Strether occupied beside little Bilham, three evenings after his
interview with Mamie Pocock, the same deep divan they had enjoyed
together on the first occasion of our friend's meeting Madame de
Vionnet and her daughter in the apartment of the Boulevard Malesherbes,
where his position affirmed itself again as ministering to an easy
exchange of impressions.  The present evening had a different stamp; if
the company was much more numerous, so, inevitably, were the ideas set
in motion.  It was on the other hand, however, now strongly marked that
the talkers moved, in respect to such matters, round an inner, a
protected circle. They knew at any rate what really concerned them
to-night, and Strether had begun by keeping his companion close to it.
Only a few of Chad's guests had dined--that is fifteen or twenty, a few
compared with the large concourse offered to sight by eleven o'clock;
but number and mass, quantity and quality, light, fragrance, sound, the
overflow of hospitality meeting the high tide of response, had all from
the first pressed upon Strether's consciousness, and he felt himself
somehow part and parcel of the most festive scene, as the term was, in
which he had ever in his life been engaged.  He had perhaps seen, on
Fourths of July and on dear old domestic Commencements, more people
assembled, but he had never seen so many in proportion to the space, or
had at all events never known so great a promiscuity to show so
markedly as picked. Numerous as was the company, it had still been made
so by selection, and what was above all rare for Strether was that, by
no fault of his own, he was in the secret of the principle that had
worked.  He hadn't enquired, he had averted his head, but Chad had put
him a pair of questions that themselves smoothed the ground. He hadn't
answered the questions, he had replied that they were the young man's
own affair; and he had then seen perfectly that the latter's direction
was already settled.

Chad had applied for counsel only by way of intimating that he knew
what to do; and he had clearly never known it better than in now
presenting to his sister the whole circle of his society.  This was all
in the sense and the spirit of the note struck by him on that lady's
arrival; he had taken at the station itself a line that led him without
a break, and that enabled him to lead the Pococks--though dazed a
little, no doubt, breathless, no doubt, and bewildered--to the
uttermost end of the passage accepted by them perforce as pleasant.  He
had made it for them violently pleasant and mercilessly full; the
upshot of which was, to Strether's vision, that they had come all the
way without discovering it to be really no passage at all.  It was a
brave blind alley, where to pass was impossible and where, unless they
stuck fast, they would have--which was always awkward--publicly to back
out.  They were touching bottom assuredly tonight; the whole scene
represented the terminus of the cul-de-sac.  So could things go when
there was a hand to keep them consistent--a hand that pulled the wire
with a skill at which the elder man more and more marvelled.  The elder
man felt responsible, but he also felt successful, since what had taken
place was simply the issue of his own contention, six weeks before,
that they properly should wait to see what their friends would have
really to say.  He had determined Chad to wait, he had determined him
to see; he was therefore not to quarrel with the time given up to the
business.  As much as ever, accordingly, now that a fortnight had
elapsed, the situation created for Sarah, and against which she had
raised no protest, was that of her having accommodated herself to her
adventure as to a pleasure-party surrendered perhaps even somewhat in
excess to bustle and to "pace." If her brother had been at any point
the least bit open to criticism it might have been on the ground of his
spicing the draught too highly and pouring the cup too full.  Frankly
treating the whole occasion of the presence of his relatives as an
opportunity for amusement, he left it, no doubt, but scant margin as an
opportunity for anything else.  He suggested, invented, abounded--yet
all the while with the loosest easiest rein. Strether, during his own
weeks, had gained a sense of knowing Paris; but he saw it afresh, and
with fresh emotion, in the form of the knowledge offered to his
colleague.

A thousand unuttered thoughts hummed for him in the air of these
observations; not the least frequent of which was that Sarah might well
of a truth not quite know whither she was drifting.  She was in no
position not to appear to expect that Chad should treat her handsomely;
yet she struck our friend as privately stiffening a little each time
she missed the chance of marking the great nuance. The great nuance was
in brief that of course her brother must treat her handsomely--she
should like to see him not; but that treating her handsomely, none the
less, wasn't all in all--treating her handsomely buttered no parsnips;
and that in fine there were moments when she felt the fixed eyes of
their admirable absent mother fairly screw into the flat of her back.
Strether, watching, after his habit, and overscoring with thought,
positively had moments of his own in which he found himself sorry for
her--occasions on which she affected him as a person seated in a
runaway vehicle and turning over the question of a possible jump. WOULD
she jump, could she, would THAT be a safe placed--this question, at
such instants, sat for him in her lapse into pallor, her tight lips,
her conscious eyes.  It came back to the main point at issue: would she
be, after all, to be squared?  He believed on the whole she would jump;
yet his alternations on this subject were the more especial stuff of
his suspense.  One thing remained well before him--a conviction that
was in fact to gain sharpness from the impressions of this evening:
that if she SHOULD gather in her skirts, close her eyes and quit the
carriage while in motion, he would promptly enough become aware.  She
would alight from her headlong course more or less directly upon him;
it would be appointed to him, unquestionably, to receive her entire
weight. Signs and portents of the experience thus in reserve for him
had as it happened, multiplied even through the dazzle of Chad's party.
It was partly under the nervous consciousness of such a prospect that,
leaving almost every one in the two other rooms, leaving those of the
guests already known to him as well as a mass of brilliant strangers of
both sexes and of several varieties of speech, he had desired five
quiet minutes with little Bilham, whom he always found soothing and
even a little inspiring, and to whom he had actually moreover something
distinct and important to say.

He had felt of old--for it already seemed long ago--rather humiliated
at discovering he could learn in talk with a personage so much his
junior the lesson of a certain moral ease; but he had now got used to
that--whether or no the mixture of the fact with other humiliations had
made it indistinct, whether or no directly from little Bilham's
example, the example of his being contentedly just the obscure and
acute little Bilham he was.  It worked so for him, Strether seemed to
see; and our friend had at private hours a wan smile over the fact that
he himself, after so many more years, was still in search of something
that would work.  However, as we have said, it worked just now for them
equally to have found a corner a little apart.  What particularly kept
it apart was the circumstance that the music in the salon was
admirable, with two or three such singers as it was a privilege to hear
in private.  Their presence gave a distinction to Chad's entertainment,
and the interest of calculating their effect on Sarah was actually so
sharp as to be almost painful.  Unmistakeably, in her single person,
the motive of the composition and dressed in a splendour of crimson
which affected Strether as the sound of a fall through a skylight, she
would now be in the forefront of the listening circle and committed by
it up to her eyes.  Those eyes during the wonderful dinner itself he
hadn't once met; having confessedly--perhaps a little
pusillanimously--arranged with Chad that he should be on the same side
of the table.  But there was no use in having arrived now with little
Bilham at an unprecedented point of intimacy unless he could pitch
everything into the pot.  "You who sat where you could see her, what
does she make of it all?  By which I mean on what terms does she take
it?"

"Oh she takes it, I judge, as proving that the claim of his family is
more than ever justified."

"She isn't then pleased with what he has to show?"

"On the contrary; she's pleased with it as with his capacity to do this
kind of thing--more than she has been pleased with anything for a long
time.  But she wants him to show it THERE.  He has no right to waste it
on the likes of us."

Strether wondered.  "She wants him to move the whole thing over?"

"The whole thing--with an important exception.  Everything he has
'picked up'--and the way he knows how.  She sees no difficulty in that.
She'd run the show herself, and she'll make the handsome concession
that Woollett would be on the whole in some ways the better for it. Not
that it wouldn't be also in some ways the better for Woollett.  The
people there are just as good."

"Just as good as you and these others?  Ah that may be.  But such an
occasion as this, whether or no," Strether said, "isn't the people.
It's what has made the people possible."

"Well then," his friend replied, "there you are; I give you my
impression for what it's worth.  Mrs. Pocock has SEEN, and that's
to-night how she sits there.  If you were to have a glimpse of her face
you'd understand me.  She has made up her mind--to the sound of
expensive music."

Strether took it freely in.  "Ah then I shall have news of her."

"I don't want to frighten you, but I think that likely.  However,"
little Bilham continued, "if I'm of the least use to you to hold on
by--!"

"You're not of the least!"--and Strether laid an appreciative hand on
him to say it.  "No one's of the least." With which, to mark how gaily
he could take it, he patted his companion's knee.  "I must meet my fate
alone, and I SHALL--oh you'll see!  And yet," he pursued the next
moment, "you CAN help me too.  You once said to me"--he followed this
further--"that you held Chad should marry. I didn't see then so well as
I know now that you meant he should marry Miss Pocock.  Do you still
consider that he should?  Because if you do"--he kept it up--"I want
you immediately to change your mind.  You can help me that way."

"Help you by thinking he should NOT marry?"

"Not marry at all events Mamie."

"And who then?"

"Ah," Strether returned, "that I'm not obliged to say.  But Madame de
Vionnet--I suggest--when he can.'

"Oh!" said little Bilham with some sharpness.

"Oh precisely!  But he needn't marry at all--I'm at any rate not
obliged to provide for it.  Whereas in your case I rather feel that I
AM."

Little Bilham was amused.  "Obliged to provide for my marrying?"

"Yes--after all I've done to you!"

The young man weighed it.  "Have you done as much as that?"

"Well," said Strether, thus challenged, "of course I must remember what
you've also done to ME.  We may perhaps call it square.  But all the
same," he went on, "I wish awfully you'd marry Mamie Pocock yourself."

Little Bilham laughed out.  "Why it was only the other night, in this
very place, that you were proposing to me a different union altogether."

"Mademoiselle de Vionnet?"  Well, Strether easily confessed it. "That,
I admit, was a vain image.  THIS is practical politics. I want to do
something good for both of you--I wish you each so well; and you can
see in a moment the trouble it will save me to polish you off by the
same stroke.  She likes you, you know.  You console her.  And she's
splendid."

Little Bilham stared as a delicate appetite stares at an overheaped
plate.  "What do I console her for?"

It just made his friend impatient.  "Oh come, you knows"

"And what proves for you that she likes me?"

"Why the fact that I found her three days ago stopping at home alone
all the golden afternoon on the mere chance that you'd come to her, and
hanging over her balcony on that of seeing your cab drive up.  I don't
know what you want more."

Little Bilham after a moment found it.  "Only just to know what proves
to you that I like HER."

"Oh if what I've just mentioned isn't enough to make you do it, you're
a stony-hearted little fiend.  Besides"--Strether encouraged his
fancy's flight--"you showed your inclination in the way you kept her
waiting, kept her on purpose to see if she cared enough for you."

His companion paid his ingenuity the deference of a pause.  "I didn't
keep her waiting.  I came at the hour.  I wouldn't have kept her
waiting for the world," the young man honourably declared.

"Better still--then there you are!"  And Strether, charmed, held him
the faster.  "Even if you didn't do her justice, moreover," he
continued, "I should insist on your immediately coming round to it. I
want awfully to have worked it.  I want"--and our friend spoke now with
a yearning that was really earnest--"at least to have done THAT."

"To have married me off--without a penny?"

"Well, I shan't live long; and I give you my word, now and here, that
I'll leave you every penny of my own.  I haven't many, unfortunately,
but you shall have them all.  And Miss Pocock, I think, has a few.  I
want," Strether went on, "to have been at least to that extent
constructive even expiatory.  I've been sacrificing so to strange gods
that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my
fidelity--fundamentally unchanged after all--to our own.  I feel as if
my hands were embrued with the blood of monstrous alien altars--of
another faith altogether.  There it is--it's done." And then he further
explained.  "It took hold of me because the idea of getting her quite
out of the way for Chad helps to clear my ground."

The young man, at this, bounced about, and it brought them face to face
in admitted amusement.  "You want me to marry as a convenience to Chad?"

"No," Strether debated--"HE doesn't care whether you marry or not. It's
as a convenience simply to my own plan FOR him."

"'Simply'!"--and little Bilham's concurrence was in itself a lively
comment.  "Thank you.  But I thought," he continued, "you had exactly
NO plan 'for' him."

"Well then call it my plan for myself--which may be well, as you say,
to have none.  His situation, don't you see? is reduced now to the bare
facts one has to recognise.  Mamie doesn't want him, and he doesn't
want Mamie:  so much as that these days have made clear.  It's a thread
we can wind up and tuck in."

But little Bilham still questioned.  "YOU can--since you seem so much
to want to.  But why should I?"

Poor Strether thought it over, but was obliged of course to admit that
his demonstration did superficially fail.  "Seriously, there is no
reason.  It's my affair--I must do it alone.  I've only my fantastic
need of making my dose stiff."

Little Bilham wondered.  "What do you call your dose?"

"Why what I have to swallow.  I want my conditions unmitigated."

He had spoken in the tone of talk for talk's sake, and yet with an
obscure truth lurking in the loose folds; a circumstance presently not
without its effect on his young friend.  Little Bilham's eyes rested on
him a moment with some intensity; then suddenly, as if everything had
cleared up, he gave a happy laugh.  It seemed to say that if
pretending, or even trying, or still even hoping, to be able to care
for Mamie would be of use, he was all there for the job.  "I'll do
anything in the world for you!"

"Well," Strether smiled, "anything in the world is all I want.  I don't
know anything that pleased me in her more," he went on, "than the way
that, on my finding her up there all alone, coming on her unawares and
feeling greatly for her being so out of it, she knocked down my tall
house of cards with her instant and cheerful allusion to the next young
man.  It was somehow so the note I needed--her staying at home to
receive him."

"It was Chad of course," said little Bilham, "who asked the next young
man--I like your name for me!--to call."

"So I supposed--all of which, thank God, is in our innocent and natural
manners.  But do you know," Strether asked, "if Chad knows--?"  And
then as this interlocutor seemed at a loss: "Why where she has come
out."

Little Bilham, at this, met his face with a conscious look--it was as
if, more than anything yet, the allusion had penetrated.  "Do you know
yourself?"

Strether lightly shook his head.  "There I stop.  Oh, odd as it may
appear to you, there ARE things I don't know.  I only got the sense
from her of something very sharp, and yet very deep down, that she was
keeping all to herself.  That is I had begun with the belief that she
HAD kept it to herself; but face to face with her there I soon made out
that there was a person with whom she would have shared it.  I had
thought she possibly might with ME--but I saw then that I was only half
in her confidence.  When, turning to me to greet me--for she was on the
balcony and I had come in without her knowing it--she showed me she had
been expecting YOU and was proportionately disappointed, I got hold of
the tail of my conviction.  Half an hour later I was in possession of
all the rest of it.  You know what has happened." He looked at his
young friend hard--then he felt sure.  "For all you say, you're up to
your eyes. So there you are."

Little Bilham after an instant pulled half round.  "I assure you she
hasn't told me anything."

"Of course she hasn't.  For what do you suggest that I suppose her to
take you?  But you've been with her every day, you've seen her freely,
you've liked her greatly--I stick to that--and you've made your profit
of it.  You know what she has been through as well as you know that she
has dined here to-night--which must have put her, by the way, through a
good deal more."

The young man faced this blast; after which he pulled round the rest of
the way.  "I haven't in the least said she hasn't been nice to me.  But
she's proud."

"And quite properly.  But not too proud for that."

"It's just her pride that has made her.  Chad," little Bilham loyally
went on, "has really been as kind to her as possible. It's awkward for
a man when a girl's in love with him."

"Ah but she isn't--now."

Little Bilham sat staring before him; then he sprang up as if his
friend's penetration, recurrent and insistent, made him really after
all too nervous.  "No--she isn't now.  It isn't in the least," he went
on, "Chad's fault.  He's really all right.  I mean he would have been
willing.  But she came over with ideas.  Those she had got at home.
They had been her motive and support in joining her brother and his
wife.  She was to SAVE our friend."

"Ah like me, poor thing?"  Strether also got to his feet.

"Exactly--she had a bad moment.  It was very soon distinct to her, to
pull her up, to let her down, that, alas, he was, he IS, saved. There's
nothing left for her to do."

"Not even to love him?"

"She would have loved him better as she originally believed him."

Strether wondered "Of course one asks one's self what notion a little
girl forms, where a young man's in question, of such a history and such
a state."

"Well, this little girl saw them, no doubt, as obscure, but she saw
them practically as wrong.  The wrong for her WAS the obscure. Chad
turns out at any rate right and good and disconcerting, while what she
was all prepared for, primed and girded and wound up for, was to deal
with him as the general opposite."

"Yet wasn't her whole point"--Strether weighed it--"that he was to be,
that he COULD be, made better, redeemed?"

Little Bilham fixed it all a moment, and then with a small headshake
that diffused a tenderness:  "She's too late.  Too late for the
miracle."

"Yes"--his companion saw enough.  "Still, if the worst fault of his
condition is that it may be all there for her to profit by--?"

"Oh she doesn't want to 'profit,' in that flat way.  She doesn't want
to profit by another woman's work--she wants the miracle to have been
her own miracle.  THAT'S what she's too late for."

Strether quite felt how it all fitted, yet there seemed one loose
piece.  "I'm bound to say, you know, that she strikes one, on these
lines, as fastidious--what you call here difficile."

Little Bilham tossed up his chin.  "Of course she's difficile--on any
lines!  What else in the world ARE our Mamies--the real, the right
ones?"

"I see, I see," our friend repeated, charmed by the responsive wisdom
he had ended by so richly extracting.  "Mamie is one of the real and
the right."

"The very thing itself."

"And what it comes to then," Strether went on, "is that poor awful Chad
is simply too good for her."

"Ah too good was what he was after all to be; but it was she herself,
and she herself only, who was to have made him so."

It hung beautifully together, but with still a loose end.  "Wouldn't he
do for her even if he should after all break--"

"With his actual influence?"  Oh little Bilham had for this enquiry the
sharpest of all his controls.  "How can he 'do'--on any terms
whatever--when he's flagrantly spoiled?"

Strether could only meet the question with his passive, his receptive
pleasure.  "Well, thank goodness, YOU'RE not!  You remain for her to
save, and I come back, on so beautiful and full a demonstration, to my
contention of just now--that of your showing distinct signs of her
having already begun."

The most he could further say to himself--as his young friend turned
away--was that the charge encountered for the moment no renewed denial.
Little Bilham, taking his course back to the music, only shook his
good-natured ears an instant, in the manner of a terrier who has got
wet; while Strether relapsed into the sense--which had for him in these
days most of comfort--that he was free to believe in anything that from
hour to hour kept him going.  He had positively motions and flutters of
this conscious hour-to-hour kind, temporary surrenders to irony, to
fancy, frequent instinctive snatches at the growing rose of
observation, constantly stronger for him, as he felt, in scent and
colour, and in which he could bury his nose even to wantonness.  This
last resource was offered him, for that matter, in the very form of his
next clear perception--the vision of a prompt meeting, in the doorway
of the room, between little Bilham and brilliant Miss Barrace, who was
entering as Bilham withdrew.  She had apparently put him a question, to
which he had replied by turning to indicate his late interlocutor;
toward whom, after an interrogation further aided by a resort to that
optical machinery which seemed, like her other ornaments, curious and
archaic, the genial lady, suggesting more than ever for her fellow
guest the old French print, the historic portrait, directed herself
with an intention that Strether instantly met.  He knew in advance the
first note she would sound, and took in as she approached all her need
of sounding it.  Nothing yet had been so "wonderful" between them as
the present occasion; and it was her special sense of this quality in
occasions that she was there, as she was in most places, to feed.  That
sense had already been so well fed by the situation about them that she
had quitted the other room, forsaken the music, dropped out of the
play, abandoned, in a word, the stage itself, that she might stand a
minute behind the scenes with Strether and so perhaps figure as one of
the famous augurs replying, behind the oracle, to the wink of the
other.  Seated near him presently where little Bilham had sat, she
replied in truth to many things; beginning as soon as he had said to
her--what he hoped he said without fatuity--"All you ladies are
extraordinarily kind to me."

She played her long handle, which shifted her observation; she saw in
an instant all the absences that left them free.  "How can we be
anything else?  But isn't that exactly your plight?  'We ladies'--oh
we're nice, and you must be having enough of us!  As one of us, you
know, I don't pretend I'm crazy about us.  But Miss Gostrey at least
to-night has left you alone, hasn't she?"  With which she again looked
about as if Maria might still lurk.

"Oh yes," said Strether; "she's only sitting up for me at home." And
then as this elicited from his companion her gay "Oh, oh, oh!" he
explained that he meant sitting up in suspense and prayer.  "We thought
it on the whole better she shouldn't be present; and either way of
course it's a terrible worry for her." He abounded in the sense of his
appeal to the ladies, and they might take their choice of his doing so
from humility or from pride.  "Yet she inclines to believe I shall come
out."

"Oh I incline to believe too you'll come out!"--Miss Barrace, with her
laugh, was not to be behind.  "Only the question's about WHERE, isn't
it?  However," she happily continued, "if it's anywhere at all it must
be very far on, mustn't it?  To do us justice, I think, you know," she
laughed, "we do, among us all, want you rather far on.  Yes, yes," she
repeated in her quick droll way; "we want you very, VERY far on!" After
which she wished to know why he had thought it better Maria shouldn't
be present.

"Oh," he replied, "it was really her own idea.  I should have wished
it.  But she dreads responsibility."

"And isn't that a new thing for her?"

"To dread it?  No doubt--no doubt.  But her nerve has given way."

Miss Barrace looked at him a moment.  "She has too much at stake." Then
less gravely:  "Mine, luckily for me, holds out."

"Luckily for me too"--Strether came back to that.  "My own isn't so
firm, MY appetite for responsibility isn't so sharp, as that I haven't
felt the very principle of this occasion to be 'the more the merrier.'
If we ARE so merry it's because Chad has understood so well."

"He has understood amazingly," said Miss Barrace.

"It's wonderful--Strether anticipated for her.

"It's wonderful!" she, to meet it, intensified; so that, face to face
over it, they largely and recklessly laughed.  But she presently added:
"Oh I see the principle.  If one didn't one would be lost.  But when
once one has got hold of it--"

"It's as simple as twice two!  From the moment he had to do something--"

"A crowd"--she took him straight up--"was the only thing?  Rather,
rather:  a rumpus of sound," she laughed, "or nothing.  Mrs. Pocock's
built in, or built out--whichever you call it; she's packed so tight
she can't move.  She's in splendid isolation"--Miss Barrace embroidered
the theme.

Strether followed, but scrupulous of justice.  "Yet with every one in
the place successively introduced to her."

"Wonderfully--but just so that it does build her out.  She's bricked
up, she's buried alive!"

Strether seemed for a moment to look at it; but it brought him to a
sigh.  "Oh but she's not dead!  It will take more than this to kill
her."

His companion had a pause that might have been for pity.  "No, I can't
pretend I think she's finished--or that it's for more than to-night."
She remained pensive as if with the same compunction. "It's only up to
her chin." Then again for the fun of it:  "She can breathe."

"She can breathe!"--he echoed it in the same spirit.  "And do you
know," he went on, "what's really all this time happening to
me?--through the beauty of music, the gaiety of voices, the uproar in
short of our revel and the felicity of your wit?  The sound of Mrs.
Pocock's respiration drowns for me, I assure you, every other. It's
literally all I hear."

She focussed him with her clink of chains.  "Well--!" she breathed ever
so kindly.

"Well, what?"

"She IS free from her chin up," she mused; "and that WILL be enough for
her."

"It will be enough for me!" Strether ruefully laughed.  "Waymarsh has
really," he then asked, "brought her to see you?"

"Yes--but that's the worst of it.  I could do you no good.  And yet I
tried hard."

Strether wondered.  "And how did you try?"

"Why I didn't speak of you."

"I see.  That was better."

"Then what would have been worse?  For speaking or silent," she lightly
wailed, "I somehow 'compromise.' And it has never been any one but you."

"That shows"--he was magnanimous--"that it's something not in you, but
in one's self.  It's MY fault."

She was silent a little.  "No, it's Mr. Waymarsh's.  It's the fault of
his having brought her."

"Ah then," said Strether good-naturedly, "why DID he bring her?"

"He couldn't afford not to."

"Oh you were a trophy--one of the spoils of conquest?  But why in that
case, since you do 'compromise'--"

"Don't I compromise HIM as well?  I do compromise him as well," Miss
Barrace smiled.  "I compromise him as hard as I can.  But for Mr.
Waymarsh it isn't fatal.  It's--so far as his wonderful relation with
Mrs. Pocock is concerned--favourable." And then, as he still seemed
slightly at sea:  "The man who had succeeded with ME, don't you see?
For her to get him from me was such an added incentive."

Strether saw, but as if his path was still strewn with surprises. "It's
'from' you then that she has got him?"

She was amused at his momentary muddle.  "You can fancy my fight! She
believes in her triumph.  I think it has been part of her joy.

"Oh her joy!" Strether sceptically murmured.

"Well, she thinks she has had her own way.  And what's to-night for her
but a kind of apotheosis?  Her frock's really good."

"Good enough to go to heaven in?  For after a real apotheosis,"
Strether went on, "there's nothing BUT heaven.  For Sarah there's only
to-morrow."

"And you mean that she won't find to-morrow heavenly?"

"Well, I mean that I somehow feel to-night--on her behalf--too good to
be true.  She has had her cake; that is she's in the act now of having
it, of swallowing the largest and sweetest piece.  There won't be
another left for her.  Certainly I haven't one.  It can only, at the
best, be Chad." He continued to make it out as for their common
entertainment.  "He may have one, as it were, up his sleeve; yet it's
borne in upon me that if he had--"

"He wouldn't"--she quite understood--"have taken all THIS trouble? I
dare say not, and, if I may be quite free and dreadful, I very much
hope he won't take any more.  Of course I won't pretend now," she
added, "not to know what it's a question of."

"Oh every one must know now," poor Strether thoughtfully admitted; "and
it's strange enough and funny enough that one should feel everybody
here at this very moment to be knowing and watching and waiting."

"Yes--isn't it indeed funny?"  Miss Barrace quite rose to it. "That's
the way we ARE in Paris." She was always pleased with a new
contribution to that queerness.  "It's wonderful!  But, you know," she
declared, "it all depends on you.  I don't want to turn the knife in
your vitals, but that's naturally what you just now meant by our all
being on top of you.  We know you as the hero of the drama, and we're
gathered to see what you'll do."

Strether looked at her a moment with a light perhaps slightly obscured.
"I think that must be why the hero has taken refuge in this corner.
He's scared at his heroism--he shrinks from his part."

"Ah but we nevertheless believe he'll play it.  That's why," Miss
Barrace kindly went on, "we take such an interest in you. We feel
you'll come up to the scratch." And then as he seemed perhaps not quite
to take fire:  "Don't let him do it."

"Don't let Chad go?"

"Yes, keep hold of him.  With all this"--and she indicated the general
tribute--"he has done enough.  We love him here--he's charming."

"It's beautiful," said Strether, "the way you all can simplify when you
will."

But she gave it to him back.  "It's nothing to the way you will when
you must."

He winced at it as at the very voice of prophecy, and it kept him a
moment quiet.  He detained her, however, on her appearing about to
leave him alone in the rather cold clearance their talk had made.
"There positively isn't a sign of a hero to-night; the hero's dodging
and shirking, the hero's ashamed.  Therefore, you know, I think, what
you must all REALLY be occupied with is the heroine."

Miss Barrace took a minute.  "The heroine?"

"The heroine.  I've treated her," said Strether, "not a bit like a
hero.  Oh," he sighed, "I don't do it well!"

She eased him off.  "You do it as you can."  And then after another
hesitation:  "I think she's satisfied."

But he remained compunctious.  "I haven't been near her.  I haven't
looked at her."

"Ah then you've lost a good deal!"

He showed he knew it.  "She's more wonderful than ever?"

"Than ever.  With Mr. Pocock."

Strether wondered.  "Madame de Vionnet--with Jim?"

"Madame de Vionnet--with 'Jim.'"  Miss Barrace was historic.

"And what's she doing with him?"

"Ah you must ask HIM!"

Strether's face lighted again at the prospect.  "It WILL be amusing to
do so."  Yet he continued to wonder.  "But she must have some idea."

"Of course she has--she has twenty ideas.  She has in the first place,"
said Miss Barrace, swinging a little her tortoise-shell, "that of doing
her part.  Her part is to help YOU."

It came out as nothing had come yet; links were missing and connexions
unnamed, but it was suddenly as if they were at the heart of their
subject.  "Yes; how much more she does it," Strether gravely reflected,
"than I help HER!"  It all came over him as with the near presence of
the beauty, the grace, the intense, dissimulated spirit with which he
had, as he said, been putting off contact.  "SHE has courage."

"Ah she has courage!" Miss Barrace quite agreed; and it was as if for a
moment they saw the quantity in each other's face.

But indeed the whole thing was present.  "How much she must care!"

"Ah there it is.  She does care.  But it isn't, is it," Miss Barrace
considerately added, "as if you had ever had any doubt of that?"

Strether seemed suddenly to like to feel that he really never had. "Why
of course it's the whole point."

"Voila!" Miss Barrace smiled.

"It's why one came out," Strether went on.  "And it's why one has
stayed so long.  And it's also"--he abounded--"why one's going home.
It's why, it's why--"

"It's why everything!" she concurred.  "It's why she might be
to-night--for all she looks and shows, and for all your friend 'Jim'
does--about twenty years old.  That's another of her ideas; to be for
him, and to be quite easily and charmingly, as young as a little girl."

Strether assisted at his distance.  "'For him'?  For Chad--?"

"For Chad, in a manner, naturally, always.  But in particular to-night
for Mr.  Pocock."  And then as her friend still stared: "Yes, it IS of
a bravery But that's what she has:  her high sense of duty."  It was
more than sufficiently before them.  "When Mr. Newsome has his hands so
embarrassed with his sister--"

"It's quite the least"--Strether filled it out--"that she should take
his sister's husband?  Certainly--quite the least.  So she has taken
him."

"She has taken him."  It was all Miss Barrace had meant.

Still it remained enough.  "It must be funny."

"Oh it IS funny."  That of course essentially went with it.

But it brought them back.  "How indeed then she must care!" In answer to
which Strether's entertainer dropped a comprehensive "Ah!" expressive
perhaps of some impatience for the time he took to get used to it.  She
herself had got used to it long before.

Three nights after his meeting with Mamie, Strether hangs out with the artist Bilham at Madame de Vionnet's place. They're at another one of her swanky parties. Strether is feeling ashamed of himself again. He's in one of his depressed modes where hanging with Bilham makes him realize how much wiser Bilham is than Strether was at his age. And again, Strether despairs at having wasted his youth. Strether dives into conversation with Bilham by asking what the young man thinks of Sarah Pocock. More specifically, Strether wants to know what Bilham thinks Sarah's attitude toward Chad is. Bilham insists that Sarah Pocock envies the changes that have happened in Chad. Which is news to Strether, who thought she was pretty anti-everything. The only thing is that she wants Chad to bring his new-and-improved self back to Woollett so they can enjoy him back there instead of in Paris. It's because Chad's so improved that Sarah will not rest until he's home. According to Bilham, Sarah can't bear the idea that Chad's charm would be wasted on people like them. Bilham adds that he's not saying the people in Woollett aren't great. In fact, they're every bit as good as the people in Paris . It's just that Woollett doesn't have the rich cultural history and heritage that makes Paris so fab. Strether adds that he thinks Chad's situation would be a lot better if the guy got married. Bilham asks if he's talking about Mamie Pocock, but Strether says he's actually talking about Madame de Vionnet--you know, if her husband dies. Strether says he also thinks it's his duty to find Bilham a wife, too. This totally floors the young artist, who has no clue who Strether might have in mind. Besides, Strether suggested earlier in the book that Bilham should marry Jeanne, which was a total pipe dream. Strether admits that Jeanne was a crazy idea. But now he thinks Bilham should marry Mamie Pocock. Bilham wants to know where he got this idea, and Strether said he knows Mamie was waiting for him longingly on her balcony the other day which makes it pretty clear that she's in love with him. What a gossip. Bilham asks whether Mamie might be in love with Chad, but Strether assures that Mamie, in fact, probably hates Chad. Mamie wanted to be the girl to "save" him for the dirtiness of Paris; but now that she has seen how awesome he is, she realizes that she's too late. Another woman has already saved him, so she's pretty much been kicked to the curb. Bilham gets up to circulate around the party, and just as he leaves, Miss Barrace comes over and sits down in Bilham's place. They joke a little bit about Maria Gostrey not being at the party because she's waiting up for Strether back at home...Yeah, it's kinda shocking as far as 1903 jokes go. Strether gloats a little bit about the fact that Sarah Pocock is at the party, too, and that there's absolutely nothing that she could object to. In Strether's words, Sarah is bricked up and buried alive. She's trapped on the chessboard with no more moves left to make. Miss Barrace reminds him that Sarah still has enough room to breathe, and this might be all she needs. Barrace, for example, has met Sarah and has been received coldly. So the battle doesn't seem to be over just yet. It's just using weirder metaphors. Miss Barrace tells Strether that she feels like everyone at the party is in the middle of an epic drama and that Strether is the hero of the story. Wow, it's almost as if she's read a book called The Ambassadors by Henry James. Strether admits the he might be too much of a scaredy cat to be the hero. Miss Barrace finally comes out and says, "No matter what, don't let Chad go back to America." After all, it's his duty as a hero. The two of them reflect of Sarah being at the party, and Miss Barrace comments on how Jim Pocock has already decided to fight on the side of the Paris crowd. Basically, he's like a spy that Madame de Vionnet has been able to turn to her side. But you can only imagine how furious Sarah Pocock must be if she knows this. The drama continues.


When one morning within the week he perceived the whole thing to be
really at last upon him Strether's immediate feeling was all relief. He
had known this morning that something was about to happen--known it, in
a moment, by Waymarsh's manner when Waymarsh appeared before him during
his brief consumption of coffee and a roll in the small slippery
salle-a-manger so associated with rich rumination.  Strether had taken
there of late various lonely and absent-minded meals; he communed
there, even at the end of June, with a suspected chill, the air of old
shivers mixed with old savours, the air in which so many of his
impressions had perversely matured; the place meanwhile renewing its
message to him by the very circumstance of his single state.  He now
sat there, for the most part, to sigh softly, while he vaguely tilted
his carafe, over the vision of how much better Waymarsh was occupied.
That was really his success by the common measure--to have led this
companion so on and on.  He remembered how at first there had been
scarce a squatting-place he could beguile him into passing; the actual
outcome of which at last was that there was scarce one that could
arrest him in his rush.  His rush--as Strether vividly and amusedly
figured it--continued to be all with Sarah, and contained perhaps
moreover the word of the whole enigma, whipping up in its fine
full-flavoured froth the very principle, for good or for ill, of his
own, of Strether's destiny.  It might after all, to the end, only be
that they had united to save him, and indeed, so far as Waymarsh was
concerned, that HAD to be the spring of action. Strether was glad at
all events, in connexion with the case, that the saving he required was
not more scant; so constituted a luxury was it in certain lights just
to lurk there out of the full glare. He had moments of quite seriously
wondering whether Waymarsh wouldn't in fact, thanks to old friendship
and a conceivable indulgence, make about as good terms for him as he
might make for himself. They wouldn't be the same terms of course; but
they might have the advantage that he himself probably should be able
to make none at all.

He was never in the morning very late, but Waymarsh had already been
out, and, after a peep into the dim refectory, he presented himself
with much less than usual of his large looseness.  He had made sure,
through the expanse of glass exposed to the court, that they would be
alone; and there was now in fact that about him that pretty well took
up the room.  He was dressed in the garments of summer; and save that
his white waistcoat was redundant and bulging these things favoured,
they determined, his expression.  He wore a straw hat such as his
friend hadn't yet seen in Paris, and he showed a buttonhole freshly
adorned with a magnificent rose. Strether read on the instant his
story--how, astir for the previous hour, the sprinkled newness of the
day, so pleasant at that season in Paris, he was fairly panting with
the pulse of adventure and had been with Mrs. Pocock, unmistakeably, to
the Marche aux Fleurs. Strether really knew in this vision of him a joy
that was akin to envy; so reversed as he stood there did their old
positions seem; so comparatively doleful now showed, by the sharp turn
of the wheel, the posture of the pilgrim from Woollett.  He wondered,
this pilgrim, if he had originally looked to Waymarsh so brave and
well, so remarkably launched, as it was at present the latter's
privilege to appear.  He recalled that his friend had remarked to him
even at Chester that his aspect belied his plea of prostration; but
there certainly couldn't have been, for an issue, an aspect less
concerned than Waymarsh's with the menace of decay.  Strether had at
any rate never resembled a Southern planter of the great days--which
was the image picturesquely suggested by the happy relation between the
fuliginous face and the wide panama of his visitor. This type, it
further amused him to guess, had been, on Waymarsh's part, the object
of Sarah's care; he was convinced that her taste had not been a
stranger to the conception and purchase of the hat, any more than her
fine fingers had been guiltless of the bestowal of the rose.  It came
to him in the current of thought, as things so oddly did come, that HE
had never risen with the lark to attend a brilliant woman to the Marche
aux Fleurs; this could be fastened on him in connexion neither with
Miss Gostrey nor with Madame de Vionnet; the practice of getting up
early for adventures could indeed in no manner be fastened on him.  It
came to him in fact that just here was his usual case:  he was for ever
missing things through his general genius for missing them, while
others were for ever picking them up through a contrary bent.  And it
was others who looked abstemious and he who looked greedy; it was he
somehow who finally paid, and it was others who mainly partook.  Yes,
he should go to the scaffold yet for he wouldn't know quite whom.  He
almost, for that matter, felt on the scaffold now and really quite
enjoying it.  It worked out as BECAUSE he was anxious there--it worked
out as for this reason that Waymarsh was so blooming.  It was HIS trip
for health, for a change, that proved the success--which was just what
Strether, planning and exerting himself, had desired it should be. That
truth already sat full-blown on his companion's lips; benevolence
breathed from them as with the warmth of active exercise, and also a
little as with the bustle of haste.

"Mrs. Pocock, whom I left a quarter of an hour ago at her hotel, has
asked me to mention to you that she would like to find you at home here
in about another hour.  She wants to see you; she has something to
say--or considers, I believe, that you may have:  so that I asked her
myself why she shouldn't come right round.  She hasn't BEEN round
yet--to see our place; and I took upon myself to say that I was sure
you'd be glad to have her.  The thing's therefore, you see, to keep
right here till she comes."

The announcement was sociably, even though, after Waymarsh's wont,
somewhat solemnly made; but Strether quickly felt other things in it
than these light features.  It was the first approach, from that
quarter, to admitted consciousness; it quickened his pulse; it simply
meant at last that he should have but himself to thank if he didn't
know where he was.  He had finished his breakfast; he pushed it away
and was on his feet.  There were plenty of elements of surprise, but
only one of doubt.  "The thing's for YOU to keep here too?"  Waymarsh
had been slightly ambiguous.

He wasn't ambiguous, however, after this enquiry; and Strether's
understanding had probably never before opened so wide and effective a
mouth as it was to open during the next five minutes. It was no part of
his friend's wish, as appeared, to help to receive Mrs. Pocock; he
quite understood the spirit in which she was to present herself, but
his connexion with her visit was limited to his having--well, as he
might say--perhaps a little promoted it.  He had thought, and had let
her know it, that Strether possibly would think she might have been
round before.  At any rate, as turned out, she had been wanting
herself, quite a while, to come.  "I told her," said Waymarsh, "that it
would have been a bright idea if she had only carried it out before."

Strether pronounced it so bright as to be almost dazzling.  "But why
HASn't she carried it out before?  She has seen me every day--she had
only to name her hour.  I've been waiting and waiting."

"Well, I told her you had.  And she has been waiting too."  It was, in
the oddest way in the world, on the showing of this tone, a genial new
pressing coaxing Waymarsh; a Waymarsh conscious with a different
consciousness from any he had yet betrayed, and actually rendered by it
almost insinuating.  He lacked only time for full persuasion, and
Strether was to see in a moment why.  Meantime, however, our friend
perceived, he was announcing a step of some magnanimity on Mrs.
Pocock's part, so that he could deprecate a sharp question.  It was his
own high purpose in fact to have smoothed sharp questions to rest.  He
looked his old comrade very straight in the eyes, and he had never
conveyed to him in so mute a manner so much kind confidence and so much
good advice.  Everything that was between them was again in his face,
but matured and shelved and finally disposed of.  "At any rate," he
added, "she's coming now."

Considering how many pieces had to fit themselves, it all fell, in
Strether's brain, into a close rapid order.  He saw on the spot what
had happened, and what probably would yet; and it was all funny enough.
It was perhaps just this freedom of appreciation that wound him up to
his flare of high spirits.  "What is she coming FOR?--to kill me?"

"She's coming to be very VERY kind to you, and you must let me say that
I greatly hope you'll not be less so to herself."

This was spoken by Waymarsh with much gravity of admonition, and as
Strether stood there he knew he had but to make a movement to take the
attitude of a man gracefully receiving a present.  The present was that
of the opportunity dear old Waymarsh had flattered himself he had
divined in him the slight soreness of not having yet thoroughly
enjoyed; so he had brought it to him thus, as on a little silver
breakfast-tray, familiarly though delicately--without oppressive pomp;
and he was to bend and smile and acknowledge, was to take and use and
be grateful.  He was not--that was the beauty of it--to be asked to
deflect too much from his dignity.  No wonder the old boy bloomed in
this bland air of his own distillation. Strether felt for a moment as
if Sarah were actually walking up and down outside.  Wasn't she hanging
about the porte-cochere while her friend thus summarily opened a way?
Strether would meet her but to take it, and everything would be for the
best in the best of possible worlds.  He had never so much known what
any one meant as, in the light of this demonstration, he knew what Mrs.
Newsome did. It had reached Waymarsh from Sarah, but it had reached
Sarah from her mother, and there was no break in the chain by which it
reached HIM.  "Has anything particular happened," he asked after a
minute--"so suddenly to determine her?  Has she heard anything
unexpected from home?"

Waymarsh, on this, it seemed to him, looked at him harder than ever.
"'Unexpected'?"  He had a brief hesitation; then, however, he was firm.
"We're leaving Paris."

"Leaving?  That IS sudden."

Waymarsh showed a different opinion.  "Less so than it may seem. The
purpose of Mrs. Pocock's visit is to explain to you in fact that it's
NOT."

Strether didn't at all know if he had really an advantage--anything
that would practically count as one; but he enjoyed for the moment--as
for the first time in his life--the sense of so carrying it off.  He
wondered--it was amusing--if he felt as the impudent feel.  "I shall
take great pleasure, I assure you, in any explanation.  I shall be
delighted to receive Sarah."

The sombre glow just darkened in his comrade's eyes; but he was struck
with the way it died out again.  It was too mixed with another
consciousness--it was too smothered, as might be said, in flowers.  He
really for the time regretted it--poor dear old sombre glow! Something
straight and simple, something heavy and empty, had been eclipsed in
its company; something by which he had best known his friend.  Waymarsh
wouldn't BE his friend, somehow, without the occasional ornament of the
sacred rage, and the right to the sacred rage--inestimably precious for
Strether's charity--he also seemed in a manner, and at Mrs. Pocock's
elbow, to have forfeited. Strether remembered the occasion early in
their stay when on that very spot he had come out with his earnest, his
ominous "Quit it!"--and, so remembering, felt it hang by a hair that he
didn't himself now utter the same note.  Waymarsh was having a good
time--this was the truth that was embarrassing for him, and he was
having it then and there, he was having it in Europe, he was having it
under the very protection of circumstances of which he didn't in the
least approve; all of which placed him in a false position, with no
issue possible--none at least by the grand manner.  It was practically
in the manner of any one--it was all but in poor Strether's own--that
instead of taking anything up he merely made the most of having to be
himself explanatory.  "I'm not leaving for the United States direct.
Mr. and Mrs. Pocock and Miss Mamie are thinking of a little trip before
their own return, and we've been talking for some days past of our
joining forces.  We've settled it that we do join and that we sail
together the end of next month. But we start to-morrow for Switzerland.
Mrs. Pocock wants some scenery.  She hasn't had much yet."

He was brave in his way too, keeping nothing back, confessing all there
was, and only leaving Strether to make certain connexions. "Is what
Mrs. Newsome had cabled her daughter an injunction to break off short?"

The grand manner indeed at this just raised its head a little. "I know
nothing about Mrs. Newsome's cables."

Their eyes met on it with some intensity--during the few seconds of
which something happened quite out of proportion to the time. It
happened that Strether, looking thus at his friend, didn't take his
answer for truth--and that something more again occurred in consequence
of THAT.  Yes--Waymarsh just DID know about Mrs. Newsome's cables:  to
what other end than that had they dined together at Bignon's?  Strether
almost felt for the instant that it was to Mrs. Newsome herself the
dinner had been given; and, for that matter, quite felt how she must
have known about it and, as he might think, protected and consecrated
it.  He had a quick blurred view of daily cables, questions, answers,
signals:  clear enough was his vision of the expense that, when so
wound up, the lady at home was prepared to incur.  Vivid not less was
his memory of what, during his long observation of her, some of her
attainments of that high pitch had cost her.  Distinctly she was at the
highest now, and Waymarsh, who imagined himself an independent
performer, was really, forcing his fine old natural voice, an
overstrained accompanist.  The whole reference of his errand seemed to
mark her for Strether as by this time consentingly familiar to him, and
nothing yet had so despoiled her of a special shade of consideration.
"You don't know," he asked, "whether Sarah has been directed from home
to try me on the matter of my also going to Switzerland?"

"I know," said Waymarsh as manfully as possible, "nothing whatever
about her private affairs; though I believe her to be acting in
conformity with things that have my highest respect."  It was as manful
as possible, but it was still the false note--as it had to be to convey
so sorry a statement.  He knew everything, Strether more and more felt,
that he thus disclaimed, and his little punishment was just in this
doom to a second fib.  What falser position--given the man--could the
most vindictive mind impose? He ended by squeezing through a passage in
which three months before he would certainly have stuck fast.  "Mrs
Pocock will probably be ready herself to answer any enquiry you may put
to her.  But," he continued, "BUT--!"  He faltered on it.

"But what?  Don't put her too many?"

Waymarsh looked large, but the harm was done; he couldn't, do what he
would, help looking rosy.  "Don't do anything you'll be sorry for."

It was an attenuation, Strether guessed, of something else that had
been on his lips; it was a sudden drop to directness, and was thereby
the voice of sincerity.  He had fallen to the supplicating note, and
that immediately, for our friend, made a difference and reinstated him.
They were in communication as they had been, that first morning, in
Sarah's salon and in her presence and Madame de Vionnet's; and the same
recognition of a great good will was again, after all, possible.  Only
the amount of response Waymarsh had then taken for granted was doubled,
decupled now.  This came out when he presently said:  "Of course I
needn't assure you I hope you'll come with us."  Then it was that his
implications and expectations loomed up for Strether as almost
pathetically gross.

The latter patted his shoulder while he thanked him, giving the go-by
to the question of joining the Pococks; he expressed the joy he felt at
seeing him go forth again so brave and free, and he in fact almost took
leave of him on the spot.  "I shall see you again of course before you
go; but I'm meanwhile much obliged to you for arranging so conveniently
for what you've told me.  I shall walk up and down in the court
there--dear little old court which we've each bepaced so, this last
couple of months, to the tune of our flights and our drops, our
hesitations and our plunges:  I shall hang about there, all impatience
and excitement, please let Sarah know, till she graciously presents
herself.  Leave me with her without fear," he laughed; "I assure you I
shan't hurt her.  I don't think either she'll hurt ME:  I'm in a
situation in which damage was some time ago discounted.  Besides, THAT
isn't what worries you--but don't, don't explain! We're all right as we
are:  which was the degree of success our adventure was pledged to for
each of us.  We weren't, it seemed, all right as we were before; and
we've got over the ground, all things considered, quickly.  I hope
you'll have a lovely time in the Alps."

Waymarsh fairly looked up at him as from the foot of them.  "I don't
know as I OUGHT really to go."

It was the conscience of Milrose in the very voice of Milrose, but, oh
it was feeble and flat! Strether suddenly felt quite ashamed for him;
he breathed a greater boldness.  "LET yourself, on the contrary, go--in
all agreeable directions.  These are precious hours--at our age they
mayn't recur.  Don't have it to say to yourself at Milrose, next
winter, that you hadn't courage for them."  And then as his comrade
queerly stared:  "Live up to Mrs. Pocock."

"Live up to her?"

"You're a great help to her."

Waymarsh looked at it as at one of the uncomfortable things that were
certainly true and that it was yet ironical to say.  "It's more then
than you are."

"That's exactly your own chance and advantage.  Besides," said
Strether, "I do in my way contribute.  I know what I'm about."

Waymarsh had kept on his great panama, and, as he now stood nearer the
door, his last look beneath the shade of it had turned again to
darkness and warning.  "So do I!  See here, Strether."

"I know what you're going to say.  'Quit this'?"

"Quit this!"  But it lacked its old intensity; nothing of it remained;
it went out of the room with him.

One morning later in the week, Strether is eating breakfast with Waymarsh when he suddenly suspects that something big is about to happen. He can just feel it from the way Waymarsh butters his roll. Waymarsh comes out and says he's been speaking with Sarah, and that she'll come by the hotel in an hour to talk to Strether about something important. Waymarsh also drops a weird comment about how Sarah is coming over for Strether's own good. He wasn't wrong about that roll. Strether then asks if Sarah has any some sort of unexpected news from home, which Waymarsh responds to by saying that they are leaving Paris. Who, pray tell, does he mean by "they"? Well, of course the group will include Sarah, her husband Jim, and Mamie. But here's a funny thing: Waymarsh is going to go with them. Now it's clear that Waymarsh is on the Newsomes' side, and that he might also have something going on with Sarah. Plus, they're all going to go to Switzerland before heading back to America. Strether asks Waymarsh if it's Sarah's mission to bring him along, too, but Waymarsh is totally tightlipped. Strether tells Waymarsh that he hopes he enjoys his time in Switzerland. After all, the two of them are very old and they need to enjoy things while they can. Waymarsh doesn't like this comment at all, but his usual comebacks don't have the power they once did. Must have lost his knack at the circus.


Almost the first thing, strangely enough, that, about an hour later,
Strether found himself doing in Sarah's presence was to remark
articulately on this failure, in their friend, of what had been
superficially his great distinction.  It was as if--he alluded of
course to the grand manner--the dear man had sacrificed it to some
other advantage; which would be of course only for himself to measure.
It might be simply that he was physically so much more sound than on
his first coming out; this was all prosaic, comparatively cheerful and
vulgar.  And fortunately, if one came to that, his improvement in
health was really itself grander than any manner it could be conceived
as having cost him.  "You yourself alone, dear Sarah"--Strether took
the plunge--"have done him, it strikes me, in these three weeks, as
much good as all the rest of his time together."

It was a plunge because somehow the range of reference was, in the
conditions, "funny," and made funnier still by Sarah's attitude, by the
turn the occasion had, with her appearance, so sensibly taken. Her
appearance was really indeed funnier than anything else--the spirit in
which he felt her to be there as soon as she was there, the shade of
obscurity that cleared up for him as soon as he was seated with her in
the small salon de lecture that had, for the most part, in all the
weeks, witnessed the wane of his early vivacity of discussion with
Waymarsh.  It was an immense thing, quite a tremendous thing, for her
to have come:  this truth opened out to him in spite of his having
already arrived for himself at a fairly vivid view of it.  He had done
exactly what he had given Waymarsh his word for--had walked and
re-walked the court while he awaited her advent; acquiring in this
exercise an amount of light that affected him at the time as flooding
the scene.  She had decided upon the step in order to give him the
benefit of a doubt, in order to be able to say to her mother that she
had, even to abjectness, smoothed the way for him.  The doubt had been
as to whether he mightn't take her as not having smoothed it--and the
admonition had possibly come from Waymarsh's more detached spirit.
Waymarsh had at any rate, certainly, thrown his weight into the
scale--he had pointed to the importance of depriving their friend of a
grievance.  She had done justice to the plea, and it was to set herself
right with a high ideal that she actually sat there in her state.  Her
calculation was sharp in the immobility with which she held her tall
parasol-stick upright and at arm's length, quite as if she had struck
the place to plant her flag; in the separate precautions she took not
to show as nervous; in the aggressive repose in which she did quite
nothing but wait for him.  Doubt ceased to be possible from the moment
he had taken in that she had arrived with no proposal whatever; that
her concern was simply to show what she had come to receive.  She had
come to receive his submission, and Waymarsh was to have made it plain
to him that she would expect nothing less.  He saw fifty things, her
host, at this convenient stage; but one of those he most saw was that
their anxious friend hadn't quite had the hand required of him.
Waymarsh HAD, however, uttered the request that she might find him
mild, and while hanging about the court before her arrival he had
turned over with zeal the different ways in which he could be so. The
difficulty was that if he was mild he wasn't, for her purpose,
conscious.  If she wished him conscious--as everything about her cried
aloud that she did--she must accordingly be at costs to make him so.
Conscious he was, for himself--but only of too many things; so she must
choose the one she required.

Practically, however, it at last got itself named, and when once that
had happened they were quite at the centre of their situation. One
thing had really done as well as another; when Strether had spoken of
Waymarsh's leaving him, and that had necessarily brought on a reference
to Mrs. Pocock's similar intention, the jump was but short to supreme
lucidity.  Light became indeed after that so intense that Strether
would doubtless have but half made out, in the prodigious glare, by
which of the two the issue had been in fact precipitated.  It was, in
their contracted quarters, as much there between them as if it had been
something suddenly spilled with a crash and a splash on the floor.  The
form of his submission was to be an engagement to acquit himself within
the twenty-four hours.  "He'll go in a moment if you give him the
word--he assures me on his honour he'll do that":  this came in its
order, out of its order, in respect to Chad, after the crash had
occurred.  It came repeatedly during the time taken by Strether to feel
that he was even more fixed in his rigour than he had supposed--the
time he was not above adding to a little by telling her that such a way
of putting it on her brother's part left him sufficiently surprised.
She wasn't at all funny at last--she was really fine; and he felt
easily where she was strong--strong for herself.  It hadn't yet so come
home to him that she was nobly and appointedly officious. She was
acting in interests grander and clearer than that of her poor little
personal, poor little Parisian equilibrium, and all his consciousness
of her mother's moral pressure profited by this proof of its sustaining
force.  She would be held up; she would be strengthened; he needn't in
the least be anxious for her. What would once more have been distinct
to him had he tried to make it so was that, as Mrs. Newsome was
essentially all moral pressure, the presence of this element was almost
identical with her own presence. It wasn't perhaps that he felt he was
dealing with her straight, but it was certainly as if she had been
dealing straight with HIM. She was reaching him somehow by the
lengthened arm of the spirit, and he was having to that extent to take
her into account; but he wasn't reaching her in turn, not making her
take HIM; he was only reaching Sarah, who appeared to take so little of
him. "Something has clearly passed between you and Chad," he presently
said, "that I think I ought to know something more about.  Does he put
it all," he smiled, "on me?"

"Did you come out," she asked, "to put it all on HIM?"

But he replied to this no further than, after an instant, by saying:
"Oh it's all right.  Chad I mean's all right in having said to
you--well anything he may have said.  I'll TAKE it all--what he does
put on me.  Only I must see him before I see you again."

She hesitated, but she brought it out.  "Is it absolutely necessary you
should see me again?"

"Certainly, if I'm to give you any definite word about anything."

"Is it your idea then," she returned, "that I shall keep on meeting you
only to be exposed to fresh humiliation?"

He fixed her a longer time.  "Are your instructions from Mrs. Newsome
that you shall, even at the worst, absolutely and irretrievably break
with me?"

"My instructions from Mrs. Newsome are, if you please, my affair. You
know perfectly what your own were, and you can judge for yourself of
what it can do for you to have made what you have of them.  You can
perfectly see, at any rate, I'll go so far as to say, that if I wish
not to expose myself I must wish still less to expose HER."  She had
already said more than she had quite expected; but, though she had also
pulled up, the colour in her face showed him he should from one moment
to the other have it all. He now indeed felt the high importance of his
having it.  "What is your conduct," she broke out as if to
explain--"what is your conduct but an outrage to women like US?  I mean
your acting as if there can be a doubt--as between us and such
another--of his duty?"

He thought a moment.  It was rather much to deal with at once; not only
the question itself, but the sore abysses it revealed. "Of course
they're totally different kinds of duty."

"And do you pretend that he has any at all--to such another?"

"Do you mean to Madame de Vionnet?"  He uttered the name not to affront
her, but yet again to gain time--time that he needed for taking in
something still other and larger than her demand of a moment before. It
wasn't at once that he could see all that was in her actual challenge;
but when he did he found himself just checking a low vague sound, a
sound which was perhaps the nearest approach his vocal chords had ever
known to a growl.  Everything Mrs. Pocock had failed to give a sign of
recognising in Chad as a particular part of a
transformation--everything that had lent intention to this particular
failure--affected him as gathered into a large loose bundle and thrown,
in her words, into his face.  The missile made him to that extent catch
his breath; which however he presently recovered.  "Why when a woman's
at once so charming and so beneficent--"

"You can sacrifice mothers and sisters to her without a blush and can
make them cross the ocean on purpose to feel the more and take from you
the straighter, HOW you do it?"

Yes, she had taken him up as short and as sharply as that, but he tried
not to flounder in her grasp.  "I don't think there's anything I've
done in any such calculated way as you describe. Everything has come as
a sort of indistinguishable part of everything else.  Your coming out
belonged closely to my having come before you, and my having come was a
result of our general state of mind.  Our general state of mind had
proceeded, on its side, from our queer ignorance, our queer
misconceptions and confusions--from which, since then, an inexorable
tide of light seems to have floated us into our perhaps still queerer
knowledge. Don't you LIKE your brother as he is," he went on, "and
haven't you given your mother an intelligible account of all that that
comes to?"

It put to her also, doubtless, his own tone, too many things, this at
least would have been the case hadn't his final challenge directly
helped her.  Everything, at the stage they had reached, directly helped
her, because everything betrayed in him such a basis of intention.  He
saw--the odd way things came out!--that he would have been held less
monstrous had he only been a little wilder.  What exposed him was just
his poor old trick of quiet inwardness, what exposed him was his
THINKING such offence.  He hadn't in the least however the desire to
irritate that Sarah imputed to him, and he could only at last
temporise, for the moment, with her indignant view.  She was altogether
more inflamed than he had expected, and he would probably understand
this better when he should learn what had occurred for her with Chad.
Till then her view of his particular blackness, her clear surprise at
his not clutching the pole she held out, must pass as extravagant.  "I
leave you to flatter yourself," she returned, "that what you speak of
is what YOU'VE beautifully done.  When a thing has been already
described in such a lovely way--!"  But she caught herself up, and her
comment on his description rang out sufficiently loud.  "Do you
consider her even an apology for a decent woman?"

Ah there it was at last! She put the matter more crudely than, for his
own mixed purposes, he had yet had to do; but essentially it was all
one matter.  It was so much--so much; and she treated it, poor lady, as
so little.  He grew conscious, as he was now apt to do, of a strange
smile, and the next moment he found himself talking like Miss Barrace.
"She has struck me from the first as wonderful.  I've been thinking too
moreover that, after all, she would probably have represented even for
yourself something rather new and rather good."

He was to have given Mrs. Pocock with this, however, but her best
opportunity for a sound of derision.  "Rather new?  I hope so with all
my heart!"

"I mean," he explained, "that she might have affected you by her
exquisite amiability--a real revelation, it has seemed to myself; her
high rarity, her distinction of every sort."

He had been, with these words, consciously a little "precious"; but he
had had to be--he couldn't give her the truth of the case without them;
and it seemed to him moreover now that he didn't care.  He had at all
events not served his cause, for she sprang at its exposed side.  "A
'revelation'--to ME:  I've come to such a woman for a revelation?  You
talk to me about 'distinction'--YOU, you who've had your
privilege?--when the most distinguished woman we shall either of us
have seen in this world sits there insulted, in her loneliness, by your
incredible comparison!"

Strether forbore, with an effort, from straying; but he looked all
about him.  "Does your mother herself make the point that she sits
insulted?"

Sarah's answer came so straight, so "pat," as might have been said,
that he felt on the instant its origin.  "She has confided to my
judgement and my tenderness the expression of her personal sense of
everything, and the assertion of her personal dignity."

They were the very words of the lady of Woollett--he would have known
them in a thousand; her parting charge to her child.  Mrs. Pocock
accordingly spoke to this extent by book, and the fact immensely moved
him.  "If she does really feel as you say it's of course very very
dreadful.  I've given sufficient proof, one would have thought," he
added, "of my deep admiration for Mrs. Newsome."

"And pray what proof would one have thought you'd CALL sufficient? That
of thinking this person here so far superior to her?"

He wondered again; he waited.  "Ah dear Sarah, you must LEAVE me this
person here!"

In his desire to avoid all vulgar retorts, to show how, even
perversely, he clung to his rag of reason, he had softly almost wailed
this plea.  Yet he knew it to be perhaps the most positive declaration
he had ever made in his life, and his visitor's reception of it
virtually gave it that importance.  "That's exactly what I'm delighted
to do.  God knows WE don't want her! You take good care not to meet,"
she observed in a still higher key, "my question about their life.  If
you do consider it a thing one can even SPEAK of, I congratulate you on
your taste!"

The life she alluded to was of course Chad's and Madame de Vionnet's,
which she thus bracketed together in a way that made him wince a
little; there being nothing for him but to take home her full
intention.  It was none the less his inconsequence that while he had
himself been enjoying for weeks the view of the brilliant woman's
specific action, he just suffered from any characterisation of it by
other lips.  "I think tremendously well of her, at the same time that I
seem to feel her 'life' to be really none of my business.  It's my
business, that is, only so far as Chad's own life is affected by it;
and what has happened, don't you see? is that Chad's has been affected
so beautifully.  The proof of the pudding's in the eating"--he tried,
with no great success, to help it out with a touch of pleasantry, while
she let him go on as if to sink and sink.  He went on however well
enough, as well as he could do without fresh counsel; he indeed
shouldn't stand quite firm, he felt, till he should have re-established
his communications with Chad.  Still, he could always speak for the
woman he had so definitely promised to "save."  This wasn't quite for
her the air of salvation; but as that chill fairly deepened what did it
become but a reminder that one might at the worst perish WITH her?  And
it was simple enough--it was rudimentary:  not, not to give her away.
"I find in her more merits than you would probably have patience with
my counting over.  And do you know," he enquired, "the effect you
produce on me by alluding to her in such terms?  It's as if you had
some motive in not recognising all she has done for your brother, and
so shut your eyes to each side of the matter, in order, whichever side
comes up, to get rid of the other.  I don't, you must allow me to say,
see how you can with any pretence to candour get rid of the side
nearest you."

"Near me--THAT sort of thing?"  And Sarah gave a jerk back of her head
that well might have nullified any active proximity.

It kept her friend himself at his distance, and he respected for a
moment the interval.  Then with a last persuasive effort he bridged it.
"You don't, on your honour, appreciate Chad's fortunate development?"

"Fortunate?" she echoed again.  And indeed she was prepared. "I call it
hideous."

Her departure had been for some minutes marked as imminent, and she was
already at the door that stood open to the court, from the threshold of
which she delivered herself of this judgement.  It rang out so loud as
to produce for the time the hush of everything else.  Strether quite,
as an effect of it, breathed less bravely; he could acknowledge it, but
simply enough.  "Oh if you think THAT--!"

"Then all's at an end?  So much the better.  I do think that!"  She
passed out as she spoke and took her way straight across the court,
beyond which, separated from them by the deep arch of the porte-cochere
the low victoria that had conveyed her from her own hotel was drawn up.
She made for it with decision, and the manner of her break, the sharp
shaft of her rejoinder, had an intensity by which Strether was at first
kept in arrest.  She had let fly at him as from a stretched cord, and
it took him a minute to recover from the sense of being pierced.  It
was not the penetration of surprise; it was that, much more, of
certainty; his case being put for him as he had as yet only put it to
himself.  She was away at any rate; she had distanced him--with rather
a grand spring, an effect of pride and ease, after all; she had got
into her carriage before he could overtake her, and the vehicle was
already in motion.  He stopped halfway; he stood there in the court
only seeing her go and noting that she gave him no other look.  The way
he had put it to himself was that all quite MIGHT be at an end.  Each
of her movements, in this resolute rupture, reaffirmed, re-enforced
that idea. Sarah passed out of sight in the sunny street while, planted
there in the centre of the comparatively grey court, he continued
merely to look before him.  It probably WAS all at an end.

Book Eleventh

[Note:  In the 1909 New York Edition the following two chapters were
placed in the reverse of the order appearing below.  Since 1950, most
scholars have agreed, because of the internal evidence of the two
chapters, that an editorial error caused them to be printed in reverse
order.  This Etext, like other editions of the past four decades,
corrects the apparent error.--Richard D. Hathaway, preparer of this
electronic text]

The time has come for Strether to sit down and finally have it out with Sarah Pocock. The cards are on the table, the gloves are off...you see where things are headed here. Strether gets down to brass tacks and asks Sarah if Chad blames their failure to return to America all on him. Sarah, in turn, answers by asking Strether if he plans on blaming it all on Chad. Direct hit number one. Or so she thinks. Strether takes a deep breath, braces himself, and says that no matter what's been said, he'll take full responsibility for his and Chad's non-return. And he would like to see Chad again before his next meeting with Sarah. Sarah, though, says she's got no plans to meet Strether at all before she leaves. In other words, this might be a breakup conversation she's having on her mom's behalf. Strether then asks Sarah if her instructions from Mrs. Newsome are to break his will and drag him home. But as always, Sarah won't say anything about Mrs. Newsome at all. This is like a shadowy presence in this book, sending representatives but never revealing her own thoughts. Sarah tells Strether that the way he's been acting is nothing short of an outrage. He has totally blown off his duty to the Newsome family. Strether says that Sarah needs to acknowledge Chad's improvement under the influence of Madame de Vionnet, but Sarah counters that Chad's only devotion should be to his family. It's disgusting that he would choose another family over his own flesh and blood. Yep, she said disgusting. And here comes the boom. Sarah says that Madame de Vionnet is a shameful woman, not even an "apology for a decent woman" . Burn! At this point, Strether realizes that there is nothing in the world that will ever convince the Pococks that they're not better than everyone else. Sarah doesn't have any evidence to back up her claim about Madame de Vionnet, but that ain't gonna stop her. She goes on to tell Strether that he's mad if he thinks any woman in the world could ever hold a candle to her mother. Which is just delusional, if you ask us. Strether comes out and accuses Sarah of being a prejudiced, ignorant woman. He can't believe that after all she's seen, she can still be some pig-headed about her family's superiority. Doesn't she see that the Newsomes are just big fish in a small pond back in Woollett? Sarah says that Chad's changes are "hideous" . Strether concludes by saying that if Sarah truly thinks this, then they're at a total impasse and all they can do is part ways. Sarah agrees and gets up to leave. At this point, Strether knows that his relationship with the whole Newsome family is now probably at an end. Big loss.