It wasn't the first time Strether had sat alone in the great dim
church--still less was it the first of his giving himself up, so far as
conditions permitted, to its beneficent action on his nerves.  He had
been to Notre Dame with Waymarsh, he had been there with Miss Gostrey,
he had been there with Chad Newsome, and had found the place, even in
company, such a refuge from the obsession of his problem that, with
renewed pressure from that source, he had not unnaturally recurred to a
remedy meeting the case, for the moment, so indirectly, no doubt, but
so relievingly.  He was conscious enough that it was only for the
moment, but good moments--if he could call them good--still had their
value for a man who by this time struck himself as living almost
disgracefully from hand to mouth.  Having so well learnt the way, he
had lately made the pilgrimage more than once by himself--had quite
stolen off, taking an unnoticed chance and making no point of speaking
of the adventure when restored to his friends.

His great friend, for that matter, was still absent, as well as
remarkably silent; even at the end of three weeks Miss Gostrey hadn't
come back.  She wrote to him from Mentone, admitting that he must judge
her grossly inconsequent--perhaps in fact for the time odiously
faithless; but asking for patience, for a deferred sentence, throwing
herself in short on his generosity.  For her too, she could assure him,
life was complicated--more complicated than he could have guessed; she
had moreover made certain of him--certain of not wholly missing him on
her return--before her disappearance.  If furthermore she didn't burden
him with letters it was frankly because of her sense of the other great
commerce he had to carry on.  He himself, at the end of a fortnight,
had written twice, to show how his generosity could be trusted; but he
reminded himself in each case of Mrs. Newsome's epistolary manner at
the times when Mrs. Newsome kept off delicate ground.  He sank his
problem, he talked of Waymarsh and Miss Barrace, of little Bilham and
the set over the river, with whom he had again had tea, and he was
easy, for convenience, about Chad and Madame de Vionnet and Jeanne.  He
admitted that he continued to see them, he was decidedly so confirmed a
haunter of Chad's premises and that young man's practical intimacy with
them was so undeniably great; but he had his reason for not attempting
to render for Miss Gostrey's benefit the impression of these last days.
That would be to tell her too much about himself--it being at present
just from himself he was trying to escape.

This small struggle sprang not a little, in its way, from the same
impulse that had now carried him across to Notre Dame; the impulse to
let things be, to give them time to justify themselves or at least to
pass.  He was aware of having no errand in such a place but the desire
not to be, for the hour, in certain other places; a sense of safety, of
simplification, which each time he yielded to it he amused himself by
thinking of as a private concession to cowardice.  The great church had
no altar for his worship, no direct voice for his soul; but it was none
the less soothing even to sanctity; for he could feel while there what
he couldn't elsewhere, that he was a plain tired man taking the holiday
he had earned.  He was tired, but he wasn't plain--that was the pity
and the trouble of it; he was able, however, to drop his problem at the
door very much as if it had been the copper piece that he deposited, on
the threshold, in the receptacle of the inveterate blind beggar.  He
trod the long dim nave, sat in the splendid choir, paused before the
cluttered chapels of the east end, and the mighty monument laid upon
him its spell.  He might have been a student under the charm of a
museum--which was exactly what, in a foreign town, in the afternoon of
life, he would have liked to be free to be.  This form of sacrifice did
at any rate for the occasion as well as another; it made him quite
sufficiently understand how, within the precinct, for the real refugee,
the things of the world could fall into abeyance.  That was the
cowardice, probably--to dodge them, to beg the question, not to deal
with it in the hard outer light; but his own oblivions were too brief,
too vain, to hurt any one but himself, and he had a vague and fanciful
kindness for certain persons whom he met, figures of mystery and
anxiety, and whom, with observation for his pastime, he ranked as those
who were fleeing from justice.  Justice was outside, in the hard light,
and injustice too; but one was as absent as the other from the air of
the long aisles and the brightness of the many altars.

Thus it was at all events that, one morning some dozen days after the
dinner in the Boulevard Malesherbes at which Madame de Vionnet had been
present with her daughter, he was called upon to play his part in an
encounter that deeply stirred his imagination.  He had the habit, in
these contemplations, of watching a fellow visitant, here and there,
from a respectable distance, remarking some note of behaviour, of
penitence, of prostration, of the absolved, relieved state; this was
the manner in which his vague tenderness took its course, the degree of
demonstration to which it naturally had to confine itself.  It hadn't
indeed so felt its responsibility as when on this occasion he suddenly
measured the suggestive effect of a lady whose supreme stillness, in
the shade of one of the chapels, he had two or three times noticed as
he made, and made once more, his slow circuit.  She wasn't
prostrate--not in any degree bowed, but she was strangely fixed, and
her prolonged immobility showed her, while he passed and paused, as
wholly given up to the need, whatever it was, that had brought her
there.  She only sat and gazed before her, as he himself often sat; but
she had placed herself, as he never did, within the focus of the
shrine, and she had lost herself, he could easily see, as he would only
have liked to do. She was not a wandering alien, keeping back more than
she gave, but one of the familiar, the intimate, the fortunate, for
whom these dealings had a method and a meaning.  She reminded our
friend--since it was the way of nine tenths of his current impressions
to act as recalls of things imagined--of some fine firm concentrated
heroine of an old story, something he had heard, read, something that,
had he had a hand for drama, he might himself have written, renewing
her courage, renewing her clearness, in splendidly-protected
meditation.  Her back, as she sat, was turned to him, but his
impression absolutely required that she should be young and
interesting, and she carried her head moreover, even in the sacred
shade, with a discernible faith in herself, a kind of implied
conviction of consistency, security, impunity.  But what had such a
woman come for if she hadn't come to pray?  Strether's reading of such
matters was, it must be owned, confused; but he wondered if her
attitude were some congruous fruit of absolution, of "indulgence."  He
knew but dimly what indulgence, in such a place, might mean; yet he
had, as with a soft sweep, a vision of how it might indeed add to the
zest of active rites.  All this was a good deal to have been denoted by
a mere lurking figure who was nothing to him; but, the last thing
before leaving the church, he had the surprise of a still deeper
quickening.

He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in the
museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft, to
reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms of
Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once in a way
to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes, a
miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the shopman, at
the price of the red-and-gold alone.  He looked, doubtless, while he
played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms, sufficiently rapt in
reverence; but what his thought had finally bumped against was the
question of where, among packed accumulations, so multiform a wedge
would be able to enter.  Were seventy volumes in red-and-gold to be
perhaps what he should most substantially have to show at Woollett as
the fruit of his mission?  It was a possibility that held him a
minute--held him till he happened to feel that some one, unnoticed, had
approached him and paused.  Turning, he saw that a lady stood there as
for a greeting, and he sprang up as he next took her, securely, for
Madame de Vionnet, who appeared to have recognised him as she passed
near him on her way to the door.  She checked, quickly and gaily, a
certain confusion in him, came to meet it, turned it back, by an art of
her own; the confusion having threatened him as he knew her for the
person he had lately been observing.  She was the lurking figure of the
dim chapel; she had occupied him more than she guessed; but it came to
him in time, luckily, that he needn't tell her and that no harm, after
all, had been done.  She herself, for that matter, straightway showing
she felt their encounter as the happiest of accidents, had for him a
"You come here too?" that despoiled surprise of every awkwardness.

"I come often," she said.  "I love this place, but I'm terrible, in
general, for churches.  The old women who live in them all know me; in
fact I'm already myself one of the old women.  It's like that, at all
events, that I foresee I shall end."  Looking about for a chair, so
that he instantly pulled one nearer, she sat down with him again to the
sound of an "Oh, I like so much your also being fond--!"

He confessed the extent of his feeling, though she left the object
vague; and he was struck with the tact, the taste of her vagueness,
which simply took for granted in him a sense of beautiful things. He
was conscious of how much it was affected, this sense, by something
subdued and discreet in the way she had arranged herself for her
special object and her morning walk--he believed her to have come on
foot; the way her slightly thicker veil was drawn--a mere touch, but
everything; the composed gravity of her dress, in which, here and
there, a dull wine-colour seemed to gleam faintly through black; the
charming discretion of her small compact head; the quiet note, as she
sat, of her folded, grey-gloved hands.  It was, to Strether's mind, as
if she sat on her own ground, the light honours of which, at an open
gate, she thus easily did him, while all the vastness and mystery of
the domain stretched off behind. When people were so completely in
possession they could be extraordinarily civil; and our friend had
indeed at this hour a kind of revelation of her heritage.  She was
romantic for him far beyond what she could have guessed, and again he
found his small comfort in the conviction that, subtle though she was,
his impression must remain a secret from her.  The thing that, once
more, made him uneasy for secrets in general was this particular
patience she could have with his own want of colour; albeit that on the
other hand his uneasiness pretty well dropped after he had been for ten
minutes as colourless as possible and at the same time as responsive.

The moments had already, for that matter, drawn their deepest tinge
from the special interest excited in him by his vision of his
companion's identity with the person whose attitude before the
glimmering altar had so impressed him.  This attitude fitted admirably
into the stand he had privately taken about her connexion with Chad on
the last occasion of his seeing them together.  It helped him to stick
fast at the point he had then reached; it was there he had resolved
that he WOULD stick, and at no moment since had it seemed as easy to do
so.  Unassailably innocent was a relation that could make one of the
parties to it so carry herself. If it wasn't innocent why did she haunt
the churches?--into which, given the woman he could believe he made
out, she would never have come to flaunt an insolence of guilt.  She
haunted them for continued help, for strength, for peace--sublime
support which, if one were able to look at it so, she found from day to
day.  They talked, in low easy tones and with lifted lingering looks,
about the great monument and its history and its beauty--all of which,
Madame de Vionnet professed, came to her most in the other, the outer
view.  "We'll presently, after we go," she said, "walk round it again
if you like.  I'm not in a particular hurry, and it will be pleasant to
look at it well with you."  He had spoken of the great romancer and the
great romance, and of what, to his imagination, they had done for the
whole, mentioning to her moreover the exorbitance of his purchase, the
seventy blazing volumes that were so out of proportion.

"Out of proportion to what?"

"Well, to any other plunge."  Yet he felt even as he spoke how at that
instant he was plunging.  He had made up his mind and was impatient to
get into the air; for his purpose was a purpose to be uttered outside,
and he had a fear that it might with delay still slip away from him.
She however took her time; she drew out their quiet gossip as if she
had wished to profit by their meeting, and this confirmed precisely an
interpretation of her manner, of her mystery.  While she rose, as he
would have called it, to the question of Victor Hugo, her voice itself,
the light low quaver of her deference to the solemnity about them,
seemed to make her words mean something that they didn't mean openly.
Help, strength, peace, a sublime support--she hadn't found so much of
these things as that the amount wouldn't be sensibly greater for any
scrap his appearance of faith in her might enable her to feel in her
hand. Every little, in a long strain, helped, and if he happened to
affect her as a firm object she could hold on by, he wouldn't jerk
himself out of her reach.  People in difficulties held on by what was
nearest, and he was perhaps after all not further off than sources of
comfort more abstract.  It was as to this he had made up his mind; he
had made it up, that is, to give her a sign.  The sign would be
that--though it was her own affair--he understood; the sign would be
that--though it was her own affair--she was free to clutch.  Since she
took him for a firm object--much as he might to his own sense appear at
times to rock--he would do his best to BE one.

The end of it was that half an hour later they were seated together for
an early luncheon at a wonderful, a delightful house of entertainment
on the left bank--a place of pilgrimage for the knowing, they were both
aware, the knowing who came, for its great renown, the homage of
restless days, from the other end of the town.  Strether had already
been there three times--first with Miss Gostrey, then with Chad, then
with Chad again and with Waymarsh and little Bilham, all of whom he had
himself sagaciously entertained; and his pleasure was deep now on
learning that Madame de Vionnet hadn't yet been initiated.  When he had
said as they strolled round the church, by the river, acting at last on
what, within, he had made up his mind to, "Will you, if you have time,
come to dejeuner with me somewhere?  For instance, if you know it, over
there on the other side, which is so easy a walk"--and then had named
the place; when he had done this she stopped short as for quick
intensity, and yet deep difficulty, of response.  She took in the
proposal as if it were almost too charming to be true; and there had
perhaps never yet been for her companion so unexpected a moment of
pride--so fine, so odd a case, at any rate, as his finding himself thus
able to offer to a person in such universal possession a new, a rare
amusement.  She had heard of the happy spot, but she asked him in reply
to a further question how in the world he could suppose her to have
been there.  He supposed himself to have supposed that Chad might have
taken her, and she guessed this the next moment to his no small
discomfort.

"Ah, let me explain," she smiled, "that I don't go about with him in
public; I never have such chances--not having them otherwise--and it's
just the sort of thing that, as a quiet creature living in my hole, I
adore."  It was more than kind of him to have thought of it--though,
frankly, if he asked whether she had time she hadn't a single minute.
That however made no difference--she'd throw everything over.  Every
duty at home, domestic, maternal, social, awaited her; but it was a
case for a high line.  Her affairs would go to smash, but hadn't one a
right to one's snatch of scandal when one was prepared to pay?  It was
on this pleasant basis of costly disorder, consequently, that they
eventually seated themselves, on either side of a small table, at a
window adjusted to the busy quay and the shining barge-burdened Seine;
where, for an hour, in the matter of letting himself go, of diving
deep, Strether was to feel he had touched bottom.  He was to feel many
things on this occasion, and one of the first of them was that he had
travelled far since that evening in London, before the theatre, when
his dinner with Maria Gostrey, between the pink-shaded candles, had
struck him as requiring so many explanations.  He had at that time
gathered them in, the explanations--he had stored them up; but it was
at present as if he had either soared above or sunk below them--he
couldn't tell which; he could somehow think of none that didn't seem to
leave the appearance of collapse and cynicism easier for him than
lucidity.  How could he wish it to be lucid for others, for any one,
that he, for the hour, saw reasons enough in the mere way the bright
clean ordered water-side life came in at the open window?--the mere way
Madame de Vionnet, opposite him over their intensely white table-linen,
their omelette aux tomates, their bottle of straw-coloured Chablis,
thanked him for everything almost with the smile of a child, while her
grey eyes moved in and out of their talk, back to the quarter of the
warm spring air, in which early summer had already begun to throb, and
then back again to his face and their human questions.

Their human questions became many before they had done--many more, as
one after the other came up, than our friend's free fancy had at all
foreseen.  The sense he had had before, the sense he had had
repeatedly, the sense that the situation was running away with him, had
never been so sharp as now; and all the more that he could perfectly
put his finger on the moment it had taken the bit in its teeth.  That
accident had definitely occurred, the other evening, after Chad's
dinner; it had occurred, as he fully knew, at the moment when he
interposed between this lady and her child, when he suffered himself so
to discuss with her a matter closely concerning them that her own
subtlety, marked by its significant "Thank you!" instantly sealed the
occasion in her favour.  Again he had held off for ten days, but the
situation had continued out of hand in spite of that; the fact that it
was running so fast being indeed just WHY he had held off.  What had
come over him as he recognised her in the nave of the church was that
holding off could be but a losing game from the instant she was worked
for not only by her subtlety, but by the hand of fate itself.  If all
the accidents were to fight on her side--and by the actual showing they
loomed large--he could only give himself up.  This was what he had done
in privately deciding then and there to propose she should breakfast
with him. What did the success of his proposal in fact resemble but the
smash in which a regular runaway properly ends?  The smash was their
walk, their dejeuner, their omelette, the Chablis, the place, the view,
their present talk and his present pleasure in it--to say nothing,
wonder of wonders, of her own.  To this tune and nothing less,
accordingly, was his surrender made good.  It sufficiently lighted up
at least the folly of holding off.  Ancient proverbs sounded, for his
memory, in the tone of their words and the clink of their glasses, in
the hum of the town and the plash of the river.  It WAS clearly better
to suffer as a sheep than as a lamb.  One might as well perish by the
sword as by famine.

"Maria's still away?"--that was the first thing she had asked him; and
when he had found the frankness to be cheerful about it in spite of the
meaning he knew her to attach to Miss Gostrey's absence, she had gone
on to enquire if he didn't tremendously miss her.  There were reasons
that made him by no means sure, yet he nevertheless answered
"Tremendously"; which she took in as if it were all she had wished to
prove.  Then, "A man in trouble MUST be possessed somehow of a woman,"
she said; "if she doesn't come in one way she comes in another."

"Why do you call me a man in trouble?"

"Ah because that's the way you strike me."  She spoke ever so gently
and as if with all fear of wounding him while she sat partaking of his
bounty.  "AREn't you in trouble?"

He felt himself colour at the question, and then hated that--hated to
pass for anything so idiotic as woundable.  Woundable by Chad's lady,
in respect to whom he had come out with such a fund of
indifference--was he already at that point?  Perversely, none the less,
his pause gave a strange air of truth to her supposition; and what was
he in fact but disconcerted at having struck her just in the way he had
most dreamed of not doing?  "I'm not in trouble yet," he at last
smiled.  "I'm not in trouble now."

"Well, I'm always so.  But that you sufficiently know."  She was a
woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the
table.  It was a posture unknown to Mrs. Newsome, but it was easy for a
femme du monde.  "Yes--I am 'now'!"

"There was a question you put to me," he presently returned, "the night
of Chad's dinner.  I didn't answer it then, and it has been very
handsome of you not to have sought an occasion for pressing me about it
since."

She was instantly all there.  "Of course I know what you allude to. I
asked you what you had meant by saying, the day you came to see me,
just before you left me, that you'd save me.  And you then said--at our
friend's--that you'd have really to wait to see, for yourself, what you
did mean."

"Yes, I asked for time," said Strether.  "And it sounds now, as you put
it, like a very ridiculous speech."

"Oh!" she murmured--she was full of attenuation.  But she had another
thought.  "If it does sound ridiculous why do you deny that you're in
trouble?"

"Ah if I were," he replied, "it wouldn't be the trouble of fearing
ridicule.  I don't fear it."

"What then do you?"

"Nothing--now."  And he leaned back in his chair.

"I like your 'now'!" she laughed across at him.

"Well, it's precisely that it fully comes to me at present that I've
kept you long enough.  I know by this time, at any rate, what I meant
by my speech; and I really knew it the night of Chad's dinner."

"Then why didn't you tell me?"

"Because it was difficult at the moment.  I had already at that moment
done something for you, in the sense of what I had said the day I went
to see you; but I wasn't then sure of the importance I might represent
this as having."

She was all eagerness.  "And you're sure now?"

"Yes; I see that, practically, I've done for you--had done for you when
you put me your question--all that it's as yet possible to me to do.  I
feel now," he went on, "that it may go further than I thought.  What I
did after my visit to you," he explained, "was to write straight off to
Mrs. Newsome about you, and I'm at last, from one day to the other,
expecting her answer.  It's this answer that will represent, as I
believe, the consequences."

Patient and beautiful was her interest.  "I see--the consequences of
your speaking for me."  And she waited as if not to hustle him.

He acknowledged it by immediately going on.  "The question, you
understand, was HOW I should save you.  Well, I'm trying it by thus
letting her know that I consider you worth saving."

"I see--I see."  Her eagerness broke through.

"How can I thank you enough?"  He couldn't tell her that, however, and
she quickly pursued.  "You do really, for yourself, consider it?"

His only answer at first was to help her to the dish that had been
freshly put before them.  "I've written to her again since then--I've
left her in no doubt of what I think.  I've told her all about you."

"Thanks--not so much.  'All about' me," she went on--"yes."

"All it seems to me you've done for him."

"Ah and you might have added all it seems to ME!"  She laughed again,
while she took up her knife and fork, as in the cheer of these
assurances.  "But you're not sure how she'll take it."

"No, I'll not pretend I'm sure."

"Voila."  And she waited a moment.  "I wish you'd tell me about her."

"Oh," said Strether with a slightly strained smile, "all that need
concern you about her is that she's really a grand person."

Madame de Vionnet seemed to demur.  "Is that all that need concern me
about her?"

But Strether neglected the question.  "Hasn't Chad talked to you?"

"Of his mother?  Yes, a great deal--immensely.  But not from your point
of view."

"He can't," our friend returned, "have said any ill of her."

"Not the least bit.  He has given me, like you, the assurance that
she's really grand.  But her being really grand is somehow just what
hasn't seemed to simplify our case.  Nothing," she continued, "is
further from me than to wish to say a word against her; but of course I
feel how little she can like being told of her owing me anything.  No
woman ever enjoys such an obligation to another woman."

This was a proposition Strether couldn't contradict.  "And yet what
other way could I have expressed to her what I felt?  It's what there
was most to say about you."

"Do you mean then that she WILL be good to me?"

"It's what I'm waiting to see.  But I've little doubt she would," he
added, "if she could comfortably see you."

It seemed to strike her as a happy, a beneficent thought.  "Oh then
couldn't that be managed?  Wouldn't she come out?  Wouldn't she if you
so put it to her?  DID you by any possibility?" she faintly quavered.

"Oh no"--he was prompt.  "Not that.  It would be, much more, to give an
account of you that--since there's no question of YOUR paying the
visit--I should go home first."

It instantly made her graver.  "And are you thinking of that?"

"Oh all the while, naturally."

"Stay with us--stay with us!" she exclaimed on this.  "That's your only
way to make sure."

"To make sure of what?"

"Why that he doesn't break up.  You didn't come out to do that to him."

"Doesn't it depend," Strether returned after a moment, "on what you
mean by breaking up?"

"Oh you know well enough what I mean!"

His silence seemed again for a little to denote an understanding. "You
take for granted remarkable things."

"Yes, I do--to the extent that I don't take for granted vulgar ones.
You're perfectly capable of seeing that what you came out for wasn't
really at all to do what you'd now have to do."

"Ah it's perfectly simple," Strether good-humouredly pleaded.  "I've
had but one thing to do--to put our case before him.  To put it as it
could only be put here on the spot--by personal pressure.  My dear
lady," he lucidly pursued, "my work, you see, is really done, and my
reasons for staying on even another day are none of the best.  Chad's
in possession of our case and professes to do it full justice.  What
remains is with himself.  I've had my rest, my amusement and
refreshment; I've had, as we say at Woollett, a lovely time.  Nothing
in it has been more lovely than this happy meeting with you--in these
fantastic conditions to which you've so delightfully consented.  I've a
sense of success.  It's what I wanted.  My getting all this good is
what Chad has waited for, and I gather that if I'm ready to go he's the
same."

She shook her head with a finer deeper wisdom.  "You're not ready. If
you're ready why did you write to Mrs. Newsome in the sense you've
mentioned to me?"

Strether considered.  "I shan't go before I hear from her.  You're too
much afraid of her," he added.

It produced between them a long look from which neither shrank.  "I
don't think you believe that--believe I've not really reason to fear
her."

"She's capable of great generosity," Strether presently stated.

"Well then let her trust me a little.  That's all I ask.  Let her
recognise in spite of everything what I've done."

"Ah remember," our friend replied, "that she can't effectually
recognise it without seeing it for herself.  Let Chad go over and show
her what you've done, and let him plead with her there for it and, as
it were, for YOU."

She measured the depth of this suggestion.  "Do you give me your word
of honour that if she once has him there she won't do her best to marry
him?"

It made her companion, this enquiry, look again a while out at the
view; after which he spoke without sharpness.  "When she sees for
herself what he is--"

But she had already broken in.  "It's when she sees for herself what he
is that she'll want to marry him most."

Strether's attitude, that of due deference to what she said, permitted
him to attend for a minute to his luncheon.  "I doubt if that will come
off.  It won't be easy to make it."

"It will be easy if he remains there--and he'll remain for the money.
The money appears to be, as a probability, so hideously much."

"Well," Strether presently concluded, "nothing COULD really hurt you
but his marrying."

She gave a strange light laugh.  "Putting aside what may really hurt
HIM."

But her friend looked at her as if he had thought of that too. "The
question will come up, of course, of the future that you yourself offer
him."

She was leaning back now, but she fully faced him.  "Well, let it come
up!"

"The point is that it's for Chad to make of it what he can.  His being
proof against marriage will show what he does make."

"If he IS proof, yes"--she accepted the proposition.  "But for myself,"
she added, "the question is what YOU make."

"Ah I make nothing.  It's not my affair."

"I beg your pardon.  It's just there that, since you've taken it up and
are committed to it, it most intensely becomes yours.  You're not
saving me, I take it, for your interest in myself, but for your
interest in our friend.  The one's at any rate wholly dependent on the
other.  You can't in honour not see me through," she wound up, "because
you can't in honour not see HIM."

Strange and beautiful to him was her quiet soft acuteness.  The thing
that most moved him was really that she was so deeply serious.  She had
none of the portentous forms of it, but he had never come in contact,
it struck him, with a force brought to so fine a head.  Mrs. Newsome,
goodness knew, was serious; but it was nothing to this.  He took it all
in, he saw it all together.  "No," he mused, "I can't in honour not see
him."

Her face affected him as with an exquisite light.  "You WILL then?"

"I will."

At this she pushed back her chair and was the next moment on her feet.
"Thank you!" she said with her hand held out to him across the table
and with no less a meaning in the words than her lips had so
particularly given them after Chad's dinner.  The golden nail she had
then driven in pierced a good inch deeper.  Yet he reflected that he
himself had only meanwhile done what he had made up his mind to on the
same occasion.  So far as the essence of the matter went he had simply
stood fast on the spot on which he had then planted his feet.

Strether goes to an old church to sit by himself and ponder his situation. And not just any church. Notre Dame. Maybe he thinks he'll find a famous hunchback to solve this question of virtue once and for all. So here's the pickle: he now thinks that Chad should stay in Paris, even though it's his personal mission as Newsome ambassador to convince that brat to head home. While thinking, he notices a woman coming into the church and sitting down in one of the pews with her back to him. Eventually, he realizes that it's Madame de Vionnet. She suggests that the two of them go for a walk around the church to take it all in. He confesses that he recently bought a 70-volume set of books by famous Frenchie Victor Hugo . In other news, Strether thinks that he's becoming too loose with his money. A half hour later, Strether finds himself sitting down for lunch with Madame de Vionnet. Yes, not the way to save money. Neither is buying 70 books by Victor Hugo. While they're eating, Madame tells Strether that he strikes her as a man who's in trouble. He replies that he doesn't think he is--yet. How ominous. Strether tells her that he now knows what he meant when he first met her and said that he would try to "save her." He meant that he would write to Mrs. Newsome about how lovely she was, and this is what he did. He's now waiting for a letter back revealing the consequences. He also feels that he should thank Madame for all she's done for Chad. Madame de Vionnet, though, wants to hear more about Mrs. Newsome. Strether says that all she needs to know is that Mrs. Newsome is a very grand lady. Did we say cagey? Yeah, we meant it. Sensing an opportunity to convert Strether, Madame de Vionnet asks him to stay in Paris--as in, forever. In other words, Madame thinks that if Strether stays forever, so will Chad. And Strether has another little nagging feeling about being used. Madame is worried that Chad's family will make him get married and settle down if he ever sets foot back in America. Strether can't deny this, so Madame makes a direct request for Strether to be on her side and to keep Chad in Paris. After some painful indecision, he agrees, and Madame de Vionnet thanks him profusely. Is our Streth a traitor, or is he just picking his loyalties?


He received three days after this a communication from America, in the
form of a scrap of blue paper folded and gummed, not reaching him
through his bankers, but delivered at his hotel by a small boy in
uniform, who, under instructions from the concierge, approached him as
he slowly paced the little court.  It was the evening hour, but
daylight was long now and Paris more than ever penetrating.  The scent
of flowers was in the streets, he had the whiff of violets perpetually
in his nose; and he had attached himself to sounds and suggestions,
vibrations of the air, human and dramatic, he imagined, as they were
not in other places, that came out for him more and more as the mild
afternoons deepened--a far-off hum, a sharp near click on the asphalt,
a voice calling, replying, somewhere and as full of tone as an actor's
in a play.  He was to dine at home, as usual, with Waymarsh--they had
settled to that for thrift and simplicity; and he now hung about before
his friend came down.

He read his telegram in the court, standing still a long time where he
had opened it and giving five minutes afterwards to the renewed study
of it.  At last, quickly, he crumpled it up as if to get it out of the
way; in spite of which, however, he kept it there--still kept it when,
at the end of another turn, he had dropped into a chair placed near a
small table.  Here, with his scrap of paper compressed in his fist and
further concealed by his folding his arms tight, he sat for some time
in thought, gazed before him so straight that Waymarsh appeared and
approached him without catching his eye.  The latter in fact, struck
with his appearance, looked at him hard for a single instant and then,
as if determined to that course by some special vividness in it,
dropped back into the salon de lecture without addressing him.  But the
pilgrim from Milrose permitted himself still to observe the scene from
behind the clear glass plate of that retreat.  Strether ended, as he
sat, by a fresh scrutiny of his compressed missive, which he smoothed
out carefully again as he placed it on his table.  There it remained
for some minutes, until, at last looking up, he saw Waymarsh watching
him from within.  It was on this that their eyes met--met for a moment
during which neither moved.  But Strether then got up, folding his
telegram more carefully and putting it into his waistcoat pocket.

A few minutes later the friends were seated together at dinner; but
Strether had meanwhile said nothing about it, and they eventually
parted, after coffee in the court, with nothing said on either side.
Our friend had moreover the consciousness that even less than usual was
on this occasion said between them, so that it was almost as if each
had been waiting for something from the other.  Waymarsh had always
more or less the air of sitting at the door of his tent, and silence,
after so many weeks, had come to play its part in their concert.  This
note indeed, to Strether's sense, had lately taken a fuller tone, and
it was his fancy to-night that they had never quite so drawn it out.
Yet it befell, none the less that he closed the door to confidence when
his companion finally asked him if there were anything particular the
matter with him.  "Nothing," he replied, "more than usual."

On the morrow, however, at an early hour, he found occasion to give an
answer more in consonance with the facts.  What was the matter had
continued to be so all the previous evening, the first hours of which,
after dinner, in his room, he had devoted to the copious composition of
a letter.  He had quitted Waymarsh for this purpose, leaving him to his
own resources with less ceremony than their wont, but finally coming
down again with his letter unconcluded and going forth into the streets
without enquiry for his comrade.  He had taken a long vague walk, and
one o'clock had struck before his return and his re-ascent to his room
by the aid of the glimmering candle-end left for him on the shelf
outside the porter's lodge.  He had possessed himself, on closing his
door, of the numerous loose sheets of his unfinished composition, and
then, without reading them over, had torn them into small pieces.  He
had thereupon slept--as if it had been in some measure thanks to that
sacrifice--the sleep of the just, and had prolonged his rest
considerably beyond his custom.  Thus it was that when, between nine
and ten, the tap of the knob of a walking-stick sounded on his door, he
had not yet made himself altogether presentable.  Chad Newsome's bright
deep voice determined quickly enough none the less the admission of the
visitor.  The little blue paper of the evening before, plainly an
object the more precious for its escape from premature destruction, now
lay on the sill of the open window, smoothed out afresh and kept from
blowing away by the superincumbent weight of his watch. Chad, looking
about with careless and competent criticism, as he looked wherever he
went immediately espied it and permitted himself to fix it for a moment
rather hard.  After which he turned his eyes to his host.  "It has come
then at last?"

Strether paused in the act of pinning his necktie.  "Then you know--?
You've had one too?"

"No, I've had nothing, and I only know what I see.  I see that thing
and I guess.  Well," he added, "it comes as pat as in a play, for I've
precisely turned up this morning--as I would have done yesterday, but
it was impossible--to take you."

"To take me?"  Strether had turned again to his glass.

"Back, at last, as I promised.  I'm ready--I've really been ready this
month.  I've only been waiting for you--as was perfectly right. But
you're better now; you're safe--I see that for myself; you've got all
your good.  You're looking, this morning, as fit as a flea."

Strether, at his glass, finished dressing; consulting that witness
moreover on this last opinion.  WAS he looking preternaturally fit?
There was something in it perhaps for Chad's wonderful eye, but he had
felt himself for hours rather in pieces.  Such a judgement, however,
was after all but a contribution to his resolve; it testified
unwittingly to his wisdom.  He was still firmer, apparently--since it
shone in him as a light--than he had flattered himself.  His firmness
indeed was slightly compromised, as he faced about to his friend, by
the way this very personage looked--though the case would of course
have been worse hadn't the secret of personal magnificence been at
every hour Chad's unfailing possession.  There he was in all the
pleasant morning freshness of it--strong and sleek and gay, easy and
fragrant and fathomless, with happy health in his colour, and pleasant
silver in his thick young hair, and the right word for everything on
the lips that his clear brownness caused to show as red.  He had never
struck Strether as personally such a success; it was as if now, for his
definite surrender, he had gathered himself vividly together.  This,
sharply and rather strangely, was the form in which he was to be
presented to Woollett.  Our friend took him in again--he was always
taking him in and yet finding that parts of him still remained out;
though even thus his image showed through a mist of other things. "I've
had a cable," Strether said, "from your mother."

"I dare say, my dear man.  I hope she's well."

Strether hesitated.  "No--she's not well, I'm sorry to have to tell
you."

"Ah," said Chad, "I must have had the instinct of it.  All the more
reason then that we should start straight off."

Strether had now got together hat, gloves and stick, but Chad had
dropped on the sofa as if to show where he wished to make his point. He
kept observing his companion's things; he might have been judging how
quickly they could be packed.  He might even have wished to hint that
he'd send his own servant to assist.  "What do you mean," Strether
enquired, "by 'straight off'?"

"Oh by one of next week's boats.  Everything at this season goes out so
light that berths will be easy anywhere."

Strether had in his hand his telegram, which he had kept there after
attaching his watch, and he now offered it to Chad, who, however, with
an odd movement, declined to take it.  "Thanks, I'd rather not.  Your
correspondence with Mother's your own affair.  I'm only WITH you both
on it, whatever it is."  Strether, at this, while their eyes met,
slowly folded the missive and put it in his pocket; after which, before
he had spoken again, Chad broke fresh ground. "Has Miss Gostrey come
back?"

But when Strether presently spoke it wasn't in answer.  "It's not, I
gather, that your mother's physically ill; her health, on the whole,
this spring, seems to have been better than usual.  But she's worried,
she's anxious, and it appears to have risen within the last few days to
a climax.  We've tired out, between us, her patience."

"Oh it isn't YOU!" Chad generously protested.

"I beg your pardon--it IS me."  Strether was mild and melancholy, but
firm.  He saw it far away and over his companion's head.  "It's very
particularly me."

"Well then all the more reason.  Marchons, marchons!" said the young
man gaily.  His host, however, at this, but continued to stand agaze;
and he had the next thing repeated his question of a moment before.
"Has Miss Gostrey come back?"

"Yes, two days ago."

"Then you've seen her?"

"No--I'm to see her to-day."  But Strether wouldn't linger now on Miss
Gostrey.  "Your mother sends me an ultimatum.  If I can't bring you I'm
to leave you; I'm to come at any rate myself."

"Ah but you CAN bring me now," Chad, from his sofa, reassuringly
replied.

Strether had a pause.  "I don't think I understand you.  Why was it
that, more than a month ago, you put it to me so urgently to let Madame
de Vionnet speak for you?"

"'Why'?"  Chad considered, but he had it at his fingers' ends.  "Why
but because I knew how well she'd do it?  It was the way to keep you
quiet and, to that extent, do you good.  Besides," he happily and
comfortably explained, "I wanted you really to know her and to get the
impression of her--and you see the good that HAS done you."

"Well," said Strether, "the way she has spoken for you, all the
same--so far as I've given her a chance--has only made me feel how much
she wishes to keep you.  If you make nothing of that I don't see why
you wanted me to listen to her."

"Why my dear man," Chad exclaimed, "I make everything of it! How can
you doubt--?"

"I doubt only because you come to me this morning with your signal to
start."

Chad stared, then gave a laugh.  "And isn't my signal to start just
what you've been waiting for?"

Strether debated; he took another turn.  "This last month I've been
awaiting, I think, more than anything else, the message I have here."

"You mean you've been afraid of it?"

"Well, I was doing my business in my own way.  And I suppose your
present announcement," Strether went on, "isn't merely the result of
your sense of what I've expected.  Otherwise you wouldn't have put me
in relation--" But he paused, pulling up.

At this Chad rose.  "Ah HER wanting me not to go has nothing to do with
it! It's only because she's afraid--afraid of the way that, over there,
I may get caught.  But her fear's groundless."

He had met again his companion's sufficiently searching look.  "Are you
tired of her?"

Chad gave him in reply to this, with a movement of the head, the
strangest slow smile he had ever had from him.  "Never."

It had immediately, on Strether's imagination, so deep and soft an
effect that our friend could only for the moment keep it before him.
"Never?"

"Never," Chad obligingly and serenely repeated.

It made his companion take several more steps.  "Then YOU'RE not
afraid."

"Afraid to go?"

Strether pulled up again.  "Afraid to stay."

The young man looked brightly amazed.  "You want me now to 'stay'?"

"If I don't immediately sail the Pococks will immediately come out.
That's what I mean," said Strether, "by your mother's ultimatum ."

Chad showed a still livelier, but not an alarmed interest.  "She has
turned on Sarah and Jim?"

Strether joined him for an instant in the vision.  "Oh and you may be
sure Mamie.  THAT'S whom she's turning on."

This also Chad saw--he laughed out.  "Mamie--to corrupt me?"

"Ah," said Strether, "she's very charming."

"So you've already more than once told me.  I should like to see her."

Something happy and easy, something above all unconscious, in the way
he said this, brought home again to his companion the facility of his
attitude and the enviability of his state.  "See her then by all means.
And consider too," Strether went on, "that you really give your sister
a lift in letting her come to you.  You give her a couple of months of
Paris, which she hasn't seen, if I'm not mistaken, since just after she
was married, and which I'm sure she wants but the pretext to visit."

Chad listened, but with all his own knowledge of the world.  "She has
had it, the pretext, these several years, yet she has never taken it."

"Do you mean YOU?" Strether after an instant enquired.

"Certainly--the lone exile.  And whom do you mean?" said Chad.

"Oh I mean ME.  I'm her pretext.  That is--for it comes to the same
thing--I'm your mother's."

"Then why," Chad asked, "doesn't Mother come herself?"

His friend gave him a long look.  "Should you like her to?"  And as he
for the moment said nothing: "It's perfectly open to you to cable for
her."

Chad continued to think.  "Will she come if I do?"

"Quite possibly.  But try, and you'll see."

"Why don't YOU try?" Chad after a moment asked.

"Because I don't want to."

Chad thought.  "Don't desire her presence here?"

Strether faced the question, and his answer was the more emphatic.
"Don't put it off, my dear boy, on ME!"

"Well--I see what you mean.  I'm sure you'd behave beautifully but you
DON'T want to see her.  So I won't play you that trick.'

"Ah," Strether declared, "I shouldn't call it a trick.  You've a
perfect right, and it would be perfectly straight of you."  Then he
added in a different tone: "You'd have moreover, in the person of
Madame de Vionnet, a very interesting relation prepared for her."

Their eyes, on this proposition, continued to meet, but Chad's pleasant
and bold, never flinched for a moment.  He got up at last and he said
something with which Strether was struck.  "She wouldn't understand
her, but that makes no difference.  Madame de Vionnet would like to see
her.  She'd like to be charming to her.  She believes she could work
it."

Strether thought a moment, affected by this, but finally turning away.
"She couldn't!"

"You're quite sure?" Chad asked.

"Well, risk it if you like!"

Strether, who uttered this with serenity, had urged a plea for their
now getting into the air; but the young man still waited.  "Have you
sent your answer?"

"No, I've done nothing yet."

"Were you waiting to see me?"

"No, not that."

"Only waiting"--and Chad, with this, had a smile for him--"to see Miss
Gostrey?"

"No--not even Miss Gostrey.  I wasn't waiting to see any one.  I had
only waited, till now, to make up my mind--in complete solitude; and,
since I of course absolutely owe you the information, was on the point
of going out with it quite made up.  Have therefore a little more
patience with me.  Remember," Strether went on, "that that's what you
originally asked ME to have.  I've had it, you see, and you see what
has come of it.  Stay on with me."

Chad looked grave.  "How much longer?"

"Well, till I make you a sign.  I can't myself, you know, at the best,
or at the worst, stay for ever.  Let the Pococks come," Strether
repeated.

"Because it gains you time?"

"Yes--it gains me time."

Chad, as if it still puzzled him, waited a minute.  "You don't want to
get back to Mother?"

"Not just yet.  I'm not ready."

"You feel," Chad asked in a tone of his own, "the charm of life over
here?"

"Immensely."  Strether faced it.  "You've helped me so to feel it that
that surely needn't surprise you."

"No, it doesn't surprise me, and I'm delighted.  But what, my dear
man," Chad went on with conscious queerness, "does it all lead to for
you?"

The change of position and of relation, for each, was so oddly betrayed
in the question that Chad laughed out as soon as he had uttered
it--which made Strether also laugh.  "Well, to my having a certitude
that has been tested--that has passed through the fire. But oh," he
couldn't help breaking out, "if within my first month here you had been
willing to move with me--!"

"Well?" said Chad, while he broke down as for weight of thought.

"Well, we should have been over there by now."

"Ah but you wouldn't have had your fun!"

"I should have had a month of it; and I'm having now, if you want to
know," Strether continued, "enough to last me for the rest of my days."

Chad looked amused and interested, yet still somewhat in the dark;
partly perhaps because Strether's estimate of fun had required of him
from the first a good deal of elucidation.  "It wouldn't do if I left
you--?"

"Left me?"--Strether remained blank.

"Only for a month or two--time to go and come.  Madame de Vionnet,"
Chad smiled, "would look after you in the interval."

"To go back by yourself, I remaining here?"  Again for an instant their
eyes had the question out; after which Strether said: "Grotesque!"

"But I want to see Mother," Chad presently returned.  "Remember how
long it is since I've seen Mother."

"Long indeed; and that's exactly why I was originally so keen for
moving you.  Hadn't you shown us enough how beautifully you could do
without it?"

"Oh but," said Chad wonderfully, "I'm better now."

There was an easy triumph in it that made his friend laugh out again.
"Oh if you were worse I SHOULD know what to do with you.  In that case
I believe I'd have you gagged and strapped down, carried on board
resisting, kicking.  How MUCH," Strether asked, "do you want to see
Mother?"

"How much?"--Chad seemed to find it in fact difficult to say.

"How much."

"Why as much as you've made me.  I'd give anything to see her.  And
you've left me," Chad went on, "in little enough doubt as to how much
SHE wants it."

Strether thought a minute.  "Well then if those things are really your
motive catch the French steamer and sail to-morrow.  Of course, when it
comes to that, you're absolutely free to do as you choose. From the
moment you can't hold yourself I can only accept your flight."

"I'll fly in a minute then," said Chad, "if you'll stay here."

"I'll stay here till the next steamer--then I'll follow you."

"And do you call that," Chad asked, "accepting my flight?"

"Certainly--it's the only thing to call it.  The only way to keep me
here, accordingly," Strether explained, "is by staying yourself."

Chad took it in.  "All the more that I've really dished you, eh?"

"Dished me?" Strether echoed as inexpressively as possible.

"Why if she sends out the Pococks it will be that she doesn't trust
you, and if she doesn't trust you, that bears upon--well, you know
what."

Strether decided after a moment that he did know what, and in
consonance with this he spoke.  "You see then all the more what you owe
me."

"Well, if I do see, how can I pay?"

"By not deserting me.  By standing by me."

"Oh I say--!"  But Chad, as they went downstairs, clapped a firm hand,
in the manner of a pledge, upon his shoulder.  They descended slowly
together and had, in the court of the hotel, some further talk, of
which the upshot was that they presently separated.  Chad Newsome
departed, and Strether, left alone, looked about, superficially, for
Waymarsh.  But Waymarsh hadn't yet, it appeared, come down, and our
friend finally went forth without sight of him.

Three days after his conversation with Madame de Vionnet, Strether receives a short little telegram from America. And to get a telegram instead of a letter in those days usually meant that a message was urgent. At first, he crumples up the telegram and shoves it into his pocket. Mysterious! Waymarsh walks past where he's sitting and notices a big change come over his face, so Waymarsh decides to just keep walking and to leave Strether with his thoughts. Yes, the suspense is building. A few minutes later, though, the two of them sit down for dinner. But Strether says nothing about it and Waymarsh won't let on that he's been bit by the curious bug. So they say nothing to each other and then part ways again. Not one of the more eventful meals of the book. Later on, Waymarsh finally breaks his silence and asks Strether if he's heard any news. Strether says that he hasn't heard anything more than usual. Whatever that means. The next day, Chad shows up at Strether's room and asks Strether if the word from Woollett has finally come through. Strether is surprised at Chad's knowledge of what's going on, and wonders if he got a telegram, too. Chad says he hasn't, but just points to Strether's telegram and guesses at what's going on. Chad says out of nowhere that he's ready to head back to Woollett with Strether. He feels that Strether has felt the full benefit of his time in Paris and that he's looking much fitter and healthier. Strether breaks the news to Chad that Mama Newsome is in poor health. Chad replies that this is all the more reason for the two of them to leave immediately. But here's the thing: Strether now argues that Chad can't go home just yet. Chad actually wants to go home and see his mother, especially if she's not doing so great. But now it's Strether who says he's not ready to go back to the dull world of Woollett anymore. Switcheroo! Strether also mentions that Mrs. Newsome has given him an ultimatum. Either he bring Chad home immediately, or comes home himself. Either way, there'll be no more delaying. Which is pretty much the exact opposite of what he's doing. Strether asks Chad why he would make him enjoy Paris and Madame de Vionnet so much if his plan was to go home all along. Chad answer that he thought it would do Strether good, which it definitely has. Strether tells Chad about Mrs. Newsome's plan to marry him off to Mamie Pocock once he's back in America. He's really looking for outs now. Chad realizes that what's really going on is that Strether doesn't want to go back to Mrs. Newsome, but he doesn't have the guts to break it off, either. Chad says that Mrs. Newsome will send her daughter Sarah if he and Strether try to buy more time. Strether is okay with letting this happen, since it'll do exactly that: buy him some more time in Paris. He also has a distant hope that Sarah will have the same experience as him and be so impressed with Chad that she'll want him to stay in Paris. Chad proposes going back to America himself and leaving Strether in Paris. But Strether is too chicken for this, too. It's like he can't make excuses to himself to stay in Paris without Chad there. Chad promises to stand by Strether's side in Paris. Which is pretty ironic considering they just flipped the whole premise of the book. They seal their deal with a little handshake and part ways.


At four o'clock that afternoon he had still not seen him, but he was
then, as to make up for this, engaged in talk about him with Miss
Gostrey.  Strether had kept away from home all day, given himself up to
the town and to his thoughts, wandered and mused, been at once restless
and absorbed--and all with the present climax of a rich little welcome
in the Quartier Marboeuf.  "Waymarsh has been, 'unbeknown' to me, I'm
convinced"--for Miss Gostrey had enquired--"in communication with
Woollett: the consequence of which was, last night, the loudest
possible call for me."

"Do you mean a letter to bring you home?"

"No--a cable, which I have at this moment in my pocket: a 'Come back by
the first ship.'"

Strether's hostess, it might have been made out, just escaped changing
colour.  Reflexion arrived but in time and established a provisional
serenity.  It was perhaps exactly this that enabled her to say with
duplicity: "And you're going--?"

"You almost deserve it when you abandon me so."

She shook her head as if this were not worth taking up.  "My absence
has helped you--as I've only to look at you to see.  It was my
calculation, and I'm justified.  You're not where you were.  And the
thing," she smiled, "was for me not to be there either.  You can go of
yourself."

"Oh but I feel to-day," he comfortably declared, "that I shall want you
yet."

She took him all in again.  "Well, I promise you not again to leave
you, but it will only be to follow you.  You've got your momentum and
can toddle alone."

He intelligently accepted it.  "Yes--I suppose I can toddle.  It's the
sight of that in fact that has upset Waymarsh.  He can bear it--the way
I strike him as going--no longer.  That's only the climax of his
original feeling.  He wants me to quit; and he must have written to
Woollett that I'm in peril of perdition."

"Ah good!" she murmured.  "But is it only your supposition?"

"I make it out--it explains."

"Then he denies?--or you haven't asked him?"

"I've not had time," Strether said; "I made it out but last night,
putting various things together, and I've not been since then face to
face with him."

She wondered.  "Because you're too disgusted?  You can't trust
yourself?"

He settled his glasses on his nose.  "Do I look in a great rage?"

"You look divine!"

"There's nothing," he went on, "to be angry about.  He has done me on
the contrary a service."

She made it out.  "By bringing things to a head?"

"How well you understand!" he almost groaned.  "Waymarsh won't in the
least, at any rate, when I have it out with him, deny or extenuate.  He
has acted from the deepest conviction, with the best conscience and
after wakeful nights.  He'll recognise that he's fully responsible, and
will consider that he has been highly successful; so that any
discussion we may have will bring us quite together again--bridge the
dark stream that has kept us so thoroughly apart.  We shall have at
last, in the consequences of his act, something we can definitely talk
about."

She was silent a little.  "How wonderfully you take it! But you're
always wonderful."

He had a pause that matched her own; then he had, with an adequate
spirit, a complete admission.  "It's quite true.  I'm extremely
wonderful just now.  I dare say in fact I'm quite fantastic, and I
shouldn't be at all surprised if I were mad."

"Then tell me!" she earnestly pressed.  As he, however, for the time
answered nothing, only returning the look with which she watched him,
she presented herself where it was easier to meet her.  "What will Mr.
Waymarsh exactly have done?"

"Simply have written a letter.  One will have been quite enough.  He
has told them I want looking after."

"And DO you?"--she was all interest.

"Immensely.  And I shall get it."

"By which you mean you don't budge?"

"I don't budge."

"You've cabled?"

"No--I've made Chad do it."

"That you decline to come?"

"That HE declines.  We had it out this morning and I brought him round.
He had come in, before I was down, to tell me he was ready--ready, I
mean, to return.  And he went off, after ten minutes with me, to say he
wouldn't."

Miss Gostrey followed with intensity.  "Then you've STOPPED him?"

Strether settled himself afresh in his chair.  "I've stopped him. That
is for the time.  That"--he gave it to her more vividly--"is where I
am."

"I see, I see.  But where's Mr. Newsome?  He was ready," she asked, "to
go?"

"All ready."

"And sincerely--believing YOU'D be?"

"Perfectly, I think; so that he was amazed to find the hand I had laid
on him to pull him over suddenly converted into an engine for keeping
him still."

It was an account of the matter Miss Gostrey could weigh.  "Does he
think the conversion sudden?"

"Well," said Strether, "I'm not altogether sure what he thinks.  I'm
not sure of anything that concerns him, except that the more I've seen
of him the less I've found him what I originally expected. He's
obscure, and that's why I'm waiting."

She wondered.  "But for what in particular?"

"For the answer to his cable."

"And what was his cable?"

"I don't know," Strether replied; "it was to be, when he left me,
according to his own taste.  I simply said to him: 'I want to stay, and
the only way for me to do so is for you to.' That I wanted to stay
seemed to interest him, and he acted on that."

Miss Gostrey turned it over.  "He wants then himself to stay."

"He half wants it.  That is he half wants to go.  My original appeal
has to that extent worked in him.  Nevertheless," Strether pursued, "he
won't go.  Not, at least, so long as I'm here."

"But you can't," his companion suggested, "stay here always.  I wish
you could."

"By no means.  Still, I want to see him a little further.  He's not in
the least the case I supposed, he's quite another case.  And it's as
such that he interests me."  It was almost as if for his own
intelligence that, deliberate and lucid, our friend thus expressed the
matter.  "I don't want to give him up."

Miss Gostrey but desired to help his lucidity.  She had however to be
light and tactful.  "Up, you mean--a--to his mother?"

"Well, I'm not thinking of his mother now.  I'm thinking of the plan of
which I was the mouthpiece, which, as soon as we met, I put before him
as persuasively as I knew how, and which was drawn up, as it were, in
complete ignorance of all that, in this last long period, has been
happening to him.  It took no account whatever of the impression I was
here on the spot immediately to begin to receive from him--impressions
of which I feel sure I'm far from having had the last."

Miss Gostrey had a smile of the most genial criticism.  "So your idea
is--more or less--to stay out of curiosity?"

"Call it what you like! I don't care what it's called--"

"So long as you do stay?  Certainly not then.  I call it, all the same,
immense fun," Maria Gostrey declared; "and to see you work it out will
be one of the sensations of my life.  It IS clear you can toddle alone!"

He received this tribute without elation.  "I shan't be alone when the
Pococks have come."

Her eyebrows went up.  "The Pococks are coming?"

"That, I mean, is what will happen--and happen as quickly as
possible--in consequence of Chad's cable.  They'll simply embark. Sarah
will come to speak for her mother--with an effect different from MY
muddle."

Miss Gostrey more gravely wondered.  "SHE then will take him back?"

"Very possibly--and we shall see.  She must at any rate have the
chance, and she may be trusted to do all she can."

"And do you WANT that?"

"Of course," said Strether, "I want it.  I want to play fair."

But she had lost for a moment the thread.  "If it devolves on the
Pococks why do you stay?"

"Just to see that I DO play fair--and a little also, no doubt, that
they do."  Strether was luminous as he had never been.  "I came out to
find myself in presence of new facts--facts that have kept striking me
as less and less met by our old reasons.  The matter's perfectly
simple.  New reasons--reasons as new as the facts themselves--are
wanted; and of this our friends at Woollett--Chad's and mine--were at
the earliest moment definitely notified.  If any are producible Mrs.
Pocock will produce them; she'll bring over the whole collection.
They'll be," he added with a pensive smile "a part of the 'fun' you
speak of."

She was quite in the current now and floating by his side.  "It's
Mamie--so far as I've had it from you--who'll be their great card." And
then as his contemplative silence wasn't a denial she significantly
added: "I think I'm sorry for her."

"I think I am!"--and Strether sprang up, moving about a little as her
eyes followed him.  "But it can't be helped."

"You mean her coming out can't be?"

He explained after another turn what he meant.  "The only way for her
not to come is for me to go home--as I believe that on the spot I could
prevent it.  But the difficulty as to that is that if I do go home--"

"I see, I see"--she had easily understood.  "Mr. Newsome will do the
same, and that's not"--she laughed out now--"to be thought of."

Strether had no laugh; he had only a quiet comparatively placid look
that might have shown him as proof against ridicule.  "Strange, isn't
it?"

They had, in the matter that so much interested them, come so far as
this without sounding another name--to which however their present
momentary silence was full of a conscious reference. Strether's
question was a sufficient implication of the weight it had gained with
him during the absence of his hostess; and just for that reason a
single gesture from her could pass for him as a vivid answer.  Yet he
was answered still better when she said in a moment: "Will Mr. Newsome
introduce his sister--?"

"To Madame de Vionnet?"  Strether spoke the name at last.  "I shall be
greatly surprised if he doesn't."

She seemed to gaze at the possibility.  "You mean you've thought of it
and you're prepared."

"I've thought of it and I'm prepared."

It was to her visitor now that she applied her consideration.  "Bon!
You ARE magnificent!"

"Well," he answered after a pause and a little wearily, but still
standing there before her--"well, that's what, just once in all my dull
days, I think I shall like to have been!"

Two days later he had news from Chad of a communication from Woollett
in response to their determinant telegram, this missive being addressed
to Chad himself and announcing the immediate departure for France of
Sarah and Jim and Mamie.  Strether had meanwhile on his own side
cabled; he had but delayed that act till after his visit to Miss
Gostrey, an interview by which, as so often before, he felt his sense
of things cleared up and settled.  His message to Mrs. Newsome, in
answer to her own, had consisted of the words: "Judge best to take
another month, but with full appreciation of all re-enforcements."  He
had added that he was writing, but he was of course always writing; it
was a practice that continued, oddly enough, to relieve him, to make
him come nearer than anything else to the consciousness of doing
something: so that he often wondered if he hadn't really, under his
recent stress, acquired some hollow trick, one of the specious arts of
make-believe.  Wouldn't the pages he still so freely dispatched by the
American post have been worthy of a showy journalist, some master of
the great new science of beating the sense out of words? Wasn't he
writing against time, and mainly to show he was kind?--since it had
become quite his habit not to like to read himself over.  On those
lines he could still be liberal, yet it was at best a sort of whistling
in the dark.  It was unmistakeable moreover that the sense of being in
the dark now pressed on him more sharply--creating thereby the need for
a louder and livelier whistle.  He whistled long and hard after sending
his message; he whistled again and again in celebration of Chad's news;
there was an interval of a fortnight in which this exercise helped him.
He had no great notion of what, on the spot, Sarah Pocock would have to
say, though he had indeed confused premonitions; but it shouldn't be in
her power to say--it shouldn't be in any one's anywhere to say--that he
was neglecting her mother.  He might have written before more freely,
but he had never written more copiously; and he frankly gave for a
reason at Woollett that he wished to fill the void created there by
Sarah's departure.

The increase of his darkness, however, and the quickening, as I have
called it, of his tune, resided in the fact that he was hearing almost
nothing.  He had for some time been aware that he was hearing less than
before, and he was now clearly following a process by which Mrs.
Newsome's letters could but logically stop. He hadn't had a line for
many days, and he needed no proof--though he was, in time, to have
plenty--that she wouldn't have put pen to paper after receiving the
hint that had determined her telegram. She wouldn't write till Sarah
should have seen him and reported on him.  It was strange, though it
might well be less so than his own behaviour appeared at Woollett.  It
was at any rate significant, and what WAS remarkable was the way his
friend's nature and manner put on for him, through this very drop of
demonstration, a greater intensity.  It struck him really that he had
never so lived with her as during this period of her silence; the
silence was a sacred hush, a finer clearer medium, in which her
idiosyncrasies showed. He walked about with her, sat with her, drove
with her and dined face-to-face with her--a rare treat "in his life,"
as he could perhaps have scarce escaped phrasing it; and if he had
never seen her so soundless he had never, on the other hand, felt her
so highly, so almost austerely, herself: pure and by the vulgar
estimate "cold," but deep devoted delicate sensitive noble.  Her
vividness in these respects became for him, in the special conditions,
almost an obsession; and though the obsession sharpened his pulses,
adding really to the excitement of life, there were hours at which, to
be less on the stretch, he directly sought forgetfulness.  He knew it
for the queerest of adventures--a circumstance capable of playing such
a part only for Lambert Strether--that in Paris itself, of all places,
he should find this ghost of the lady of Woollett more importunate than
any other presence.

When he went back to Maria Gostrey it was for the change to something
else.  And yet after all the change scarcely operated for he talked to
her of Mrs. Newsome in these days as he had never talked before.  He
had hitherto observed in that particular a discretion and a law;
considerations that at present broke down quite as if relations had
altered.  They hadn't REALLY altered, he said to himself, so much as
that came to; for if what had occurred was of course that Mrs. Newsome
had ceased to trust him, there was nothing on the other hand to prove
that he shouldn't win back her confidence.  It was quite his present
theory that he would leave no stone unturned to do so; and in fact if
he now told Maria things about her that he had never told before this
was largely because it kept before him the idea of the honour of such a
woman's esteem. His relation with Maria as well was, strangely enough,
no longer quite the same; this truth--though not too
disconcertingly--had come up between them on the renewal of their
meetings.  It was all contained in what she had then almost immediately
said to him; it was represented by the remark she had needed but ten
minutes to make and that he hadn't been disposed to gainsay.  He could
toddle alone, and the difference that showed was extraordinary.  The
turn taken by their talk had promptly confirmed this difference; his
larger confidence on the score of Mrs. Newsome did the rest; and the
time seemed already far off when he had held out his small thirsty cup
to the spout of her pail.  Her pail was scarce touched now, and other
fountains had flowed for him; she fell into her place as but one of his
tributaries; and there was a strange sweetness--a melancholy mildness
that touched him--in her acceptance of the altered order.

It marked for himself the flight of time, or at any rate what he was
pleased to think of with irony and pity as the rush of experience; it
having been but the day before yesterday that he sat at her feet and
held on by her garment and was fed by her hand.  It was the proportions
that were changed, and the proportions were at all times, he
philosophised, the very conditions of perception, the terms of thought.
It was as if, with her effective little entresol and and her wide
acquaintance, her activities, varieties, promiscuities, the duties and
devotions that took up nine tenths of her time and of which he got,
guardedly, but the side-wind--it was as if she had shrunk to a
secondary element and had consented to the shrinkage with the
perfection of tact.  This perfection had never failed her; it had
originally been greater than his prime measure for it; it had kept him
quite apart, kept him out of the shop, as she called her huge general
acquaintance, made their commerce as quiet, as much a thing of the home
alone--the opposite of the shop--as if she had never another customer.
She had been wonderful to him at first, with the memory of her little
entresol, the image to which, on most mornings at that time, his eyes
directly opened; but now she mainly figured for him as but part of the
bristling total--though of course always as a person to whom he should
never cease to be indebted.  It would never be given to him certainly
to inspire a greater kindness.  She had decked him out for others, and
he saw at this point at least nothing she would ever ask for. She only
wondered and questioned and listened, rendering him the homage of a
wistful speculation.  She expressed it repeatedly; he was already far
beyond her, and she must prepare herself to lose him.  There was but
one little chance for her.

Often as she had said it he met it--for it was a touch he liked--each
time the same way.  "My coming to grief?"

"Yes--then I might patch you up."

"Oh for my real smash, if it takes place, there will be no patching."

"But you surely don't mean it will kill you."

"No--worse.  It will make me old."

"Ah nothing can do that! The wonderful and special thing about you is
that you ARE, at this time of day, youth."  Then she always made,
further, one of those remarks that she had completely ceased to adorn
with hesitations or apologies, and that had, by the same token, in
spite of their extreme straightness, ceased to produce in Strether the
least embarrassment.  She made him believe them, and they became
thereby as impersonal as truth itself.  "It's just your particular
charm."

His answer too was always the same.  "Of course I'm youth--youth for
the trip to Europe.  I began to be young, or at least to get the
benefit of it, the moment I met you at Chester, and that's what has
been taking place ever since.  I never had the benefit at the proper
time--which comes to saying that I never had the thing itself.  I'm
having the benefit at this moment; I had it the other day when I said
to Chad 'Wait'; I shall have it still again when Sarah Pocock arrives.
It's a benefit that would make a poor show for many people; and I don't
know who else but you and I, frankly, could begin to see in it what I
feel.  I don't get drunk; I don't pursue the ladies; I don't spend
money; I don't even write sonnets.  But nevertheless I'm making up late
for what I didn't have early.  I cultivate my little benefit in my own
little way.  It amuses me more than anything that has happened to me in
all my life.  They may say what they like--it's my surrender, it's my
tribute, to youth.  One puts that in where one can--it has to come in
somewhere, if only out of the lives, the conditions, the feelings of
other persons. Chad gives me the sense of it, for all his grey hairs,
which merely make it solid in him and safe and serene; and SHE does the
same, for all her being older than he, for all her marriageable
daughter, her separated husband, her agitated history.  Though they're
young enough, my pair, I don't say they're, in the freshest way, their
own absolutely prime adolescence; for that has nothing to do with it.
The point is that they're mine.  Yes, they're my youth; since somehow
at the right time nothing else ever was.  What I meant just now
therefore is that it would all go--go before doing its work--if they
were to fail me."

On which, just here, Miss Gostrey inveterately questioned.  "What do
you, in particular, call its work?"

"Well, to see me through."

"But through what?"--she liked to get it all out of him.

"Why through this experience."  That was all that would come.

It regularly gave her none the less the last word.  "Don't you remember
how in those first days of our meeting it was I who was to see you
through?"

"Remember?  Tenderly, deeply"--he always rose to it.  "You're just
doing your part in letting me maunder to you thus."

"Ah don't speak as if my part were small; since whatever else fails
you--"

"YOU won't, ever, ever, ever?"--he thus took her up.  "Oh I beg your
pardon; you necessarily, you inevitably WILL.  Your conditions--that's
what I mean--won't allow me anything to do for you."

"Let alone--I see what you mean--that I'm drearily dreadfully old. I
AM, but there's a service--possible for you to render--that I know, all
the same, I shall think of."

"And what will it be?"

This, in fine, however, she would never tell him.  "You shall hear only
if your smash takes place.  As that's really out of the question, I
won't expose myself"--a point at which, for reasons of his own,
Strether ceased to press.

He came round, for publicity--it was the easiest thing--to the idea
that his smash WAS out of the question, and this rendered idle the
discussion of what might follow it.  He attached an added importance,
as the days elapsed, to the arrival of the Pococks; he had even a
shameful sense of waiting for it insincerely and incorrectly.  He
accused himself of making believe to his own mind that Sarah's
presence, her impression, her judgement would simplify and harmonise,
he accused himself of being so afraid of what they MIGHT do that he
sought refuge, to beg the whole question, in a vain fury.  He had
abundantly seen at home what they were in the habit of doing, and he
had not at present the smallest ground.  His clearest vision was when
he made out that what he most desired was an account more full and free
of Mrs. Newsome's state of mind than any he felt he could now expect
from herself; that calculation at least went hand in hand with the
sharp consciousness of wishing to prove to himself that he was not
afraid to look his behaviour in the face.  If he was by an inexorable
logic to pay for it he was literally impatient to know the cost, and he
held himself ready to pay in instalments.  The first instalment would
be precisely this entertainment of Sarah; as a consequence of which
moreover, he should know vastly better how he stood.

Book Eighth

Strether visits Maria Gostrey and says that he's pretty certain that Waymarsh has been communicating with the Newsomes behind his back and telling them about how he's living it up in Paris. He also finally reveals what was in Mrs. Newsome's telegram, which was the message, "Take the first ship back to America." Maria is disappointed at the news, since she figures Strether will of course go back home. He says he should go back home after she abandoned him the way she did, going away from Paris with barely any warning. Which is kind of forward considering their former dance of coyness, if you ask us. Maria, though, insists that her absence has helped Strether become more independent. At first, he was totally reliant on her. But now he doesn't need to rely on her or any woman for guidance. He can just be his own person. If that's what he gets from being her "client," it's a way more "virtuous" deal than we gave her credit for. He tells Maria that he's not going to leave, at least not yet. Maria asks him if he's going to confront Waymarsh about possibly sending secret telegrams and generally being a rat. But Strether says he probably won't because Waymarsh has actually done him a favor by forcing the Newsomes to act. He also tells Maria about his new plan to keep Chad in Paris. He already knows Mrs. Newsome's next move: she'll send her daughter, the intimidating Sarah Pocock , to come and get Chad and bring him home. Strether knows that Sarah is much more of a hard-nosed Newsome than he is, and she probably won't give in to the charms of Paris. He also says he plans on playing along with the whole game and taking Sarah to see Madame de Vionnet. He's not going to let on in the least that the Newsomes are mad, and he's just gong to act as though everything is fantastic. Yes, playing dumb, a brilliant scheme. He wraps up the conversation by saying that for once in his life, he's glad to be living. Two days later, Chad gets a return telegram from Woollett saying that Sarah and her husband Jim Pocock are coming to Paris immediately. And not only that, they're bringing Mamie with them. Strether's own telegram to Mrs. Newsome has said that he thinks it best to stay in Paris another month, but that he's glad to welcome Sarah and the rest of the "re-enforcements" . He notices during this time that Mrs. Newsome's letters are becoming more and more infrequent, suggesting that the bond between them is breaking. If you hear a chorus of tiny violins at the tragedy...you're probably alone. Returning to his conversation with Maria, Strether says that he's felt younger ever since he first met her. He says that no matter what else fails him in life, he's certain that Maria never will. Yep, that Newsome bond is broke. The chapter ends with Strether waiting for the Pococks to arrive in Paris. He's not sure what to expect, but at least he'll get a better idea of where he stands with them. Right?