
Chad's sense that reprobation hadn't rewarded Madame de Vionnet's
request for an interview.  At the end of the twenty-four hours, at the
end of the forty-eight, there was still no overture; so that Strether
filled up the time, as he had so often filled it before, by going to
see Miss Gostrey.

He proposed amusements to her; he felt expert now in proposing
amusements; and he had thus, for several days, an odd sense of leading
her about Paris, of driving her in the Bois, of showing her the penny
steamboats--those from which the breeze of the Seine was to be best
enjoyed--that might have belonged to a kindly uncle doing the honours
of the capital to an Intelligent niece from the country.  He found
means even to take her to shops she didn't know, or that she pretended
she didn't; while she, on her side, was, like the country maiden, all
passive modest and grateful--going in fact so far as to emulate
rusticity in occasional fatigues and bewilderments.  Strether described
these vague proceedings to himself, described them even to her, as a
happy interlude; the sign of which was that the companions said for the
time no further word about the matter they had talked of to satiety. He
proclaimed satiety at the outset, and she quickly took the hint; as
docile both in this and in everything else as the intelligent obedient
niece.  He told her as yet nothing of his late adventure--for as an
adventure it now ranked with him; he pushed the whole business
temporarily aside and found his interest in the fact of her beautiful
assent.  She left questions unasked--she who for so long had been all
questions; she gave herself up to him with an understanding of which
mere mute gentleness might have seemed the sufficient expression.  She
knew his sense of his situation had taken still another step--of that
he was quite aware; but she conveyed that, whatever had thus happened
for him, it was thrown into the shade by what was happening for
herself.  This--though it mightn't to a detached spirit have seemed
much--was the major interest, and she met it with a new directness of
response, measuring it from hour to hour with her grave hush of
acceptance. Touched as he had so often been by her before, he was, for
his part too, touched afresh; all the more that though he could be duly
aware of the principle of his own mood he couldn't be equally so of the
principle of hers.  He knew, that is, in a manner--knew roughly and
resignedly--what he himself was hatching; whereas he had to take the
chance of what he called to himself Maria's calculations.  It was all
he needed that she liked him enough for what they were doing, and even
should they do a good deal more would still like him enough for that;
the essential freshness of a relation so simple was a cool bath to the
soreness produced by other relations.  These others appeared to him now
horribly complex; they bristled with fine points, points all
unimaginable beforehand, points that pricked and drew blood; a fact
that gave to an hour with his present friend on a bateau-mouche, or in
the afternoon shade of the Champs Elysees, something of the innocent
pleasure of handling rounded ivory.  His relation with Chad
personally--from the moment he had got his point of view--had been of
the simplest; yet this also struck him as bristling, after a third and
a fourth blank day had passed.  It was as if at last however his care
for such indications had dropped; there came a fifth blank day and he
ceased to enquire or to heed.

They now took on to his fancy, Miss Gostrey and he, the image of the
Babes in the Wood; they could trust the merciful elements to let them
continue at peace.  He had been great already, as he knew, at
postponements; but he had only to get afresh into the rhythm of one to
feel its fine attraction.  It amused him to say to himself that he
might for all the world have been going to die--die resignedly; the
scene was filled for him with so deep a death-bed hush, so melancholy a
charm.  That meant the postponement of everything else--which made so
for the quiet lapse of life; and the postponement in especial of the
reckoning to come--unless indeed the reckoning to come were to be one
and the same thing with extinction.  It faced him, the reckoning, over
the shoulder of much interposing experience--which also faced him; and
one would float to it doubtless duly through these caverns of Kubla
Khan.  It was really behind everything; it hadn't merged in what he had
done; his final appreciation of what he had done--his appreciation on
the spot--would provide it with its main sharpness.  The spot so
focussed was of course Woollett, and he was to see, at the best, what
Woollett would be with everything there changed for him.  Wouldn't THAT
revelation practically amount to the wind-up of his career?  Well, the
summer's end would show; his suspense had meanwhile exactly the
sweetness of vain delay; and he had with it, we should mention, other
pastimes than Maria's company--plenty of separate musings in which his
luxury failed him but at one point.  He was well in port, the outer sea
behind him, and it was only a matter of getting ashore.  There was a
question that came and went for him, however, as he rested against the
side of his ship, and it was a little to get rid of the obsession that
he prolonged his hours with Miss Gostrey.  It was a question about
himself, but it could only be settled by seeing Chad again; it was
indeed his principal reason for wanting to see Chad. After that it
wouldn't signify--it was a ghost that certain words would easily lay to
rest.  Only the young man must be there to take the words.  Once they
were taken he wouldn't have a question left; none, that is, in
connexion with this particular affair.  It wouldn't then matter even to
himself that he might now have been guilty of speaking BECAUSE of what
he had forfeited.  That was the refinement of his supreme scruple--he
wished so to leave what he had forfeited out of account.  He wished not
to do anything because he had missed something else, because he was
sore or sorry or impoverished, because he was maltreated or desperate;
he wished to do everything because he was lucid and quiet, just the
same for himself on all essential points as he had ever been.  Thus it
was that while he virtually hung about for Chad he kept mutely putting
it:  "You've been chucked, old boy; but what has that to do with it?"
It would have sickened him to feel vindictive.

These tints of feeling indeed were doubtless but the iridescence of his
idleness, and they were presently lost in a new light from Maria.  She
had a fresh fact for him before the week was out, and she practically
met him with it on his appearing one night.  He hadn't on this day seen
her, but had planned presenting himself in due course to ask her to
dine with him somewhere out of doors, on one of the terraces, in one of
the gardens, of which the Paris of summer was profuse.  It had then
come on to rain, so that, disconcerted, he changed his mind; dining
alone at home, a little stuffily and stupidly, and waiting on her
afterwards to make up his loss.  He was sure within a minute that
something had happened; it was so in the air of the rich little room
that he had scarcely to name his thought.  Softly lighted, the whole
colour of the place, with its vague values, was in cool fusion--an
effect that made the visitor stand for a little agaze.  It was as if in
doing so now he had felt a recent presence--his recognition of the
passage of which his hostess in turn divined.  She had scarcely to say
it--"Yes, she has been here, and this time I received her." It wasn't
till a minute later that she added:  "There being, as I understand you,
no reason NOW--!"

"None for your refusing?"

"No--if you've done what you've had to do."

"I've certainly so far done it," Strether said, "as that you needn't
fear the effect, or the appearance of coming between us.  There's
nothing between us now but what we ourselves have put there, and not an
inch of room for anything else whatever.  Therefore you're only
beautifully WITH us as always--though doubtless now, if she has talked
to you, rather more with us than less.  Of course if she came," he
added, "it was to talk to you."

"It was to talk to me," Maria returned; on which he was further sure
that she was practically in possession of what he himself hadn't yet
told her.  He was even sure she was in possession of things he himself
couldn't have told; for the consciousness of them was now all in her
face and accompanied there with a shade of sadness that marked in her
the close of all uncertainties.  It came out for him more than ever yet
that she had had from the first a knowledge she believed him not to
have had, a knowledge the sharp acquisition of which might be destined
to make a difference for him.  The difference for him might not
inconceivably be an arrest of his independence and a change in his
attitude--in other words a revulsion in favour of the principles of
Woollett.  She had really prefigured the possibility of a shock that
would send him swinging back to Mrs. Newsome.  He hadn't, it was true,
week after week, shown signs of receiving it, but the possibility had
been none the less in the air.  What Maria accordingly had had now to
take in was that the shock had descended and that he hadn't, all the
same, swung back.  He had grown clear, in a flash, on a point long
since settled for herself; but no reapproximation to Mrs. Newsome had
occurred in consequence.  Madame de Vionnet had by her visit held up
the torch to these truths, and what now lingered in poor Maria's face
was the somewhat smoky light of the scene between them. If the light
however wasn't, as we have hinted, the glow of joy, the reasons for
this also were perhaps discernible to Strether even through the blur
cast over them by his natural modesty.  She had held herself for months
with a firm hand; she hadn't interfered on any chance--and chances were
specious enough--that she might interfere to her profit.  She had
turned her back on the dream that Mrs. Newsome's rupture, their
friend's forfeiture--the engagement the relation itself, broken beyond
all mending--might furnish forth her advantage; and, to stay her hand
from promoting these things, she had on private, difficult, but rigid,
lines, played strictly fair.  She couldn't therefore but feel that,
though, as the end of all, the facts in question had been stoutly
confirmed, her ground for personal, for what might have been called
interested, elation remained rather vague.  Strether might easily have
made out that she had been asking herself, in the hours she had just
sat through, if there were still for her, or were only not, a fair
shade of uncertainty.  Let us hasten to add, however, that what he at
first made out on this occasion he also at first kept to himself.  He
only asked what in particular Madame de Vionnet had come for, and as to
this his companion was ready.

"She wants tidings of Mr. Newsome, whom she appears not to have seen
for some days."

"Then she hasn't been away with him again?"

"She seemed to think," Maria answered, "that he might have gone away
with YOU."

"And did you tell her I know nothing of him?"

She had her indulgent headshake.  "I've known nothing of what you know.
I could only tell her I'd ask you."

"Then I've not seen him for a week--and of course I've wondered." His
wonderment showed at this moment as sharper, but he presently went on.
"Still, I dare say I can put my hand on him.  Did she strike you," he
asked, "as anxious?"

"She's always anxious."

"After all I've done for her?"  And he had one of the last flickers of
his occasional mild mirth.  "To think that was just what I came out to
prevent!"

She took it up but to reply.  "You don't regard him then as safe?"

"I was just going to ask you how in that respect you regard Madame de
Vionnet."

She looked at him a little.  "What woman was EVER safe?  She told me,"
she added--and it was as if at the touch of the connexion--"of your
extraordinary meeting in the country.  After that a quoi se fier?"

"It was, as an accident, in all the possible or impossible chapter,"
Strether conceded, "amazing enough.  But still, but still--!"

"But still she didn't mind?"

"She doesn't mind anything."

"Well, then, as you don't either, we may all sink to rest!"

He appeared to agree with her, but he had his reservation. "I do mind
Chad's disappearance."

"Oh you'll get him back.  But now you know," she said, "why I went to
Mentone." He had sufficiently let her see that he had by this time
gathered things together, but there was nature in her wish to make them
clearer still.  "I didn't want you to put it to me."

"To put it to you--?"

"The question of what you were at last--a week ago--to see for
yourself.  I didn't want to have to lie for her.  I felt that to be too
much for me.  A man of course is always expected to do it--to do it, I
mean, for a woman; but not a woman for another woman; unless perhaps on
the tit-for-tat principle, as an indirect way of protecting herself.  I
don't need protection, so that I was free to 'funk' you--simply to
dodge your test.  The responsibility was too much for me.  I gained
time, and when I came back the need of a test had blown over."

Strether thought of it serenely.  "Yes; when you came back little
Bilham had shown me what's expected of a gentleman.  Little Bilham had
lied like one."

"And like what you believed him?"

"Well," said Strether, "it was but a technical lie--he classed the
attachment as virtuous.  That was a view for which there was much to be
said--and the virtue came out for me hugely There was of course a great
deal of it.  I got it full in the face, and I haven't, you see, done
with it yet."

"What I see, what I saw," Maria returned, "is that you dressed up even
the virtue.  You were wonderful--you were beautiful, as I've had the
honour of telling you before; but, if you wish really to know," she
sadly confessed, "I never quite knew WHERE you were. There were
moments," she explained, "when you struck me as grandly cynical; there
were others when you struck me as grandly vague."

Her friend considered.  "I had phases.  I had flights."

"Yes, but things must have a basis."

"A basis seemed to me just what her beauty supplied."

"Her beauty of person?"

"Well, her beauty of everything.  The impression she makes.  She has
such variety and yet such harmony."

She considered him with one of her deep returns of indulgence--returns
out of all proportion to the irritations they flooded over. "You're
complete."

"You're always too personal," he good-humouredly said; "but that's
precisely how I wondered and wandered."

"If you mean," she went on, "that she was from the first for you the
most charming woman in the world, nothing's more simple.  Only that was
an odd foundation."

"For what I reared on it?"

"For what you didn't!"

"Well, it was all not a fixed quantity.  And it had for me--it has
still--such elements of strangeness.  Her greater age than his, her
different world, traditions, association; her other opportunities,
liabilities, standards."

His friend listened with respect to his enumeration of these
disparities; then she disposed of them at a stroke.  "Those things are
nothing when a woman's hit.  It's very awful.  She was hit."

Strether, on his side, did justice to that plea.  "Oh of course I saw
she was hit.  That she was hit was what we were busy with; that she was
hit was our great affair.  But somehow I couldn't think of her as down
in the dust.  And as put there by OUR little Chad!"

"Yet wasn't 'your' little Chad just your miracle?"

Strether admitted it.  "Of course I moved among miracles.  It was all
phantasmagoric.  But the great fact was that so much of it was none of
my business--as I saw my business.  It isn't even now."

His companion turned away on this, and it might well have been yet
again with the sharpness of a fear of how little his philosophy could
bring her personally.  "I wish SHE could hear you!"

"Mrs. Newsome?"

"No--not Mrs. Newsome; since I understand you that it doesn't matter
now what Mrs. Newsome hears.  Hasn't she heard everything?"

"Practically--yes." He had thought a moment, but he went on.  "You wish
Madame de Vionnet could hear me?"

"Madame de Vionnet." She had come back to him.  "She thinks just the
contrary of what you say.  That you distinctly judge her."

He turned over the scene as the two women thus placed together for him
seemed to give it.  "She might have known--!"

"Might have known you don't?" Miss Gostrey asked as he let it drop.
"She was sure of it at first," she pursued as he said nothing; "she
took it for granted, at least, as any woman in her position would. But
after that she changed her mind; she believed you believed--"

"Well?"--he was curious.

"Why in her sublimity.  And that belief had remained with her, I make
out, till the accident of the other day opened your eyes.  For that it
did," said Maria, "open them--"

"She can't help"--he had taken it up--"being aware?  No," he mused; "I
suppose she thinks of that even yet."

"Then they WERE closed?  There you are!  However, if you see her as the
most charming woman in the world it comes to the same thing. And if
you'd like me to tell her that you do still so see her--!" Miss
Gostrey, in short, offered herself for service to the end.

It was an offer he could temporarily entertain; but he decided. "She
knows perfectly how I see her."

"Not favourably enough, she mentioned to me, to wish ever to see her
again.  She told me you had taken a final leave of her.  She says
you've done with her."

"So I have."

Maria had a pause; then she spoke as if for conscience.  "She wouldn't
have done with YOU.  She feels she has lost you--yet that she might
have been better for you."

"Oh she has been quite good enough!" Strether laughed.

"She thinks you and she might at any rate have been friends."

"We might certainly.  That's just"--he continued to laugh--"why I'm
going."

It was as if Maria could feel with this then at last that she had done
her best for each.  But she had still an idea.  "Shall I tell her that?"

"No.  Tell her nothing."

"Very well then." To which in the next breath Miss Gostrey added: "Poor
dear thing!"

Her friend wondered; then with raised eyebrows:  "Me?"

"Oh no.  Marie de Vionnet."

He accepted the correction, but he wondered still.  "Are you so sorry
for her as that?"

It made her think a moment--made her even speak with a smile.  But she
didn't really retract.  "I'm sorry for us all!"

Strether expects that a visit from Chad is the next natural thing to happen, and he is puzzled when, at the end of forty-eight hours, he hears nothing from him. He occupies his time by taking Maria Gostrey about Paris, showing her "shops she didn't know, or that she pretended she didn't." Throughout their walks, they do not discuss Chad and Madame de Vionnet; Maria had taken a "hint" from Strether, and "she left questions unasked." Several days pass, and Strether still hears nothing from Chad. His desire to see him becomes an obsession. To rid himself of this constant thought, he prolongs "his hours with Miss Gostrey." In the course of one of these visits, Maria informs him that Madame de Vionnet had been to see her, and Strether now senses that Maria knows the whole story of what took place on that day in the country. However, when Maria tells him that the purpose of Madame de Vionnet's visit was to ask of news about Chad, Strether is surprised to learn that she has not returned to the country with Chad. He realizes that Maria was aware of what had been going on between Chad and Madame de Vionnet all along, and that the reason she had left Paris a few weeks before was to avoid his inevitable questions about them. Strether explains why he believed Little Bilham's gentlemanly statement that the affair was "virtuous." Maria then explains Madame de Vionnet's position: "Those things are nothing when a woman's hit. It's very awful. She was hit." The conversation closes with Maria telling Strether that Madame de Vionnet feels Strether judges her too harshly and that he doesn't want to see her again, that he has "done with her." Strether answers, "So I have."

Ironically, Strether believes that this time when Chad is out of town, he is accompanied by Madame de Vionnet; earlier, it will be remembered, Strether made no such connection when in fact such was the case. Despite the fact that he feels Bilham has lied to him, Strether is sufficiently changed by his experiences to be able to construe Bilham's phrase "virtuous attachment" as "but a technical lie." He sees, by placing Chad and Madame de Vionnet's attachment in a special context, that there was an element of virtue in it: " . . . the virtue came out for me hugely." This is the final measure of Strether's remarkable growth as a person. Strether's reference to the "caverns of Kubla Khan" is drawn from Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan."


He was to delay no longer to re-establish communication with Chad, and
we have just seen that he had spoken to Miss Gostrey of this intention
on hearing from her of the young man's absence.  It was not moreover
only the assurance so given that prompted him; it was the need of
causing his conduct to square with another profession still--the motive
he had described to her as his sharpest for now getting away.  If he
was to get away because of some of the relations involved in staying,
the cold attitude toward them might look pedantic in the light of
lingering on.  He must do both things; he must see Chad, but he must
go.  The more he thought of the former of these duties the more he felt
himself make a subject of insistence of the latter.  They were alike
intensely present to him as he sat in front of a quiet little cafe into
which he had dropped on quitting Maria's entresol.  The rain that had
spoiled his evening with her was over; for it was still to him as if
his evening HAD been spoiled--though it mightn't have been wholly the
rain.  It was late when he left the cafe, yet not too late; he couldn't
in any case go straight to bed, and he would walk round by the
Boulevard Malesherbes--rather far round--on his way home. Present
enough always was the small circumstance that had originally pressed
for him the spring of so big a difference--the accident of little
Bilham's appearance on the balcony of the mystic troisieme at the
moment of his first visit, and the effect of it on his sense of what
was then before him.  He recalled his watch, his wait, and the
recognition that had proceeded from the young stranger, that had played
frankly into the air and had presently brought him up--things smoothing
the way for his first straight step.  He had since had occasion, a few
times, to pass the house without going in; but he had never passed it
without again feeling how it had then spoken to him.  He stopped short
to-night on coming to sight of it:  it was as if his last day were
oddly copying his first.  The windows of Chad's apartment were open to
the balcony--a pair of them lighted; and a figure that had come out and
taken up little Bilham's attitude, a figure whose cigarette-spark he
could see leaned on the rail and looked down at him.  It denoted
however no reappearance of his younger friend; it quickly defined
itself in the tempered darkness as Chad's more solid shape; so that
Chad's was the attention that after he had stepped forward into the
street and signalled, he easily engaged; Chad's was the voice that,
sounding into the night with promptness and seemingly with joy, greeted
him and called him up.

That the young man had been visible there just in this position
expressed somehow for Strether that, as Maria Gostrey had reported, he
had been absent and silent; and our friend drew breath on each
landing--the lift, at that hour, having ceased to work--before the
implications of the fact.  He had been for a week intensely away, away
to a distance and alone; but he was more back than ever, and the
attitude in which Strether had surprised him was something more than a
return--it was clearly a conscious surrender.  He had arrived but an
hour before, from London, from Lucerne, from Homburg, from no matter
where--though the visitor's fancy, on the staircase, liked to fill it
out; and after a bath, a talk with Baptiste and a supper of light cold
clever French things, which one could see the remains of there in the
circle of the lamp, pretty and ultra-Parisian, he had come into the air
again for a smoke, was occupied at the moment of Strether's approach in
what might have been called taking up his life afresh.  His life, his
life!--Strether paused anew, on the last flight, at this final rather
breathless sense of what Chad's life was doing with Chad's mother's
emissary.  It was dragging him, at strange hours, up the staircases of
the rich; it was keeping him out of bed at the end of long hot days; it
was transforming beyond recognition the simple, subtle, conveniently
uniform thing that had anciently passed with him for a life of his own.
Why should it concern him that Chad was to be fortified in the pleasant
practice of smoking on balconies, of supping on salads, of feeling his
special conditions agreeably reaffirm themselves, of finding
reassurance in comparisons and contrasts?  There was no answer to such
a question but that he was still practically committed--he had perhaps
never yet so much known it. It made him feel old, and he would buy his
railway-ticket--feeling, no doubt, older--the next day; but he had
meanwhile come up four flights, counting the entresol, at midnight and
without a lift, for Chad's life.  The young man, hearing him by this
time, and with Baptiste sent to rest, was already at the door; so that
Strether had before him in full visibility the cause in which he was
labouring and even, with the troisieme fairly gained, panting a little.

Chad offered him, as always, a welcome in which the cordial and the
formal--so far as the formal was the respectful--handsomely met; and
after he had expressed a hope that he would let him put him up for the
night Strether was in full possession of the key, as it might have been
called, to what had lately happened.  If he had just thought of himself
as old Chad was at sight of him thinking of him as older:  he wanted to
put him up for the night just because he was ancient and weary.  It
could never be said the tenant of these quarters wasn't nice to him; a
tenant who, if he might indeed now keep him, was probably prepared to
work it all still more thoroughly.  Our friend had in fact the
impression that with the minimum of encouragement Chad would propose to
keep him indefinitely; an impression in the lap of which one of his own
possibilities seemed to sit.  Madame de Vionnet had wished him to
stay--so why didn't that happily fit?  He could enshrine himself for
the rest of his days in his young host's chambre d'ami and draw out
these days at his young host's expense:  there could scarce be greater
logical expression of the countenance he had been moved to give.  There
was literally a minute--it was strange enough--during which he grasped
the idea that as he WAS acting, as he could only act, he was
inconsistent.  The sign that the inward forces he had obeyed really
hung together would be that--in default always of another career--he
should promote the good cause by mounting guard on it.  These things,
during his first minutes, came and went; but they were after all
practically disposed of as soon as he had mentioned his errand.  He had
come to say good-bye--yet that was only a part; so that from the moment
Chad accepted his farewell the question of a more ideal affirmation
gave way to something else. He proceeded with the rest of his business.
"You'll be a brute, you know--you'll be guilty of the last infamy--if
you ever forsake her."

That, uttered there at the solemn hour, uttered in the place that was
full of her influence, was the rest of his business; and when once he
had heard himself say it he felt that his message had never before been
spoken.  It placed his present call immediately on solid ground, and
the effect of it was to enable him quite to play with what we have
called the key.  Chad showed no shade of embarrassment, but had none
the less been troubled for him after their meeting in the country; had
had fears and doubts on the subject of his comfort.  He was disturbed,
as it were, only FOR him, and had positively gone away to ease him off,
to let him down--if it wasn't indeed rather to screw him up--the more
gently. Seeing him now fairly jaded he had come, with characteristic
good humour, all the way to meet him, and what Strether thereupon
supremely made out was that he would abound for him to the end in
conscientious assurances.  This was what was between them while the
visitor remained; so far from having to go over old ground he found his
entertainer keen to agree to everything.  It couldn't be put too
strongly for him that he'd be a brute.  "Oh rather!--if I should do
anything of THAT sort.  I hope you believe I really feel it."

"I want it," said Strether, "to be my last word of all to you. I can't
say more, you know; and I don't see how I can do more, in every way,
than I've done."

Chad took this, almost artlessly, as a direct allusion.  "You've seen
her?"

"Oh yes--to say good-bye.  And if I had doubted the truth of what I
tell you--"

"She'd have cleared up your doubt?"  Chad understood--"rather"--again!
It even kept him briefly silent.  But he made that up. "She must have
been wonderful."

"She WAS," Strether candidly admitted--all of which practically told as
a reference to the conditions created by the accident of the previous
week.

They appeared for a little to be looking back at it; and that came out
still more in what Chad next said.  "I don't know what you've really
thought, all along; I never did know--for anything, with you, seemed to
be possible.  But of course--of course--"  Without confusion, quite
with nothing but indulgence, he broke down, he pulled up.  "After all,
you understand.  I spoke to you originally only as I HAD to speak.
There's only one way--isn't there?--about such things.  However," he
smiled with a final philosophy, "I see it's all right."

Strether met his eyes with a sense of multiplying thoughts.  What was
it that made him at present, late at night and after journeys, so
renewedly, so substantially young?  Strether saw in a moment what it
was--it was that he was younger again than Madame de Vionnet. He
himself said immediately none of the things that he was thinking; he
said something quite different.  "You HAVE really been to a distance?"

"I've been to England." Chad spoke cheerfully and promptly, but gave no
further account of it than to say:  "One must sometimes get off."

Strether wanted no more facts--he only wanted to justify, as it were,
his question.  "Of course you do as you're free to do.  But I hope,
this time, that you didn't go for ME."

"For very shame at bothering you really too much?  My dear man," Chad
laughed, "what WOULDn't I do for you?"

Strether's easy answer for this was that it was a disposition he had
exactly come to profit by.  "Even at the risk of being in your way I've
waited on, you know, for a definite reason."

Chad took it in.  "Oh yes--for us to make if possible a still better
impression." And he stood there happily exhaling his full general
consciousness.  "I'm delighted to gather that you feel we've made it."

There was a pleasant irony in the words, which his guest, preoccupied
and keeping to the point, didn't take up.  "If I had my sense of
wanting the rest of the time--the time of their being still on this
side," he continued to explain--"I know now why I wanted it."

He was as grave, as distinct, as a demonstrator before a blackboard,
and Chad continued to face him like an intelligent pupil.  "You wanted
to have been put through the whole thing."

Strether again, for a moment, said nothing; he turned his eyes away,
and they lost themselves, through the open window, in the dusky outer
air.  "I shall learn from the Bank here where they're now having their
letters, and my last word, which I shall write in the morning and which
they're expecting as my ultimatum, will so immediately reach them." The
light of his plural pronoun was sufficiently reflected in his
companion's face as he again met it; and he completed his
demonstration.  He pursued indeed as if for himself.  "Of course I've
first to justify what I shall do."

"You're justifying it beautifully!" Chad declared.

"It's not a question of advising you not to go," Strether said, "but of
absolutely preventing you, if possible, from so much as thinking of it.
Let me accordingly appeal to you by all you hold sacred."

Chad showed a surprise.  "What makes you think me capable--?"

"You'd not only be, as I say, a brute; you'd be," his companion went on
in the same way, "a criminal of the deepest dye."

Chad gave a sharper look, as if to gauge a possible suspicion. "I don't
know what should make you think I'm tired of her."

Strether didn't quite know either, and such impressions, for the
imaginative mind, were always too fine, too floating, to produce on the
spot their warrant.  There was none the less for him, in the very
manner of his host's allusion to satiety as a thinkable motive, a
slight breath of the ominous.  "I feel how much more she can do for
you.  She hasn't done it all yet.  Stay with her at least till she has."

"And leave her THEN?"

Chad had kept smiling, but its effect in Strether was a shade of
dryness.  "Don't leave her BEFORE.  When you've got all that can be
got--I don't say," he added a trifle grimly.  "That will be the proper
time.  But as, for you, from such a woman, there will always be
something to be got, my remark's not a wrong to her." Chad let him go
on, showing every decent deference, showing perhaps also a candid
curiosity for this sharper accent.  "I remember you, you know, as you
were."

"An awful ass, wasn't I?"

The response was as prompt as if he had pressed a spring; it had a
ready abundance at which he even winced; so that he took a moment to
meet it.  "You certainly then wouldn't have seemed worth all you've let
me in for.  You've defined yourself better.  Your value has quintupled."

"Well then, wouldn't that be enough--?"

Chad had risked it jocosely, but Strether remained blank.  "Enough?"

"If one SHOULD wish to live on one's accumulations?"  After which,
however, as his friend appeared cold to the joke, the young man as
easily dropped it.  "Of course I really never forget, night or day,
what I owe her.  I owe her everything.  I give you my word of honour,"
he frankly rang out, "that I'm not a bit tired of her." Strether at
this only gave him a stare:  the way youth could express itself was
again and again a wonder.  He meant no harm, though he might after all
be capable of much; yet he spoke of being "tired" of her almost as he
might have spoken of being tired of roast mutton for dinner.  "She has
never for a moment yet bored me--never been wanting, as the cleverest
women sometimes are, in tact. She has never talked about her tact--as
even they too sometimes talk; but she has always had it.  She has never
had it more"--he handsomely made the point--"than just lately." And he
scrupulously went further. "She has never been anything I could call a
burden."

Strether for a moment said nothing; then he spoke gravely, with his
shade of dryness deepened.  "Oh if you didn't do her justice--!"

"I SHOULD be a beast, eh?"

Strether devoted no time to saying what he would be; THAT, visibly,
would take them far.  If there was nothing for it but to repeat,
however, repetition was no mistake.  "You owe her everything--very much
more than she can ever owe you.  You've in other words duties to her,
of the most positive sort; and I don't see what other duties--as the
others are presented to you--can be held to go before them."

Chad looked at him with a smile.  "And you know of course about the
others, eh?--since it's you yourself who have done the presenting."

"Much of it--yes--and to the best of my ability.  But not all--from the
moment your sister took my place."

"She didn't," Chad returned.  "Sally took a place, certainly; but it
was never, I saw from the first moment, to be yours.  No one--with
us--will ever take yours.  It wouldn't be possible."

"Ah of course," sighed Strether, "I knew it.  I believe you're right.
No one in the world, I imagine, was ever so portentously solemn.  There
I am," he added with another sigh, as if weary enough, on occasion, of
this truth.  "I was made so."

Chad appeared for a little to consider the way he was made; he might
for this purpose have measured him up and down. His conclusion favoured
the fact.  "YOU have never needed any one to make you better.  There
has never been any one good enough. They couldn't," the young man
declared.

His friend hesitated.  "I beg your pardon.  They HAVE."

Chad showed, not without amusement, his doubt.  "Who then?"

Strether--though a little dimly--smiled at him.  "Women--too."

"'Two'?"--Chad stared and laughed.  "Oh I don't believe, for such work,
in any more than one!  So you're proving too much.  And what IS
beastly, at all events," he added, "is losing you."

Strether had set himself in motion for departure, but at this he
paused.  "Are you afraid?"

"Afraid--?"

"Of doing wrong.  I mean away from my eye." Before Chad could speak,
however, he had taken himself up.  "I AM, certainly," he laughed,
"prodigious."

"Yes, you spoil us for all the stupid--!"  This might have been, on
Chad's part, in its extreme emphasis, almost too freely extravagant;
but it was full, plainly enough, of the intention of comfort, it
carried with it a protest against doubt and a promise, positively, of
performance.  Picking up a hat in the vestibule he came out with his
friend, came downstairs, took his arm, affectionately, as to help and
guide him, treating him if not exactly as aged and infirm, yet as a
noble eccentric who appealed to tenderness, and keeping on with him,
while they walked, to the next corner and the next.  "You needn't tell
me, you needn't tell me!"--this again as they proceeded, he wished to
make Strether feel.  What he needn't tell him was now at last, in the
geniality of separation, anything at all it concerned him to know.  He
knew, up to the hilt--that really came over Chad; he understood, felt,
recorded his vow; and they lingered on it as they had lingered in their
walk to Strether's hotel the night of their first meeting. The latter
took, at this hour, all he could get; he had given all he had had to
give; he was as depleted as if he had spent his last sou.  But there
was just one thing for which, before they broke off, Chad seemed
disposed slightly to bargain.  His companion needn't, as he said, tell
him, but he might himself mention that he had been getting some news of
the art of advertisement.  He came out quite suddenly with this
announcement while Strether wondered if his revived interest were what
had taken him, with strange inconsequence, over to London.  He appeared
at all events to have been looking into the question and had
encountered a revelation.  Advertising scientifically worked presented
itself thus as the great new force.  "It really does the thing, you
know."

They were face to face under the street-lamp as they had been the first
night, and Strether, no doubt, looked blank.  "Affects, you mean, the
sale of the object advertised?"

"Yes--but affects it extraordinarily; really beyond what one had
supposed.  I mean of course when it's done as one makes out that in our
roaring age, it CAN be done.  I've been finding out a little, though it
doubtless doesn't amount to much more than what you originally, so
awfully vividly--and all, very nearly, that first night--put before me.
It's an art like another, and infinite like all the arts." He went on
as if for the joke of it--almost as if his friend's face amused him.
"In the hands, naturally, of a master. The right man must take hold.
With the right man to work it c'est un monde."

Strether had watched him quite as if, there on the pavement without a
pretext, he had begun to dance a fancy step.  "Is what you're thinking
of that you yourself, in the case you have in mind, would be the right
man?"

Chad had thrown back his light coat and thrust each of his thumbs into
an armhole of his waistcoat; in which position his fingers played up
and down.  "Why, what is he but what you yourself, as I say, took me
for when you first came out?"

Strether felt a little faint, but he coerced his attention.  "Oh yes,
and there's no doubt that, with your natural parts, you'd have much in
common with him.  Advertising is clearly at this time of day the secret
of trade.  It's quite possible it will be open to you--giving the whole
of your mind to it--to make the whole place hum with you.  Your
mother's appeal is to the whole of your mind, and that's exactly the
strength of her case."

Chad's fingers continued to twiddle, but he had something of a drop.
"Ah we've been through my mother's case!"

"So I thought.  Why then do you speak of the matter?"

"Only because it was part of our original discussion.  To wind up where
we began, my interest's purely platonic.  There at any rate the fact
is--the fact of the possible.  I mean the money in it."

"Oh damn the money in it!" said Strether.  And then as the young man's
fixed smile seemed to shine out more strange:  "Shall you give your
friend up for the money in it?"

Chad preserved his handsome grimace as well as the rest of his
attitude.  "You're not altogether--in your so great 'solemnity'--kind.
Haven't I been drinking you in--showing you all I feel you're worth to
me?  What have I done, what am I doing, but cleave to her to the death?
The only thing is," he good-humouredly explained, "that one can't but
have it before one, in the cleaving--the point where the death comes
in.  Don't be afraid for THAT. It's pleasant to a fellow's feelings,"
he developed, "to 'size-up' the bribe he applies his foot to."

"Oh then if all you want's a kickable surface the bribe's enormous."

"Good.  Then there it goes!"  Chad administered his kick with fantastic
force and sent an imaginary object flying.  It was accordingly as if
they were once more rid of the question and could come back to what
really concerned him.  "Of course I shall see you tomorrow."

But Strether scarce heeded the plan proposed for this; he had still the
impression--not the slighter for the simulated kick--of an irrelevant
hornpipe or jig.  "You're restless."

"Ah," returned Chad as they parted, "you're exciting."

Concerned by Chad's unlikely disappearance, Strether goes to the young man's apartment to see if he has returned. Chad is there, having in fact just returned from a trip to London, and he greets Strether warmly. As they talk, it occurs to Strether that he could stay in Paris with Chad indefinitely. This raises a moment of regret in Strether's mind, but he finally tells Chad he has come to bid him goodbye. He also has one more thing to say: "You'll be a brute, you know -- you'll be guilty of the last infamy -- if you ever forsake her." Chad protests the idea and says he doesn't know what should make Strether feel he is tired of Madame de Vionnet. "Strether didn't quite know, either, and such impressions, for the imaginative mind, were always too fine, too floating, to produce on the spot their warrant." He reminds Chad of all Madame de Vionnet has done for him and says, "I remember you, you know, as you were." As he walks Strether back to his hotel, Chad suddenly announces a revived interest in the art of advertising, and Strether wonders if he will give up Madame de Vionnet after all. Chad denies the possibility, but Strether's parting remark to Chad is "You're restless."

Strether, in a pure and noble effort, takes the ultimate step on behalf of Madame de Vionnet by appealing to Chad "by all you hold sacred" not to forsake her. Strether senses from Chad's response that he is more concerned with the art of advertising than a sacred obligation to Madame de Vionnet, and he perceives that Chad will prove a source of real disappointment. The reader can see here that it is actually Strether who has been profoundly "changed" by Europe; Chad's alteration has been a superficial one. Ironically, Strether's original embassy -- to effect the return of Chad to America -- has succeeded; but, in terms of his new awareness and sensibility, Strether has "failed."


He had, however, within two days, another separation to face. He had
sent Maria Gostrey a word early, by hand, to ask if he might come to
breakfast; in consequence of which, at noon, she awaited him in the
cool shade of her little Dutch-looking dining-room. This retreat was at
the back of the house, with a view of a scrap of old garden that had
been saved from modern ravage; and though he had on more than one other
occasion had his legs under its small and peculiarly polished table of
hospitality, the place had never before struck him as so sacred to
pleasant knowledge, to intimate charm, to antique order, to a neatness
that was almost august. To sit there was, as he had told his hostess
before, to see life reflected for the time in ideally kept pewter;
which was somehow becoming, improving to life, so that one's eyes were
held and comforted.  Strether's were comforted at all events now--and
the more that it was the last time--with the charming effect, on the
board bare of a cloth and proud of its perfect surface, of the small
old crockery and old silver, matched by the more substantial pieces
happily disposed about the room.  The specimens of vivid Delf, in
particular had the dignity of family portraits; and it was in the midst
of them that our friend resignedly expressed himself. He spoke even
with a certain philosophic humour.  "There's nothing more to wait for;
I seem to have done a good day's work.  I've let them have it all
round.  I've seen Chad, who has been to London and come back.  He tells
me I'm 'exciting,' and I seem indeed pretty well to have upset every
one.  I've at any rate excited HIM.  He's distinctly restless."

"You've excited ME," Miss Gostrey smiled.  "I'M distinctly restless."

"Oh you were that when I found you.  It seems to me I've rather got you
out of it.  What's this," he asked as he looked about him, "but a haunt
of ancient peace?"

"I wish with all my heart," she presently replied, "I could make you
treat it as a haven of rest." On which they fronted each other, across
the table, as if things unuttered were in the air.

Strether seemed, in his way, when he next spoke, to take some of them
up.  "It wouldn't give me--that would be the trouble--what it will, no
doubt, still give you.  I'm not," he explained, leaning back in his
chair, but with his eyes on a small ripe round melon--"in real harmony
with what surrounds me.  You ARE.  I take it too hard. You DON'T.  It
makes--that's what it comes to in the end--a fool of me." Then at a
tangent, "What has he been doing in London?" he demanded.

"Ah one may go to London," Maria laughed.  "You know I did."

Yes--he took the reminder.  "And you brought ME back." He brooded there
opposite to her, but without gloom.  "Whom has Chad brought? He's full
of ideas.  And I wrote to Sarah," he added, "the first thing this
morning.  So I'm square.  I'm ready for them."

She neglected certain parts of this speech in the interest of others.
"Marie said to me the other day that she felt him to have the makings
of an immense man of business."

"There it is.  He's the son of his father!"

"But SUCH a father!"

"Ah just the right one from that point of view!  But it isn't his
father in him," Strether added, "that troubles me."

"What is it then?"  He came back to his breakfast; he partook presently
of the charming melon, which she liberally cut for him; and it was only
after this that he met her question.  Then moreover it was but to
remark that he'd answer her presently.  She waited, she watched, she
served him and amused him, and it was perhaps with this last idea that
she soon reminded him of his having never even yet named to her the
article produced at Woollett.  "Do you remember our talking of it in
London--that night at the play?" Before he could say yes, however, she
had put it to him for other matters.  Did he remember, did he
remember--this and that of their first days?  He remembered everything,
bringing up with humour even things of which she professed no
recollection, things she vehemently denied; and falling back above all
on the great interest of their early time, the curiosity felt by both
of them as to where he would "come out." They had so assumed it was to
be in some wonderful place--they had thought of it as so very MUCH out.
Well, that was doubtless what it had been--since he had come out just
there.  He was out, in truth, as far as it was possible to be, and must
now rather bethink himself of getting in again. He found on the spot
the image of his recent history; he was like one of the figures of the
old clock at Berne.  THEY came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged
along their little course in the public eye, and went in on the other
side.  He too had jigged his little course--him too a modest retreat
awaited.  He offered now, should she really like to know, to name the
great product of Woollett.  It would be a great commentary on
everything.  At this she stopped him off; she not only had no wish to
know, but she wouldn't know for the world.  She had done with the
products of Woollett--for all the good she had got from them.  She
desired no further news of them, and she mentioned that Madame de
Vionnet herself had, to her knowledge, lived exempt from the
information he was ready to supply.  She had never consented to receive
it, though she would have taken it, under stress, from Mrs. Pocock. But
it was a matter about which Mrs. Pocock appeared to have had little to
say--never sounding the word--and it didn't signify now.  There was
nothing clearly for Maria Gostrey that signified now--save one sharp
point, that is, to which she came in time. "I don't know whether it's
before you as a possibility that, left to himself, Mr. Chad may after
all go back.  I judge that it IS more or less so before you, from what
you just now said of him."

Her guest had his eyes on her, kindly but attentively, as if foreseeing
what was to follow this.  "I don't think it will be for the money." And
then as she seemed uncertain:  "I mean I don't believe it will be for
that he'll give her up."

"Then he WILL give her up?"

Strether waited a moment, rather slow and deliberate now, drawing out a
little this last soft stage, pleading with her in various suggestive
and unspoken ways for patience and understanding. "What were you just
about to ask me?"

"Is there anything he can do that would make you patch it up?"

"With Mrs. Newsome?"

Her assent, as if she had had a delicacy about sounding the name, was
only in her face; but she added with it:  "Or is there anything he can
do that would make HER try it?"

"To patch it up with me?"  His answer came at last in a conclusive
headshake.  "There's nothing any one can do.  It's over.  Over for both
of us."

Maria wondered, seemed a little to doubt.  "Are you so sure for her?"

"Oh yes--sure now.  Too much has happened.  I'm different for her."

She took it in then, drawing a deeper breath.  "I see.  So that as
she's different for YOU--"

"Ah but," he interrupted, "she's not."  And as Miss Gostrey wondered
again:  "She's the same.  She's more than ever the same. But I do what
I didn't before--I SEE her."

He spoke gravely and as if responsibly--since he had to pronounce; and
the effect of it was slightly solemn, so that she simply exclaimed
"Oh!"  Satisfied and grateful, however, she showed in her own next
words an acceptance of his statement.  "What then do you go home to?"

He had pushed his plate a little away, occupied with another side of
the matter; taking refuge verily in that side and feeling so moved that
he soon found himself on his feet.  He was affected in advance by what
he believed might come from her, and he would have liked to forestall
it and deal with it tenderly;  yet in the presence of it he wished
still more to be--though as smoothly as possible--deterrent and
conclusive.  He put her question by for the moment; he told her more
about Chad.  "It would have been impossible to meet me more than he did
last night on the question of the infamy of not sticking to her."

"Is that what you called it for him--'infamy'?"

"Oh rather!  I described to him in detail the base creature he'd be,
and he quite agrees with me about it."

"So that it's really as if you had nailed him?"

"Quite really as if--!  I told him I should curse him."

"Oh," she smiled, "you HAVE done it." And then having thought again:
"You CAN'T after that propose--!"  Yet she scanned his face.

"Propose again to Mrs. Newsome?"

She hesitated afresh, but she brought it out.  "I've never believed,
you know, that you did propose.  I always believed it was really
she--and, so far as that goes, I can understand it.  What I mean is,"
she explained, "that with such a spirit--the spirit of curses!--your
breach is past mending.  She has only to know what you've done to him
never again to raise a finger."

"I've done," said Strether, "what I could--one can't do more. He
protests his devotion and his horror.  But I'm not sure I've saved him.
He protests too much.  He asks how one can dream of his being tired.
But he has all life before him."

Maria saw what he meant.  "He's formed to please."

"And it's our friend who has formed him." Strether felt in it the
strange irony.

"So it's scarcely his fault!"

"It's at any rate his danger.  I mean," said Strether, "it's hers. But
she knows it."

"Yes, she knows it.  And is your idea," Miss Gostrey asked, "that there
was some other woman in London?"

"Yes.  No.  That is I HAVE no ideas.  I'm afraid of them. I've done
with them." And he put out his hand to her.  "Good-bye."

It brought her back to her unanswered question.  "To what do you go
home?"

"I don't know.  There will always be something."

"To a great difference," she said as she kept his hand.

"A great difference--no doubt.  Yet I shall see what I can make of it."

"Shall you make anything so good--?"  But, as if remembering what Mrs.
Newsome had done, it was as far as she went.

He had sufficiently understood.  "So good as this place at this moment?
So good as what YOU make of everything you touch?" He took a moment to
say, for, really and truly, what stood about him there in her
offer--which was as the offer of exquisite service, of lightened care,
for the rest of his days--might well have tempted. It built him softly
round, it roofed him warmly over, it rested, all so firm, on selection.
And what ruled selection was beauty and knowledge.  It was awkward, it
was almost stupid, not to seem to prize such things; yet, none the
less, so far as they made his opportunity they made it only for a
moment.  She'd moreover understand--she always understood.

That indeed might be, but meanwhile she was going on. "There's nothing,
you know, I wouldn't do for you."

"Oh yes--I know."

"There's nothing," she repeated, "in all the world."

"I know.  I know.  But all the same I must go." He had got it at last.
"To be right."

"To be right?"

She had echoed it in vague deprecation, but he felt it already clear
for her.  "That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole
affair, to have got anything for myself."

She thought.  "But with your wonderful impressions you'll have got a
great deal."

"A great deal"--he agreed.  "But nothing like YOU.  It's you who would
make me wrong!"

Honest and fine, she couldn't greatly pretend she didn't see it. Still
she could pretend just a little.  "But why should you be so dreadfully
right?"

"That's the way that--if I must go--you yourself would be the first to
want me.  And I can't do anything else."

So then she had to take it, though still with her defeated protest. "It
isn't so much your BEING 'right'--it's your horrible sharp eye for what
makes you so."

"Oh but you're just as bad yourself.  You can't resist me when I point
that out."

She sighed it at last all comically, all tragically, away. "I can't
indeed resist you."

"Then there we are!" said Strether.

Strether has one more separation to face and sends a word to Maria to ask if he might come for breakfast. When she tells him she wishes he would continue to make her home a "haven of rest," he says, "It wouldn't give me -- that would be the trouble -- what it will, no doubt, still give you." They discuss Chad's business ability and Maria mentions that he has never told her what the product is that is produced at Woollett. In the next breath, she decides she never wants to know. She finally comes to the possibility that Chad may go back to Woollett after all, and Strether answers, "I don't think it will be for the money." He continues, "I've done what I could -- one can't do more. He protests his devotion and his horror. But I'm not sure I've saved him. He protests too much. He asks how one can dream of his being tired. But he has all life before him." Maria wonders whether anything can be done to patch up the relationship between Strether and Mrs. Newsome, and he shakes his head no. "I do what I didn't before -- I see her." She again expresses her desire that he stay with her in Paris, and hardly understanding himself why he can't, Strether insists he must go. In an attempt at an explanation, he says, "I must go. . . . To be right. . . . That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself."

Although Strether explains that it is his resolve to get nothing in the affair for himself, Maria knows that he has in fact profited greatly from his experience: ". . . you'll have got a great deal." Maria can see Strether as he cannot see himself, and, what is more, she is in love with him. Strether knows this, but he cannot accept her love because of his feelings for Madame de Vionnet and because accepting Maria would mean that he had somehow got something for himself out of the affair. Strether maintains his sense of integrity to the very end.