He had none the less to confess to this friend that evening that he
knew almost nothing about her, and it was a deficiency that Waymarsh,
even with his memory refreshed by contact, by her own prompt and lucid
allusions and enquiries, by their having publicly partaken of dinner in
her company, and by another stroll, to which she was not a stranger,
out into the town to look at the cathedral by moonlight--it was a blank
that the resident of Milrose, though admitting acquaintance with the
Munsters, professed himself unable to fill.  He had no recollection of
Miss Gostrey, and two or three questions that she put to him about
those members of his circle had, to Strether's observation, the same
effect he himself had already more directly felt--the effect of
appearing to place all knowledge, for the time, on this original
woman's side.  It interested him indeed to mark the limits of any such
relation for her with his friend as there could possibly be a question
of, and it particularly struck him that they were to be marked
altogether in Waymarsh's quarter.  This added to his own sense of
having gone far with her-gave him an early illustration of a much
shorter course.  There was a certitude he immediately grasped--a
conviction that Waymarsh would quite fail, as it were, and on whatever
degree of acquaintances to profit by her.

There had been after the first interchange among the three a talk of
some five minutes in the hall, and then the two men had adjourned to
the garden, Miss Gostrey for the time disappearing. Strether in due
course accompanied his friend to the room he had bespoken and had,
before going out, scrupulously visited; where at the end of another
half-hour he had no less discreetly left him. On leaving him he
repaired straight to his own room, but with the prompt effect of
feeling the compass of that chamber resented by his condition.  There
he enjoyed at once the first consequence of their reunion.  A place was
too small for him after it that had seemed large enough before.  He had
awaited it with something he would have been sorry, have been almost
ashamed not to recognise as emotion, yet with a tacit assumption at the
same time that emotion would in the event find itself relieved.  The
actual oddity was that he was only more excited; and his excitement-to
which indeed he would have found it difficult instantly to give a
name--brought him once more downstairs and caused him for some minutes
vaguely to wander.  He went once more to the garden; he looked into the
public room, found Miss Gostrey writing letters and backed out; he
roamed, fidgeted and wasted time; but he was to have his more intimate
session with his friend before the evening closed.

It was late--not till Strether had spent an hour upstairs with
him--that this subject consented to betake himself to doubtful rest.
Dinner and the subsequent stroll by moonlight--a dream, on Strether's
part, of romantic effects rather prosaically merged in a mere missing
of thicker coats--had measurably intervened, and this midnight
conference was the result of Waymarsh's having (when they were free, as
he put it, of their fashionable friend) found the smoking-room not
quite what he wanted, and yet bed what he wanted less.  His most
frequent form of words was that he knew himself, and they were applied
on this occasion to his certainty of not sleeping.  He knew himself
well enough to know that he should have a night of prowling unless he
should succeed, as a preliminary, in getting prodigiously tired.  If
the effort directed to this end involved till a late hour the presence
of Strether--consisted, that is, in the detention of the latter for
full discourse--there was yet an impression of minor discipline
involved for our friend in the picture Waymarsh made as he sat in
trousers and shirt on the edge of his couch.  With his long legs
extended and his large back much bent, he nursed alternately, for an
almost incredible time, his elbows and his beard.  He struck his
visitor as extremely, as almost wilfully uncomfortable; yet what had
this been for Strether, from that first glimpse of him disconcerted in
the porch of the hotel, but the predominant notes.  The discomfort was
in a manner contagious, as well as also in a manner inconsequent and
unfounded; the visitor felt that unless he should get used to it--or
unless Waymarsh himself should--it would constitute a menace for his
own prepared, his own already confirmed, consciousness of the
agreeable.  On their first going up together to the room Strether had
selected for him Waymarsh had looked it over in silence and with a sigh
that represented for his companion, if not the habit of disapprobation,
at least the despair of felicity; and this look had recurred to
Strether as the key of much he had since observed. "Europe," he had
begun to gather from these things, had up to now rather failed of its
message to him; he hadn't got into tune with it and had at the end of
three months almost renounced any such expectation.

He really appeared at present to insist on that by just perching there
with the gas in his eyes.  This of itself somehow conveyed the futility
of single rectifications in a multiform failure.  He had a large
handsome head and a large sallow seamed face--a striking significant
physiognomic total, the upper range of which, the great political brow,
the thick loose hair, the dark fuliginous eyes, recalled even to a
generation whose standard had dreadfully deviated the impressive image,
familiar by engravings and busts, of some great national worthy of the
earlier part of the mid-century. He was of the personal type--and it
was an element in the power and promise that in their early time
Strether had found in him--of the American statesman, the statesman
trained in "Congressional halls," of an elder day.  The legend had been
in later years that as the lower part of his face, which was weak, and
slightly crooked, spoiled the likeness, this was the real reason for
the growth of his beard, which might have seemed to spoil it for those
not in the secret.  He shook his mane; he fixed, with his admirable
eyes, his auditor or his observer; he wore no glasses and had a way,
partly formidable, yet also partly encouraging, as from a
representative to a constituent, of looking very hard at those who
approached him. He met you as if you had knocked and he had bidden you
enter. Strether, who hadn't seen him for so long an interval,
apprehended him now with a freshness of taste, and had perhaps never
done him such ideal justice.  The head was bigger, the eyes finer, than
they need have been for the career; but that only meant, after all,
that the career was itself expressive.  What it expressed at midnight
in the gas-glaring bedroom at Chester was that the subject of it had,
at the end of years, barely escaped, by flight in time, a general
nervous collapse.  But this very proof of the full life, as the full
life was understood at Milrose, would have made to Strether's
imagination an element in which Waymarsh could have floated easily had
he only consented to float.  Alas nothing so little resembled floating
as the rigour with which, on the edge of his bed, he hugged his posture
of prolonged impermanence.  It suggested to his comrade something that
always, when kept up, worried him--a person established in a
railway-coach with a forward inclination.  It represented the angle at
which poor Waymarsh was to sit through the ordeal of Europe.

Thanks to the stress of occupation, the strain of professions, the
absorption and embarrassment of each, they had not, at home, during
years before this sudden brief and almost bewildering reign of
comparative ease, found so much as a day for a meeting; a fact that was
in some degree an explanation of the sharpness with which most of his
friend's features stood out to Strether.  Those he had lost sight of
since the early time came back to him; others that it was never
possible to forget struck him now as sitting, clustered and expectant,
like a somewhat defiant family-group, on the doorstep of their
residence.  The room was narrow for its length, and the occupant of the
bed thrust so far a pair of slippered feet that the visitor had almost
to step over them in his recurrent rebounds from his chair to fidget
back and forth.  There were marks the friends made on things to talk
about, and on things not to, and one of the latter in particular fell
like the tap of chalk on the blackboard. Married at thirty, Waymarsh
had not lived with his wife for fifteen years, and it came up vividly
between them in the glare of the gas that Strether wasn't to ask about
her.  He knew they were still separate and that she lived at hotels,
travelled in Europe, painted her face and wrote her husband abusive
letters, of not one of which, to a certainty, that sufferer spared
himself the perusal; but he respected without difficulty the cold
twilight that had settled on this side of his companion's life.  It was
a province in which mystery reigned and as to which Waymarsh had never
spoken the informing word.  Strether, who wanted to do him the highest
justice wherever he COULD do it, singularly admired him for the dignity
of this reserve, and even counted it as one of the grounds--grounds all
handled and numbered--for ranking him, in the range of their
acquaintance, as a success.  He WAS a success, Waymarsh, in spite of
overwork, or prostration, of sensible shrinkage, of his wife's letters
and of his not liking Europe.  Strether would have reckoned his own
career less futile had he been able to put into it anything so handsome
as so much fine silence.  One might one's self easily have left Mrs.
Waymarsh; and one would assuredly have paid one's tribute to the ideal
in covering with that attitude the derision of having been left by her.
Her husband had held his tongue and had made a large income; and these
were in especial the achievements as to which Strether envied him.  Our
friend had had indeed on his side too a subject for silence, which he
fully appreciated; but it was a matter of a different sort, and the
figure of the income he had arrived at had never been high enough to
look any one in the face.

"I don't know as I quite see what you require it for.  You don't appear
sick to speak of."  It was of Europe Waymarsh thus finally spoke.

"Well," said Strether, who fell as much as possible into step, "I guess
I don't FEEL sick now that I've started.  But I had pretty well run
down before I did start."

Waymarsh raised his melancholy look.  "Ain't you about up to your usual
average?"

It was not quite pointedly sceptical, but it seemed somehow a plea for
the purest veracity, and it thereby affected our friend as the very
voice of Milrose.  He had long since made a mental distinction--though
never in truth daring to betray it--between the voice of Milrose and
the voice even of Woollett.  It was the former he felt, that was most
in the real tradition.  There had been occasions in his past when the
sound of it had reduced him to temporary confusion, and the present,
for some reason, suddenly became such another.  It was nevertheless no
light matter that the very effect of his confusion should be to make
him again prevaricate.  "That description hardly does justice to a man
to whom it has done such a lot of good to see YOU."

Waymarsh fixed on his washing-stand the silent detached stare with
which Milrose in person, as it were, might have marked the
unexpectedness of a compliment from Woollett, and Strether for his
part, felt once more like Woollett in person.  "I mean," his friend
presently continued, "that your appearance isn't as bad as I've seen
it:  it compares favourably with what it was when I last noticed it."
On this appearance Waymarsh's eyes yet failed to rest; it was almost as
if they obeyed an instinct of propriety, and the effect was still
stronger when, always considering the basin and jug, he added:  "You've
filled out some since then."

"I'm afraid I have," Strether laughed:  "one does fill out some with
all one takes in, and I've taken in, I dare say, more than I've natural
room for.  I was dog-tired when I sailed."  It had the oddest sound of
cheerfulness.

"I was dog-tired," his companion returned, "when I arrived, and it's
this wild hunt for rest that takes all the life out of me.  The fact
is, Strether--and it's a comfort to have you here at last to say it to;
though I don't know, after all, that I've really waited; I've told it
to people I've met in the cars--the fact is, such a country as this
ain't my KIND of country anyway.  There ain't a country I've seen over
here that DOES seem my kind.  Oh I don't say but what there are plenty
of pretty places and remarkable old things; but the trouble is that I
don't seem to feel anywhere in tune.  That's one of the reasons why I
suppose I've gained so little.  I haven't had the first sign of that
lift I was led to expect."  With this he broke out more earnestly.
"Look here--I want to go back."

His eyes were all attached to Strether's now, for he was one of the men
who fully face you when they talk of themselves.  This enabled his
friend to look at him hard and immediately to appear to the highest
advantage in his eyes by doing so.  "That's a genial thing to say to a
fellow who has come out on purpose to meet you!"

Nothing could have been finer, on this, than Waymarsh's sombre glow.
"HAVE you come out on purpose?"

"Well--very largely."

"I thought from the way you wrote there was something back of it."

Strether hesitated.  "Back of my desire to be with you?"

"Back of your prostration."

Strether, with a smile made more dim by a certain consciousness, shook
his head.  "There are all the causes of it!"

"And no particular cause that seemed most to drive you?"

Our friend could at last conscientiously answer.  "Yes.  One.  There IS
a matter that has had much to do with my coming out."

Waymarsh waited a little.  "Too private to mention?"

"No, not too private--for YOU.  Only rather complicated."

"Well," said Waymarsh, who had waited again, "I MAY lose my mind over
here, but I don't know as I've done so yet."

"Oh you shall have the whole thing.  But not tonight."

Waymarsh seemed to sit stiffer and to hold his elbows tighter.  "Why
not--if I can't sleep?"

"Because, my dear man, I CAN!"

"Then where's your prostration?"

"Just in that--that I can put in eight hours."  And Strether brought it
out that if Waymarsh didn't "gain" it was because he didn't go to bed:
the result of which was, in its order, that, to do the latter justice,
he permitted his friend to insist on his really getting settled.
Strether, with a kind coercive hand for it, assisted him to this
consummation, and again found his own part in their relation
auspiciously enlarged by the smaller touches of lowering the lamp and
seeing to a sufficiency of blanket.  It somehow ministered for him to
indulgence to feel Waymarsh, who looked unnaturally big and black in
bed, as much tucked in as a patient in a hospital and, with his
covering up to his chin, as much simplified by it He hovered in vague
pity, to be brief, while his companion challenged him out of the
bedclothes.  "Is she really after you?  Is that what's behind?"

Strether felt an uneasiness at the direction taken by his companion's
insight, but he played a little at uncertainty.  "Behind my coming out?"

"Behind your prostration or whatever.  It's generally felt, you know,
that she follows you up pretty close."

Strether's candour was never very far off.  "Oh it has occurred to you
that I'm literally running away from Mrs. Newsome?"

"Well, I haven't KNOWN but what you are.  You're a very attractive man,
Strether.  You've seen for yourself," said Waymarsh "what that lady
downstairs makes of it.  Unless indeed," he rambled on with an effect
between the ironic and the anxious, "it's you who are after HER.  IS
Mrs. Newsome OVER here?"  He spoke as with a droll dread of her.

It made his friend--though rather dimly--smile.  "Dear no she's safe,
thank goodness--as I think I more and more feel--at home.  She thought
of coming, but she gave it up.  I've come in a manner instead of her;
and come to that extent--for you're right in your inference--on her
business.  So you see there IS plenty of connexion."

Waymarsh continued to see at least all there was.  "Involving
accordingly the particular one I've referred to?"

Strether took another turn about the room, giving a twitch to his
companion's blanket and finally gaining the door.  His feeling was that
of a nurse who had earned personal rest by having made everything
straight.  "Involving more things than I can think of breaking ground
on now.  But don't be afraid--you shall have them from me:  you'll
probably find yourself having quite as much of them as you can do with.
I shall--if we keep together--very much depend on your impression of
some of them."

Waymarsh's acknowledgement of this tribute was characteristically
indirect.  "You mean to say you don't believe we WILL keep together?"

"I only glance at the danger," Strether paternally said, "because when
I hear you wail to go back I seem to see you open up such possibilities
of folly."

Waymarsh took it--silent a little--like a large snubbed child "What are
you going to do with me?"

It was the very question Strether himself had put to Miss Gostrey, and
he wondered if he had sounded like that.  But HE at least could be more
definite.  "I'm going to take you right down to London."

"Oh I've been down to London!" Waymarsh more softly moaned.  "I've no
use, Strether, for anything down there."

"Well," said Strether, good-humouredly, "I guess you've some use for
me."

"So I've got to go?"

"Oh you've got to go further yet."

"Well," Waymarsh sighed, "do your damnedest! Only you WILL tell me
before you lead me on all the way--?"

Our friend had again so lost himself, both for amusement and for
contrition, in the wonder of whether he had made, in his own challenge
that afternoon, such another figure, that he for an instant missed the
thread.  "Tell you--?"

"Why what you've got on hand."

Strether hesitated.  "Why it's such a matter as that even if I
positively wanted I shouldn't be able to keep it from you."

Waymarsh gloomily gazed.  "What does that mean then but that your trip
is just FOR her?"

"For Mrs. Newsome?  Oh it certainly is, as I say.  Very much."

"Then why do you also say it's for me?"

Strether, in impatience, violently played with his latch.  "It's simple
enough.  It's for both of you."

Waymarsh at last turned over with a groan.  "Well, I won't marry you!"

"Neither, when it comes to that--!" But the visitor had already laughed
and escaped.

Waymarsh and Strether sit down for dinner and Strether has to admit that he barely knows the woman he went walking with. Waymarsh is a bit of a prude, and Strether knows that he doesn't approve one bit of this kind of behavior. Even though Waymarsh does know some of the families Maria Gostrey kept mentioning, he'd never heard of Maria. You can sense some real judgment sneaking in here. The three of them decide to take another stroll in the evening to check out one of the English town's cathedrals. Before the stroll, Waymarsh and Strether go into the hotel garden to catch up on each other's news. If Strether is the kind of guy who can't enjoy life, Waymarsh is the kind who can't even tolerate it. From the moment he arrives, he criticizes nearly everything: from the size of his hotel room to the culture of Europe in general. The book goes into a pretty long description of Waymarsh, who is actually a tall, dark, and handsome man in his own right, despite his short, squat, and bland personality. That said, his grim outlook might be explained by the fact that he is separated from his wife, who now has a reputation for going around wearing heavy makeup and looking for new men. Yes, this sounds like your typical college breakup today, but back in 1903 , being separated from your wife would have been pretty scandalous. On top of that, Strether is also convinced that Waymarsh works so hard that he's on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Waymarsh opens their new conversation by saying he doesn't understand why Strether would need a vacation at all, since he's not sick. For Waymarsh, you see, the only reason to ever go on vacation is if your poor health is interfering with your productivity at work. Like we said, buzzkill. Strether says that before he left for his trip, he was feeling worn out. Waymarsh remarks that Strether doesn't look any more worn out than usual . Waymarsh admits that there are lots of interesting things to see and do in Europe, but he doesn't feel "in tune" with things wherever he goes. In other words, Waymarsh likes the comfort of knowing where he stands in his home culture. He doesn't like the feeling of not being at home. Back to judgement-ville, Waymarsh says he suspects that Strether has a reason for being in Europe apart from the two of them hanging out. Strether admits that this is true. The fact is that he's been sent on a mission by his fiancee. Yup, you heard right. It turns out that there's a rich old lady named Mrs. Newsome who's waiting for Strether back in Woollett. Mrs. Newsome has sent Strether to Europe to track down her good-for-nothing son, Chad, and bring him back to New England to run the family business. In other words, Strether is supposed to be Mrs. Newsome's ambassador . The Newsomes are convinced that Chad is living a life of sin in Paris, and that some evil young woman has seduced him with unmarried sex into living there forever. Waymarsh says he already wants to go back to America. But Strether basically says, "Come awwwnnnn" until he gives up and agrees to come on the mission.


He had told Miss Gostrey he should probably take, for departure with
Waymarsh, some afternoon train, and it thereupon in the morning
appeared that this lady had made her own plan for an earlier one.  She
had breakfasted when Strether came into the coffee-room; but, Waymarsh
not having yet emerged, he was in time to recall her to the terms of
their understanding and to pronounce her discretion overdone.  She was
surely not to break away at the very moment she had created a want.  He
had met her as she rose from her little table in a window, where, with
the morning papers beside her, she reminded him, as he let her know, of
Major Pendennis breakfasting at his club--a compliment of which she
professed a deep appreciation; and he detained her as pleadingly as if
he had already--and notably under pressure of the visions of the
night--learned to be unable to do without her.  She must teach him at
all events, before she went, to order breakfast as breakfast was
ordered in Europe, and she must especially sustain him in the problem
of ordering for Waymarsh.  The latter had laid upon his friend, by
desperate sounds through the door of his room, dreadful divined
responsibilities in respect to beefsteak and oranges--responsibilities
which Miss Gostrey took over with an alertness of action that matched
her quick intelligence.  She had before this weaned the expatriated
from traditions compared with which the matutinal beefsteak was but the
creature of an hour, and it was not for her, with some of her memories,
to falter in the path though she freely enough declared, on reflexion,
that there was always in such cases a choice of opposed policies.
"There are times when to give them their head, you know--!"

They had gone to wait together in the garden for the dressing of the
meal, and Strether found her more suggestive than ever "Well, what?"

"Is to bring about for them such a complexity of relations-unless
indeed we call it a simplicity!--that the situation HAS to wind itself
up.  They want to go back."

"And you want them to go!" Strether gaily concluded.

"I always want them to go, and I send them as fast as I can.'

"Oh I know--you take them to Liverpool."

"Any port will serve in a storm.  I'm--with all my other functions--an
agent for repatriation.  I want to re-people our stricken country. What
will become of it else?  I want to discourage others."

The ordered English garden, in the freshness of the day,  was
delightful to Strether, who liked the sound, under his feet, of the
tight fine gravel, packed with the chronic damp, and who had the idlest
eye for the deep smoothness of turf and the clean curves of paths.
"Other people?"

"Other countries.  Other people--yes.  I want to encourage our own."

Strether wondered.  "Not to come?  Why then do you 'meet'  them--since
it doesn't appear to be to stop them?"

"Oh that they shouldn't come is as yet too much to ask.  What I attend
to is that they come quickly and return still more so.  I meet them to
help it to be over as soon as possible,  and though I don't stop them
I've my way of putting them through.  That's my little system; and, if
you want to know,"  said Maria Gostrey, "it's my real secret, my
innermost mission and use.  I only seem, you see, to beguile and
approve; but I've thought it all out and I'm working all the while
underground.  I can't perhaps quite give you my formula, but I think
that practically I succeed.  I send you back spent.  So you stay back.
Passed through my hands--"

"We don't turn up again?"  The further she went the further he always
saw himself able to follow.  "I don't want your formula--I feel quite
enough, as I hinted yesterday, your abysses.  Spent!" he echoed.  "If
that's how you're arranging so subtly to send me I thank you for the
warning."

For a minute, amid the pleasantness--poetry in tariffed items, but all
the more, for guests already convicted, a challenge to consumption--they
smiled at each other in confirmed fellowship.  "Do you call it subtly?
It's a plain poor tale.  Besides, you're a special case."

"Oh special cases--that's weak!" She was weak enough, further still, to
defer her journey and agree to accompany the gentlemen on their own,
might a separate carriage mark her independence; though it was in spite
of this to befall after luncheon that she went off alone and that, with
a tryst taken for a day of her company in London, they lingered another
night.  She had, during the morning--spent in a way that he was to
remember later on as the very climax of his foretaste, as warm with
presentiments, with what he would have called collapses--had all sorts
of things out with Strether; and among them the fact that though there
was never a moment of her life when she wasn't "due" somewhere, there
was yet scarce a perfidy to others of which she wasn't capable for his
sake.  She explained moreover that wherever she happened to be she
found a dropped thread to pick up, a ragged edge to repair, some
familiar appetite in ambush, jumping out as she approached, yet
appeasable with a temporary biscuit.  It became, on her taking the risk
of the deviation imposed on him by her insidious arrangement of his
morning meal, a point of honour for her not to fail with Waymarsh of
the larger success too; and her subsequent boast to Strether was that
she had made their friend fare--and quite without his knowing what was
the matter--as Major Pendennis would have fared at the Megatherium. She
had made him breakfast like a gentleman, and it was nothing, she
forcibly asserted, to what she would yet make him do.  She made him
participate in the slow reiterated ramble with which, for Strether, the
new day amply filled itself; and it was by her art that he somehow had
the air, on the ramparts and in the Rows, of carrying a point of his
own.

The three strolled and stared and gossiped, or at least the two did;
the case really yielding for their comrade, if analysed, but the
element of stricken silence.  This element indeed affected Strether as
charged with audible rumblings, but he was conscious of the care of
taking it explicitly as a sign of pleasant peace.  He wouldn't appeal
too much, for that provoked stiffness; yet he wouldn't be too freely
tacit, for that suggested giving up. Waymarsh himself adhered to an
ambiguous dumbness that might have represented either the growth of a
perception or the despair of one; and at times and in places--where the
low-browed galleries were darkest, the opposite gables queerest, the
solicitations of every kind densest--the others caught him fixing hard
some object of minor interest, fixing even at moments nothing
discernible, as if he were indulging it with a truce.  When he met
Strether's eye on such occasions he looked guilty and furtive, fell the
next minute into some attitude of retractation.  Our friend couldn't
show him the right things for fear of provoking some total
renouncement, and was tempted even to show him the wrong in order to
make him differ with triumph.  There were moments when he himself felt
shy of professing the full sweetness of the taste of leisure, and there
were others when he found himself feeling as if his passages of
interchange with the lady at his side might fall upon the third member
of their party very much as Mr. Burchell, at Dr. Primrose's fireside,
was influenced by the high flights of the visitors from London.  The
smallest things so arrested and amused him that he repeatedly almost
apologised--brought up afresh in explanation his plea of a previous
grind.  He was aware at the same time that his grind had been as
nothing to Waymarsh's, and he repeatedly confessed that, to cover his
frivolity, he was doing his best for his previous virtue.  Do what he
might, in any case, his previous virtue was still there, and it seemed
fairly to stare at him out of the windows of shops that were not as the
shops of Woollett, fairly to make him want things that he shouldn't
know what to do with.  It was by the oddest, the least admissible of
laws demoralising him now; and the way it boldly took was to make him
want more wants. These first walks in Europe were in fact a kind of
finely lurid intimation of what one might find at the end of that
process.  Had he come back after long years, in something already so
like the evening of life, only to be exposed to it?  It was at all
events over the shop-windows that he made, with Waymarsh, most free;
though it would have been easier had not the latter most sensibly
yielded to the appeal of the merely useful trades.  He pierced with his
sombre detachment the plate-glass of ironmongers and saddlers, while
Strether flaunted an affinity with the dealers in stamped letter-paper
and in smart neckties.  Strether was in fact recurrently shameless in
the presence of the tailors, though it was just over the heads of the
tailors that his countryman most loftily looked.  This gave Miss
Gostrey a grasped opportunity to back up Waymarsh at his expense.  The
weary lawyer--it was unmistakeable--had a conception of dress; but
that, in view of some of the features of the effect produced, was just
what made the danger of insistence on it.  Strether wondered if he by
this time thought Miss Gostrey less fashionable or Lambert Strether
more so; and it appeared probable that most of the remarks exchanged
between this latter pair about passers, figures, faces, personal types,
exemplified in their degree the disposition to talk as "society" talked.

Was what was happening to himself then, was what already HAD happened,
really that a woman of fashion was floating him into society and that
an old friend deserted on the brink was watching the force of the
current?  When the woman of fashion permitted Strether--as she
permitted him at the most--the purchase of a pair of gloves, the terms
she made about it, the prohibition of neckties and other items till she
should be able to guide him through the Burlington Arcade, were such as
to fall upon a sensitive ear as a challenge to just imputations.  Miss
Gostrey was such a woman of fashion as could make without a symptom of
vulgar blinking an appointment for the Burlington Arcade.  Mere
discriminations about a pair of gloves could thus at any rate
represent--always for such sensitive ears as were in
question--possibilities of something that Strether could make a mark
against only as the peril of apparent wantonness.  He had quite the
consciousness of his new friend, for their companion, that he might
have had of a Jesuit in petticoats, a representative of the recruiting
interests of the Catholic Church.  The Catholic Church, for
Waymarsh-that was to say the enemy, the monster of bulging eyes and
far-reaching quivering groping tentacles--was exactly society, exactly
the multiplication of shibboleths, exactly the discrimination of types
and tones, exactly the wicked old Rows of Chester, rank with feudalism;
exactly in short Europe.

There was light for observation, however, in an incident that occurred
just before they turned back to luncheon.  Waymarsh had been for a
quarter of an hour exceptionally mute and distant, and something, or
other--Strether was never to make out exactly what--proved, as it were,
too much for him after his comrades had stood for three minutes taking
in, while they leaned on an old balustrade that guarded the edge of the
Row, a particularly crooked and huddled street-view.  "He thinks us
sophisticated, he thinks us worldly, he thinks us wicked, he thinks us
all sorts of queer things," Strether reflected; for wondrous were the
vague quantities our friend had within a couple of short days acquired
the habit of conveniently and conclusively lumping together. There
seemed moreover a direct connexion between some such inference and a
sudden grim dash taken by Waymarsh to the opposite side.  This movement
was startlingly sudden, and his companions at first supposed him to
have espied, to be pursuing, the glimpse of an acquaintance. They next
made out, however, that an open door had instantly received him, and
they then recognised him as engulfed in the establishment of a
jeweller, behind whose glittering front he was lost to view.  The fact
had somehow the note of a demonstration, and it left each of the others
to show a face almost of fear.  But Miss Gostrey broke into a laugh.
"What's the matter with him?"

"Well," said Strether, "he can't stand it."

"But can't stand what?"

"Anything.  Europe."

"Then how will that jeweller help him?"

Strether seemed to make it out, from their position, between the
interstices of arrayed watches, of close-hung dangling gewgaws. "You'll
see."

"Ah that's just what--if he buys anything--I'm afraid of:  that I shall
see something rather dreadful."

Strether studied the finer appearances.  "He may buy everything."

"Then don't you think we ought to follow him?"

"Not for worlds.  Besides we can't.  We're paralysed.  We exchange a
long scared look, we publicly tremble.  The thing is, you see, we
'realise.' He has struck for freedom."

She wondered but she laughed.  "Ah what a price to pay! And I was
preparing some for him so cheap."

"No, no," Strether went on, frankly amused now; "don't call it that:
the kind of freedom you deal in is dear."  Then as to justify himself:
"Am I not in MY way trying it?  It's this."

"Being here, you mean, with me?"

"Yes, and talking to you as I do.  I've known you a few hours, and I've
known HIM all my life; so that if the ease I thus take with you about
him isn't magnificent"--and the thought of it held him a moment--"why
it's rather base."

"It's magnificent!" said Miss Gostrey to make an end of it.  "And you
should hear," she added, "the ease I take--and I above all intend to
take--with Mr. Waymarsh."

Strether thought.  "About ME?  Ah that's no equivalent. The equivalent
would be Waymarsh's himself serving me up--his remorseless analysis of
me.  And he'll never do that"--he was sadly clear.  "He'll never
remorselessly analyse me." He quite held her with the authority of
this.  "He'll never say a word to you about me."

She took it in; she did it justice; yet after an instant her reason,
her restless irony, disposed of it.  "Of course he won't. For what do
you take people, that they're able to say words about anything, able
remorselessly to analyse?  There are not many like you and me.  It will
be only because he's too stupid."

It stirred in her friend a sceptical echo which was at the same time
the protest of the faith of years.  "Waymarsh stupid?"

"Compared with you."

Strether had still his eyes on the jeweller's front, and he waited a
moment to answer.  "He's a success of a kind that I haven't approached."

"Do you mean he has made money?"

"He makes it--to my belief.  And I," said Strether, "though with a back
quite as bent, have never made anything.  I'm a perfectly equipped
failure."

He feared an instant she'd ask him if he meant he was poor; and he was
glad she didn't, for he really didn't know to what the truth on this
unpleasant point mightn't have prompted her.  She only, however,
confirmed his assertion.  "Thank goodness you're a failure--it's why I
so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous.  Look about
you--look at the successes.  Would you BE one, on your honour?  Look,
moreover," she continued, "at me."

For a little accordingly their eyes met.  "I see," Strether returned.
"You too are out of it."

"The superiority you discern in me," she concurred, "announces my
futility.  If you knew," she sighed, "the dreams of my youth! But our
realities are what has brought us together.  We're beaten brothers in
arms."

He smiled at her kindly enough, but he shook his head.  "It doesn't
alter the fact that you're expensive.  You've cost me already--!"

But he had hung fire.  "Cost you what?"

"Well, my past--in one great lump.  But no matter," he laughed: "I'll
pay with my last penny."

Her attention had unfortunately now been engaged by their comrade's
return, for Waymarsh met their view as he came out of his shop.  "I
hope he hasn't paid," she said, "with HIS last; though I'm convinced he
has been splendid, and has been so for you."

"Ah no--not that!"

"Then for me?"

"Quite as little."  Waymarsh was by this time near enough to show signs
his friend could read, though he seemed to look almost carefully at
nothing in particular.

"Then for himself?"

"For nobody.  For nothing.  For freedom."

"But what has freedom to do with it?"

Strether's answer was indirect.  "To be as good as you and me.  But
different."

She had had time to take in their companion's face; and with it, as
such things were easy for her, she took in all.  "Different--yes. But
better!"

If Waymarsh was sombre he was also indeed almost sublime.  He told them
nothing, left his absence unexplained, and though they were convinced
he had made some extraordinary purchase they were never to learn its
nature.  He only glowered grandly at the tops of the old gables.  "It's
the sacred rage," Strether had had further time to say; and this sacred
rage was to become between them, for convenient comprehension, the
description of one of his periodical necessities.  It was Strether who
eventually contended that it did make him better than they.  But by
that time Miss Gostrey was convinced that she didn't want to be better
than Strether.

Book Second

Strether lets Maria Gostrey know that he and Waymarsh are going to take a train to London. But Maria schedules a train for London earlier in the day, which cleverly makes it look as if the men are following her. Maria tells Strether that she's not quite done with him yet. She thinks of him as a project, and she wants to teach him how to enjoy life while he's in Europe. Before everyone leaves, Maria, Strether, and Waymarsh take a walk together. During the walk, Strether realizes that he has an enhanced sense of how wonderful the world around him is. Cue musical number. He recalls being in Europe when he was younger, but feels like he didn't appreciate it at the time. This causes him to wonder if he has let life pass him by. At they walk along, it becomes clear that as Strether enjoys Europe more, Waymarsh enjoys it less. Finally, Waymarsh darts away from them and disappears into the doorway of a jewelry shop. Maria asks Strether what's going on, and Strether says that Waymarsh's best way of dealing with discomfort is to spend a bunch of money. Yup, shopping therapy was a thing back then, too. Waymarsh eventually comes back out of the shop with a parcel, meaning that he's just bought some sort of jewelry. Strether knows he doesn't want the jewelry itself. He just wanted to feel like he was in control of his life by spending money. At this point, Strether mentions to Maria that he has only known her a few hours and has know Waymarsh his whole life. But he feels closer to her. Ready for some drama? Maria remarks that Waymarsh is stupid. Strether objects and says that Waymarsh is ten times more successful than him. Maria reminds him that he's thinking like an American. Success in life isn't about how much money you make or how big your house is, or how much jewelry you can buy to fill up the void in your soul. Strether says that Maria seems like a big success because she can enjoy life. Um, zing? She reminds him that he has no clue what kind of ambitions she had when she was younger. Which adds to the mystery of the story and the possible dangerousness around Maria, not to mention the whole uncertainty-of-people's motives aspect . As Waymarsh walks alongside them again, Strether and Maria notice that he is finally showing signs of happiness now that he's bought something.


Those occasions on which Strether was, in association with the exile
from Milrose, to see the sacred rage glimmer through would doubtless
have their due periodicity; but our friend had meanwhile to find names
for many other matters.  On no evening of his life perhaps, as he
reflected, had he had to supply so many as on the third of his short
stay in London; an evening spent by Miss Gostrey's side at one of the
theatres, to which he had found himself transported, without his own
hand raised, on the mere expression of a conscientious wonder.  She
knew her theatre, she knew her play, as she had triumphantly known,
three days running, everything else, and the moment filled to the brim,
for her companion, that apprehension of the interesting which, whether
or no the interesting happened to filter through his guide, strained
now to its limits his brief opportunity.  Waymarsh hadn't come with
them; he had seen plays enough, he signified, before Strether had
joined him--an affirmation that had its full force when his friend
ascertained by questions that he had seen two and a circus. Questions
as to what he had seen had on him indeed an effect only less favourable
than questions as to what he hadn't.  He liked the former to be
discriminated; but how could it be done, Strether asked of their
constant counsellor, without discriminating the latter?

Miss Gostrey had dined with him at his hotel, face to face over a small
table on which the lighted candles had rose-coloured shades; and the
rose-coloured shades and the small table and the soft fragrance of the
lady--had anything to his mere sense ever been so soft?--were so many
touches in he scarce knew what positive high picture.  He had been to
the theatre, even to the opera, in Boston, with Mrs. Newsome, more than
once acting as her only escort; but there had been no little confronted
dinner, no pink lights, no whiff of vague sweetness, as a preliminary:
one of the results of which was that at present, mildly rueful, though
with a sharpish accent, he actually asked himself WHY there hadn't.
There was much the same difference in his impression of the noticed
state of his companion, whose dress was "cut down," as he believed the
term to be, in respect to shoulders and bosom, in a manner quite other
than Mrs. Newsome's, and who wore round her throat a broad red velvet
band with an antique jewel--he was rather complacently sure it was
antique--attached to it in front.  Mrs. Newsome's dress was never in
any degree "cut down," and she never wore round her throat a broad red
velvet band:  if she had, moreover, would it ever have served so to
carry on and complicate, as he now almost felt, his vision?

It would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the effect
of the ribbon from which Miss Gostrey's trinket depended, had he not
for the hour, at the best, been so given over to uncontrolled
perceptions.  What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his
friend's velvet band somehow added, in her appearance, to the value of
every other item--to that of her smile and of the way she carried her
head, to that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her
hair?  What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man's work in the
world to do with red velvet bands? He wouldn't for anything have so
exposed himself as to tell Miss Gostrey how much he liked hers, yet he
HAD none the less not only caught himself in the act--frivolous, no
doubt, idiotic, and above all unexpected--of liking it:  he had in
addition taken it as a starting-point for fresh backward, fresh
forward, fresh lateral flights.  The manner in which Mrs. Newsome's
throat WAS encircled suddenly represented for him, in an alien order,
almost as many things as the manner in which Miss Gostrey's was.  Mrs.
Newsome wore, at operatic hours, a black silk dress--very handsome, he
knew it was "handsome"--and an ornament that his memory was able
further to identify as a ruche.  He had his association indeed with the
ruche, but it was rather imperfectly romantic.  He had once said to the
wearer--and it was as "free" a remark as he had ever made to her--that
she looked, with her ruff and other matters, like Queen Elizabeth; and
it had after this in truth been his fancy that, as a consequence of
that tenderness and an acceptance of the idea, the form of this special
tribute to the "frill" had grown slightly more marked.  The connexion,
as he sat there and let his imagination roam, was to strike him as
vaguely pathetic; but there it all was, and pathetic was doubtless in
the conditions the best thing it could possibly be.  It had assuredly
existed at any rate; for it seemed now to come over him that no
gentleman of his age at Woollett could ever, to a lady of Mrs.
Newsome's, which was not much less than his, have embarked on such a
simile.

All sorts of things in fact now seemed to come over him, comparatively
few of which his chronicler can hope for space to mention.  It came
over him for instance that Miss Gostrey looked perhaps like Mary
Stuart:  Lambert Strether had a candour of fancy which could rest for
an instant gratified in such an antithesis.  It came over him that
never before--no, literally never--had a lady dined with him at a
public place before going to the play.  The publicity of the place was
just, in the matter, for Strether, the rare strange thing; it affected
him almost as the achievement of privacy might have affected a man of a
different experience.  He had married, in the far-away years, so young
as to have missed the time natural in Boston for taking girls to the
Museum; and it was absolutely true of hint that--even after the close
of the period of conscious detachment occupying the centre of his life,
the grey middle desert of the two deaths, that of his wife and that,
ten years later, of his boy--he had never taken any one anywhere.  It
came over him in especial--though the monition had, as happened,
already sounded, fitfully gleamed, in other forms--that the business he
had come out on hadn't yet been so brought home to him as by the sight
of the people about him.  She gave him the impression, his friend, at
first, more straight than he got it for himself--gave it simply by
saying with off-hand illumination:  "Oh yes, they're types!"--but after
he had taken it he made to the full his own use of it; both while he
kept silence for the four acts and while he talked in the intervals. It
was an evening, it was a world of types, and this was a connexion above
all in which the figures and faces in the stalls were interchangeable
with those on the stage.

He felt as if the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow of
his neighbour, a great stripped handsome red-haired lady who conversed
with a gentleman on her other side in stray dissyllables which had for
his ear, in the oddest way in the world, so much sound that he wondered
they hadn't more sense; and he recognised by the same law, beyond the
footlights, what he was pleased to take for the very flush of English
life.  He had distracted drops in which he couldn't have said if it
were actors or auditors who were most true, and the upshot of which,
each time, was the consciousness of new contacts.  However he viewed
his job it was "types" he should have to tackle.  Those before him and
around him were not as the types of Woollett, where, for that matter,
it had begun to seem to him that there must only have been the male and
the female. These made two exactly, even with the individual varieties.
Here, on the other hand, apart from the personal and the sexual
range--which might be greater or less--a series of strong stamps had
been applied, as it were, from without; stamps that his observation
played with as, before a glass case on a table, it might have passed
from medal to medal and from copper to gold.  It befell that in the
drama precisely there was a bad woman in a yellow frock who made a
pleasant weak good-looking young man in perpetual evening dress do the
most dreadful things.  Strether felt himself on the whole not afraid of
the yellow frock, but he was vaguely anxious over a certain kindness
into which he found himself drifting for its victim.  He hadn't come
out, he reminded himself, to be too kind, or indeed to be kind at all,
to Chadwick Newsome.  Would Chad also be in perpetual evening dress?
He somehow rather hoped it--it seemed so to add to THIS young man's
general amenability; though he wondered too if, to fight him with his
own weapons, he himself (a thought almost startling) would have
likewise to be.  This young man furthermore would have been much more
easy to handle--at least for HIM--than appeared probable in respect to
Chad.

It came up for him with Miss Gostrey that there were things of which
she would really perhaps after all have heard, and she admitted when a
little pressed that she was never quite sure of what she heard as
distinguished from things such as, on occasions like the present, she
only extravagantly guessed.  "I seem with this freedom, you see, to
have guessed Mr. Chad.  He's a young man on whose head high hopes are
placed at Woollett; a young man a wicked woman has got hold of and whom
his family over there have sent you out to rescue.  You've accepted the
mission of separating him from the wicked woman.  Are you quite sure
she's very bad for him?"

Something in his manner showed it as quite pulling him up.  "Of course
we are.  Wouldn't YOU be?"

"Oh I don't know.  One never does--does one?--beforehand.  One can only
judge on the facts.  Yours are quite new to me; I'm really not in the
least, as you see, in possession of them:  so it will be awfully
interesting to have them from you.  If you're satisfied, that's all
that's required.  I mean if you're sure you ARE sure: sure it won't do."

"That he should lead such a life?  Rather!"

"Oh but I don't know, you see, about his life; you've not told me about
his life.  She may be charming--his life!"

"Charming?"--Strether stared before him.  "She's base, venal-out of the
streets."

"I see.  And HE--?"

"Chad, wretched boy?"

"Of what type and temper is he?" she went on as Strether had lapsed.

"Well--the obstinate."  It was as if for a moment he had been going to
say more and had then controlled himself.

That was scarce what she wished.  "Do you like him?"

This time he was prompt.  "No.  How CAN I?"

"Do you mean because of your being so saddled with him?"

"I'm thinking of his mother," said Strether after a moment.  "He has
darkened her admirable life."  He spoke with austerity.  "He has
worried her half to death."

"Oh that's of course odious."  She had a pause as if for renewed
emphasis of this truth, but it ended on another note.  "Is her life
very admirable?"

"Extraordinarily."

There was so much in the tone that Miss Gostrey had to devote another
pause to the appreciation of it.  "And has he only HER?  I don't mean
the bad woman in Paris," she quickly added--"for I assure you I
shouldn't even at the best be disposed to allow him more than one.  But
has he only his mother?"

"He has also a sister, older than himself and married; and they're both
remarkably fine women."

"Very handsome, you mean?"

This promptitude--almost, as he might have thought, this precipitation,
gave him a brief drop; but he came up again. "Mrs. Newsome, I think, is
handsome, though she's not of course, with a son of twenty-eight and a
daughter of thirty, in her very first youth.  She married, however,
extremely young."

"And is wonderful," Miss Gostrey asked, "for her age?"

Strether seemed to feel with a certain disquiet the pressure of it. "I
don't say she's wonderful.  Or rather," he went on the next moment, "I
do say it.  It's exactly what she IS--wonderful.  But I wasn't thinking
of her appearance," he explained--"striking as that doubtless is.  I
was thinking--well, of many other things."  He seemed to look at these
as if to mention some of them; then took, pulling himself up, another
turn.  "About Mrs. Pocock people may differ."

"Is that the daughter's name--'Pocock'?"

"That's the daughter's name," Strether sturdily confessed.

"And people may differ, you mean, about HER beauty?"

"About everything."

"But YOU admire her?"

He gave his friend a glance as to show how he could bear this "I'm
perhaps a little afraid of her."

"Oh," said Miss Gostrey, "I see her from here! You may say then I see
very fast and very far, but I've already shown you I do.  The young man
and the two ladies," she went on, "are at any rate all the family?"

"Quite all.  His father has been dead ten years, and there's no
brother, nor any other sister.  They'd do," said Strether, "anything in
the world for him."

"And you'd do anything in the world for THEM?"

He shifted again; she had made it perhaps just a shade too affirmative
for his nerves.  "Oh I don't know!"

"You'd do at any rate this, and the 'anything' they'd do is represented
by their MAKING you do it."

"Ah they couldn't have come--either of them.  They're very busy people
and Mrs. Newsome in particular has a large full life.  She's moreover
highly nervous--and not at all strong."

"You mean she's an American invalid?"

He carefully distinguished.  "There's nothing she likes less than to be
called one, but she would consent to be one of those things, I think,"
he laughed, "if it were the only way to be the other."

"Consent to be an American in order to be an invalid?"

"No," said Strether, "the other way round.  She's at any rate delicate
sensitive high-strung.  She puts so much of herself into everything--"

Ah Maria knew these things!  "That she has nothing left for anything
else?  Of course she hasn't.  To whom do you say it?  High-strung?
Don't I spend my life, for them, jamming down the pedal?  I see
moreover how it has told on you."

Strether took this more lightly.  "Oh I jam down the pedal too!"

"Well," she lucidly returned, "we must from this moment bear on it
together with all our might."  And she forged ahead.  "Have they money?"

But it was as if, while her energetic image still held him, her enquiry
fell short.  "Mrs. Newsome," he wished further to explain, "hasn't
moreover your courage on the question of contact.  If she had come it
would have been to see the person herself."

"The woman?  Ah but that's courage."

"No--it's exaltation, which is a very different thing.  Courage," he,
however, accommodatingly threw out, "is what YOU have."

She shook her head.  "You say that only to patch me up--to cover the
nudity of my want of exaltation.  I've neither the one nor the other.
I've mere battered indifference.  I see that what you mean," Miss
Gostrey pursued, "is that if your friend HAD come she would take great
views, and the great views, to put it simply, would be too much for
her."

Strether looked amused at her notion of the simple, but he adopted her
formula.  "Everything's too much for her."

"Ah then such a service as this of yours--"

"Is more for her than anything else?  Yes--far more.  But so long as it
isn't too much for ME--!"

"Her condition doesn't matter?  Surely not; we leave her condition out;
we take it, that is, for granted.  I see it, her condition, as behind
and beneath you; yet at the same time I see it as bearing you up."

"Oh it does bear me up!" Strether laughed.

"Well then as yours bears ME nothing more's needed."  With which she
put again her question.  "Has Mrs. Newsome money?"

This time he heeded.  "Oh plenty.  That's the root of the evil. There's
money, to very large amounts, in the concern.  Chad has had the free
use of a great deal.  But if he'll pull himself together and come home,
all the same, he'll find his account in it."

She had listened with all her interest.  "And I hope to goodness you'll
find yours!"

"He'll take up his definite material reward," said Strether without
acknowledgement of this.  "He's at the parting of the ways.  He can
come into the business now--he can't come later."

"Is there a business?"

"Lord, yes--a big brave bouncing business.  A roaring trade."

"A great shop?"

"Yes--a workshop; a great production, a great industry.  The concern's
a manufacture--and a manufacture that, if it's only properly looked
after, may well be on the way to become a monopoly. It's a little thing
they make--make better, it appears, than other people can, or than
other people, at any rate, do.  Mr. Newsome, being a man of ideas, at
least in that particular line," Strether explained, "put them on it
with great effect, and gave the place altogether, in his time, an
immense lift."

"It's a place in itself?"

"Well, quite a number of buildings; almost a little industrial colony.
But above all it's a thing.  The article produced."

"And what IS the article produced?"

Strether looked about him as in slight reluctance to say; then the
curtain, which he saw about to rise, came to his aid.  "I'll tell you
next time."  But when the next time came he only said he'd tell her
later on--after they should have left the theatre; for she had
immediately reverted to their topic, and even for himself the picture
of the stage was now overlaid with another image.  His postponements,
however, made her wonder--wonder if the article referred to were
anything bad.  And she explained that she meant improper or ridiculous
or wrong.  But Strether, so far as that went, could satisfy her.
"Unmentionable?  Oh no, we constantly talk of it; we are quite familiar
and brazen about it.  Only, as a small, trivial, rather ridiculous
object of the commonest domestic use, it's just wanting in-what shall I
say?  Well, dignity, or the least approach to distinction.  Right here
therefore, with everything about us so grand--!" In short he shrank.

"It's a false note?"

"Sadly.  It's vulgar."

"But surely not vulgarer than this."  Then on his wondering as she
herself had done:  "Than everything about us."  She seemed a trifle
irritated.  "What do you take this for?"

"Why for--comparatively--divine!"

"This dreadful London theatre?  It's impossible, if you really want to
know."

"Oh then," laughed Strether, "I DON'T really want to know!"

It made between them a pause, which she, however, still fascinated by
the mystery of the production at Woollett, presently broke. "'Rather
ridiculous'?  Clothes-pins?  Saleratus?  Shoe-polish?"

It brought him round.  "No--you don't even 'burn.'  I don't think, you
know, you'll guess it."

"How then can I judge how vulgar it is?"

"You'll judge when I do tell you"--and he persuaded her to patience.
But it may even now frankly be mentioned that he in the sequel never
WAS to tell her.  He actually never did so, and it moreover oddly
occurred that by the law, within her, of the incalculable, her desire
for the information dropped and her attitude to the question converted
itself into a positive cultivation of ignorance.  In ignorance she
could humour her fancy, and that proved a useful freedom.  She could
treat the little nameless object as indeed unnameable--she could make
their abstention enormously definite.  There might indeed have been for
Strether the portent of this in what she next said.

"Is it perhaps then because it's so bad--because your industry as you
call it, IS so vulgar--that Mr. Chad won't come back?  Does he feel the
taint?  Is he staying away not to be mixed up in it?"

"Oh," Strether laughed, "it wouldn't appear--would it?--that he feels
'taints'! He's glad enough of the money from it, and the money's his
whole basis.  There's appreciation in that--I mean as to the allowance
his mother has hitherto made him.  She has of course the resource of
cutting this allowance off; but even then he has unfortunately, and on
no small scale, his independent supply--money left him by his
grandfather, her own father."

"Wouldn't the fact you mention then," Miss Gostrey asked, "make it just
more easy for him to be particular?  Isn't he conceivable as fastidious
about the source--the apparent and public source--of his income?"

Strether was able quite good-humouredly to entertain the proposition.
"The source of his grandfather's wealth--and thereby of his own share
in it--was not particularly noble."

"And what source was it?"

Strether cast about.  "Well--practices."

"In business?  Infamies?  He was an old swindler?"

"Oh," he said with more emphasis than spirit, "I shan't describe HIM
nor narrate his exploits."

"Lord, what abysses! And the late Mr. Newsome then?"

"Well, what about him?"

"Was he like the grandfather?"

"No--he was on the other side of the house.  And he was different."

Miss Gostrey kept it up.  "Better?"

Her friend for a moment hung fire.  "No."

Her comment on his hesitation was scarce the less marked for being
mute.  "Thank you.  NOW don't you see," she went on, "why the boy
doesn't come home?  He's drowning his shame."

"His shame?  What shame?"

"What shame?  Comment donc?  THE shame."

"But where and when," Strether asked, "is 'THE shame'--where is any
shame--to-day?  The men I speak of--they did as every one does; and
(besides being ancient history) it was all a matter of appreciation."

She showed how she understood.  "Mrs. Newsome has appreciated?"

"Ah I can't speak for HER!"

"In the midst of such doings--and, as I understand you, profiting by
them, she at least has remained exquisite?"

"Oh I can't talk of her!" Strether said.

"I thought she was just what you COULD talk of.  You DON'T trust me,"
Miss Gostrey after a moment declared.

It had its effect.  "Well, her money is spent, her life conceived and
carried on with a large beneficence--"

"That's a kind of expiation of wrongs?  Gracious," she added before he
could speak, "how intensely you make me see her!"

"If you see her," Strether dropped, "it's all that's necessary."

She really seemed to have her.  "I feel that.  She IS, in spite of
everything, handsome."

This at least enlivened him.  "What do you mean by everything?"

"Well, I mean YOU."  With which she had one of her swift changes of
ground.  "You say the concern needs looking after;  but doesn't Mrs.
Newsome look after it?"

"So far as possible.  She's wonderfully able, but it's not her affair,
and her life's a good deal overcharged.  She has many, many things."

"And you also?"

"Oh yes--I've many too, if you will."

"I see.  But what I mean is," Miss Gostrey amended, "do you also look
after the business?"

"Oh no, I don't touch the business."

"Only everything else?"

"Well, yes--some things."

"As for instance--?"

Strether obligingly thought.  "Well, the Review."

"The Review?--you have a Review?"

"Certainly.  Woollett has a Review--which Mrs. Newsome, for the most
part, magnificently pays for and which I, not at all magnificently,
edit.  My name's on the cover," Strether pursued, "and I'm really
rather disappointed and hurt that you seem never to have heard of it."

She neglected for a moment this grievance.  "And what kind of a Review
is it?"

His serenity was now completely restored.  "Well, it's green."

"Do you mean in political colour as they say here--in thought?"

"No; I mean the cover's green--of the most lovely shade."

"And with Mrs. Newsome's name on it too?"

He waited a little.  "Oh as for that you must judge if she peeps out.
She's behind the whole thing; but she's of a delicacy and a
discretion--!"

Miss Gostrey took it all.  "I'm sure.  She WOULD be.  I don't underrate
her.  She must be rather a swell."

"Oh yes, she's rather a swell!"

"A Woollett swell--bon! I like the idea of a Woollett swell.  And you
must be rather one too, to be so mixed up with her."

"Ah no," said Strether, "that's not the way it works."

But she had already taken him up.  "The way it works--you needn't tell
me!--is of course that you efface yourself."

"With my name on the cover?" he lucidly objected.

"Ah but you don't put it on for yourself."

"I beg your pardon--that's exactly what I do put it on for.  It's
exactly the thing that I'm reduced to doing for myself.  It seems to
rescue a little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions, the
refuse-heap of disappointments and failures,  my one presentable little
scrap of an identity."

On this she looked at him as to say many things, but what she at last
simply said was:  "She likes to see it there.  You're the bigger swell
of the two," she immediately continued,  "because you think you're not
one.  She thinks she IS one.  However," Miss Gostrey added, "she
thinks you're one too.  You're at all events the biggest she can get
hold of."  She embroidered, she abounded. "I don't say it to interfere
between you, but on the day she gets hold of a bigger one--!"  Strether
had thrown back his head as in silent mirth over something that struck
him in her audacity or felicity, and her flight meanwhile was already
higher.  "Therefore close with her--!"

"Close with her?" he asked as she seemed to hang poised.

"Before you lose your chance."

Their eyes met over it.  "What do you mean by closing?"

"And what do I mean by your chance?  I'll tell you when you tell me all
the things YOU don't.  Is it her GREATEST fad?" she briskly pursued.

"The Review?"  He seemed to wonder how he could best describe it. This
resulted however but in a sketch.  "It's her tribute to the ideal."

"I see.  You go in for tremendous things."

"We go in for the unpopular side--that is so far as we dare."

"And how far DO you dare?"

"Well, she very far.  I much less.  I don't begin to have her faith.
She provides," said Strether, "three fourths of that.  And she
provides, as I've confided to you, ALL the money."

It evoked somehow a vision of gold that held for a little Miss
Gostrey's eyes, and she looked as if she heard the bright dollars
shovelled in.  "I hope then you make a good thing--"

"I NEVER made a good thing!" he at once returned.

She just waited.  "Don't you call it a good thing to be loved?"

"Oh we're not loved.  We're not even hated.  We're only just sweetly
ignored."

She had another pause.  "You don't trust me!" she once more repeated.

"Don't I when I lift the last veil?--tell you the very secret of the
prison-house?"

Again she met his eyes, but to the result that after an instant her own
turned away with impatience.  "You don't sell?  Oh I'm glad of THAT!"
After which however, and before he could protest, she was off again.
"She's just a MORAL swell."

He accepted gaily enough the definition.  "Yes--I really think that
describes her."

But it had for his friend the oddest connexion.  "How does she do her
hair?"

He laughed out.  "Beautifully!"

"Ah that doesn't tell me.  However, it doesn't matter--I know.  It's
tremendously neat--a real reproach; quite remarkably thick and without,
as yet, a single strand of white.  There!"

He blushed for her realism, but gaped at her truth.  "You're the very
deuce."

"What else SHOULD I be?  It was as the very deuce I pounced on you. But
don't let it trouble you, for everything but the very deuce--at our
age--is a bore and a delusion, and even he himself, after all, but half
a joy."  With which, on a single sweep of her wing, she resumed.  "You
assist her to expiate--which is rather hard when you've yourself not
sinned."

"It's she who hasn't sinned," Strether replied.  "I've sinned the most."

"Ah," Miss Gostrey cynically laughed, "what a picture of HER! Have you
robbed the widow and the orphan?"

"I've sinned enough," said Strether.

"Enough for whom?  Enough for what?"

"Well, to be where I am."

"Thank you!" They were disturbed at this moment by the passage between
their knees and the back of the seats before them of a gentleman who
had been absent during a part of the performance and who now returned
for the close; but the interruption left Miss Gostrey time, before the
subsequent hush, to express as a sharp finality her sense of the moral
of all their talk.  "I knew you had something up your sleeve!"  This
finality, however, left them in its turn, at the end of the play, as
disposed to hang back as if they had still much to say; so that they
easily agreed to let every one go before them--they found an interest
in waiting.  They made out from the lobby that the night had turned to
rain; yet Miss Gostrey let her friend know that he wasn't to see her
home.  He was simply to put her, by herself, into a four-wheeler; she
liked so in London, of wet nights after wild pleasures, thinking things
over, on the return, in lonely four-wheelers.  This was her great time,
she intimated, for pulling herself together.  The delays caused by the
weather, the struggle for vehicles at the door, gave them occasion to
subside on a divan at the back of the vestibule and just beyond the
reach of the fresh damp gusts from the street.  Here Strether's comrade
resumed that free handling of the subject to which his own imagination
of it already owed so much.  "Does your young friend in Paris like you?"

It had almost, after the interval, startled him.  "Oh I hope not! Why
SHOULD he?"

"Why shouldn't he?" Miss Gostrey asked.  "That you're coming down on
him need have nothing to do with it."

"You see more in it," he presently returned, "than I."

"Of course I see you in it."

"Well then you see more in 'me'!"

"Than you see in yourself?  Very likely.  That's always one's right.
What I was thinking of," she explained, "is the possible particular
effect on him of his milieu."

"Oh his milieu--!"  Strether really felt he could imagine it better now
than three hours before.

"Do you mean it can only have been so lowering?"

"Why that's my very starting-point."

"Yes, but you start so far back.  What do his letters say?"

"Nothing.  He practically ignores us--or spares us.  He doesn't write."

"I see.  But there are all the same," she went on, "two quite distinct
things that--given the wonderful place he's in--may have happened to
him.  One is that he may have got brutalised.  The other is that he may
have got refined."

Strether stared--this WAS a novelty.  "Refined?"

"Oh," she said quietly, "there ARE refinements."

The way of it made him, after looking at her, break into a laugh. "YOU
have them!"

"As one of the signs," she continued in the same tone, "they constitute
perhaps the worst."

He thought it over and his gravity returned.  "Is it a refinement not
to answer his mother's letters?"

She appeared to have a scruple, but she brought it out.  "Oh I should
say the greatest of all."

"Well," said Strether, "I'M quite content to let it, as one of the
signs, pass for the worst that I know he believes he can do what he
likes with me."

This appeared to strike her.  "How do you know it?"

"Oh I'm sure of it.  I feel it in my bones."

"Feel he CAN do it?"

"Feel that he believes he can.  It may come to the same thing!"
Strether laughed.

She wouldn't, however, have this.  "Nothing for you will ever come to
the same thing as anything else."  And she understood what she meant,
it seemed, sufficiently to go straight on.  "You say that if he does
break he'll come in for things at home?"

"Quite positively.  He'll come in for a particular chance--a chance
that any properly constituted young man would jump at.  The business
has so developed that an opening scarcely apparent three years ago, but
which his father's will took account of as in certain conditions
possible and which, under that will, attaches to Chad's availing
himself of it a large contingent advantage--this opening, the
conditions having come about, now simply awaits him.  His mother has
kept it for him, holding out against strong pressure, till the last
possible moment.  It requires, naturally, as it carries with it a
handsome 'part,' a large share in profits, his being on the spot and
making a big effort for a big result. That's what I mean by his chance.
If he misses it he comes in, as you say, for nothing.  And to see that
he doesn't miss it is, in a word, what I've come out for."

She let it all sink in.  "What you've come out for then is simply to
render him an immense service."

Well, poor Strether was willing to take it so.  "Ah if you like."

"He stands, as they say, if you succeed with him, to gain--"

"Oh a lot of advantages."  Strether had them clearly at his fingers'
ends.

"By which you mean of course a lot of money."

"Well, not only.  I'm acting with a sense for him of other things too.
Consideration and comfort and security--the general safety of being
anchored by a strong chain.  He wants, as I see him, to be protected.
Protected I mean from life."

"Ah voila!"--her thought fitted with a click.  "From life.  What you
REALLY want to get him home for is to marry him."

"Well, that's about the size of it."

"Of course," she said, "it's rudimentary.  But to any one in
particular?"

He smiled at this, looking a little more conscious.  "You get
everything out."

For a moment again their eyes met.  "You put everything in!"

He acknowledged the tribute by telling her.  "To Mamie Pocock."

She wondered; then gravely, even exquisitely, as if to make the oddity
also fit:  "His own niece?"

"Oh you must yourself find a name for the relation.  His
brother-in-law's sister.  Mrs. Jim's sister-in-law."

It seemed to have on Miss Gostrey a certain hardening effect.  "And who
in the world's Mrs. Jim?"

"Chad's sister--who was Sarah Newsome.  She's married--didn't I mention
it?--to Jim Pocock."

"Ah yes," she tacitly replied; but he had mentioned things--! Then,
however, with all the sound it could have, "Who in the world's Jim
Pocock?" she asked.

"Why Sally's husband.  That's the only way we distinguish people at
Woollett," he good-humoredly explained.

"And is it a great distinction--being Sally's husband?"

He considered.  "I think there can be scarcely a greater--unless it may
become one, in the future, to be Chad's wife."

"Then how do they distinguish YOU?"

"They DON'T--except, as I've told you, by the green cover."

Once more their eyes met on it, and she held him an instant.  "The
green cover won't--nor will ANY cover--avail you with ME.  You're of a
depth of duplicity!"  Still, she could in her own large grasp of the
real condone it.  "Is Mamie a great parti?"

"Oh the greatest we have--our prettiest brightest girl."

Miss Gostrey seemed to fix the poor child.  "I know what they CAN be.
And with money?"

"Not perhaps with a great deal of that--but with so much of everything
else that we don't miss it.  We DON'T miss money much, you know,"
Strether added, "in general, in America, in pretty girls."

"No," she conceded; "but I know also what you do sometimes miss. And do
you," she asked, "yourself admire her?"

It was a question, he indicated, that there might be several ways of
taking; but he decided after an instant for the humorous. "Haven't I
sufficiently showed you how I admire ANY pretty girl?"

Her interest in his problem was by this time such that it scarce left
her freedom, and she kept close to the facts.  "I supposed that at
Woollett you wanted them--what shall I call it?--blameless.  I mean
your young men for your pretty girls."

"So did I!" Strether confessed.  "But you strike there a curious
fact--the fact that Woollett too accommodates itself to the spirit of
the age and the increasing mildness of manners.  Everything changes,
and I hold that our situation precisely marks a date.  We SHOULD prefer
them blameless, but we have to make the best of them as we find them.
Since the spirit of the age and the increasing mildness send them so
much more to Paris--"

"You've to take them back as they come.  When they DO come.  Bon!" Once
more she embraced it all, but she had a moment of thought. "Poor Chad!"

"Ah," said Strether cheerfully "Mamie will save him!"

She was looking away, still in her vision, and she spoke with
impatience and almost as if he hadn't understood her.  "YOU'LL save
him.  That's who'll save him."

"Oh but with Mamie's aid.  Unless indeed you mean," he added, "that I
shall effect so much more with yours!"

It made her at last again look at him.  "You'll do more--as you're so
much better--than all of us put together."

"I think I'm only better since I've known YOU!" Strether bravely
returned.

The depletion of the place, the shrinkage of the crowd and now
comparatively quiet withdrawal of its last elements had already brought
them nearer the door and put them in relation with a messenger of whom
he bespoke Miss Gostrey's cab.  But this left them a few minutes more,
which she was clearly in no mood not to use.  "You've spoken to me of
what--by your success--Mr. Chad stands to gain.  But you've not spoken
to me of what you do."

"Oh I've nothing more to gain," said Strether very simply.

She took it as even quite too simple.  "You mean you've got it all
'down'?  You've been paid in advance?"

"Ah don't talk about payment!" he groaned.

Something in the tone of it pulled her up, but as their messenger still
delayed she had another chance and she put it in another way. "What--by
failure--do you stand to lose?"

He still, however, wouldn't have it.  "Nothing!" he exclaimed, and on
the messenger's at this instant reappearing he was able to sink the
subject in their responsive advance.  When, a few steps up the street,
under a lamp, he had put her into her four-wheeler and she had asked
him if the man had called for him no second conveyance, he replied
before the door was closed.  "You won't take me with you?"

"Not for the world."

"Then I shall walk."

"In the rain?"

"I like the rain," said Strether.  "Good-night!"

She kept him a moment, while his hand was on the door, by not
answering; after which she answered by repeating her question. "What do
you stand to lose?"

Why the question now affected him as other he couldn't have said; he
could only this time meet it otherwise.  "Everything."

"So I thought.  Then you shall succeed.  And to that end I'm yours--"

"Ah, dear lady!" he kindly breathed.

"Till death!" said Maria Gostrey.  "Good-night."

Maria invites Strether to the theatre. He'd be delighted. She invites Waymarsh, too, but he decides not to come, saying that he's totally over going to plays . Before hitting up the theatre, Maria and Strether have dinner together at a fancy, dare we say romantic, restaurant. Strether remembers going to the theatre in the States with his fiancee, Mrs. Newsome. But they never went out for a romantic dinner beforehand. This is all new to him, and the sight of Maria and the fragrances in the air are almost overwhelming. We know, it's like he's going to burst into song. But he doesn't, because he's too busy noticing that Maria's dress is way more low-cut than anything Mrs. Newsome would ever wear. Then he realizes that no woman ever has had dinner with him before going out to a play. And yeah, that makes him think about how he's wasted his life. Come to think of it, Lewis Lambert Strether and J. Alfred Prufrock might actually be the same dude. We also learn at this point that Strether is a widower. He lost his wife many years ago, and ten years after his wife's death, he lost his only son. So at least he's got a reason to have a tough time enjoying life. He tells Maria about his mission to bring back Chad. Maria understands the situation, but asks how the Newsome family can be so sure that Chad has changed for the worse since moving to Europe. After all, none of them have actually seen or talked to him since the move. Strether goes all Woollett on her and says he can't really understand how someone could be improved by moving away from a family as moral and wholesome as the Newsomes. Hello, moral judgment. He says he's definitely sure that whoever Chad is involved with must be a terrible woman. Maria asks Strether what Chad is like, and Strether answers that he's a stubborn, ignorant young man who's to selfish to realize that he's worrying his mother to death with all of his evil adventures. Sounds pretty stick-up-his-Massachussetts to us. Maria finally asks Strether what his fiancee, Mrs. Newsome, is like. Well, the truth's the truth: they're about the same age so she's no spring chicken in the looks department. But he admires her for her grace and intelligence. Nice save, Streth. He admits that her daughter Sarah can be tough to get along with. In fact, he admits that he is a little bit afraid of her. Boy, this is like gold for the gossip column. Maria asks why Mrs. Newsome hasn't come to get Chad herself, but Strether says that Mrs. Newsome is almost an invalid who can't leave the house because she's not in great health. Like we said, no spring chicken. Don't forget, this is in 1903 so airports didn't have moving walkways yet. In fact, the first successful airplane got airborne that very year, so they weren't so much doing commercial flights yet. Back to the convo: Maria has also begun to wonder how Strether is funding his trip if he's not so successful back in America. She ventures a guess that dear Mrs. Newsome has a lot of money. Not to be forward, or anything. Lo and behold, Strether confirms that his fiancee is quite wealthy, and that Chad will be too if he comes home to manage the family business. But he adds that things are at a crossroads. If Chad wants to make a lot of money and run the business, it has to be right away. Basically, the family is done waiting for him. If he doesn't hightail it back, they'll hand the management of the business to someone else. Maria, not batting a lash about her nosiness, asks where the Newsomes' money comes from. Strether gets a little shy about this and says that they've made all of their money by manufacturing a certain type of everyday object that he won't name. Why he won't name it, Maria asks? Strether says it's a fairly embarrassing thing to talk about. As readers, we should all be racking our brains wondering what object Strether could possibly be talking about. Strether says it's a "small, trivial, rather ridiculous object" . So like, a plunger? Mops? The 1903 version of tampons? What could it be? Like us, Maria tries a few guesses, but Strether tells her she's not even close. He says he'll tell her the next time they meet. But for now, he just wants to enjoy the theatre and not think about the unnamed object. This thing must be really weird. Or at least, people in that era were. Now Maria wants to know why Strether wouldn't take over the business without Chad around. Strether says he isn't really the business type. Instead, he's the editor of a small magazine that Mrs. Newsome funds, sort of as a charity project. So Strether is pretty much totally in her debt. Strether admits that having his name on the cover of this magazine as an editor is a tiny bit of compensation for all of the hopes and dreams he feels haven't come true in his life. Single tear. Returning to the subject of Chad, Strether says that the young man ignores all letters from his family. No wonder he gets such a bad rap. That's why he has come over to get him personally. Maria suggests that one of two things has probably happened to Chad: he's either become a terrible man or he's become more refined. Strether has never even considered this second possibility and finds it absurd. Strether also mentions that Chad's family wants to bring him home so they can marry him off to a virtuous young woman named Mamie Pocock, the sister-in-law of Chad's sister, Sarah. Pocock? Strether says that Mamie is much admired back in Woollett and is a very pretty and refined girl. He believes that Mamie will be able to save Chad's soul. Maria has a sudden revelation, and she says that she thinks Strether is too good for the people around him. He dismisses this because the dude just can't take a compliment. Or is kind of in denial. When the evening is over, Strether puts Maria into a cab . He asks if he can ride with her, but she refuses. Ah, the wonderful dance of flirting... not that Strether would ever admit to himself that this is what he's doing.