The Ambassadors ................................................................................................................................................1

Henry James .............................................................................................................................................1

Nothing is more easy than to state the subject of "The Ambassadors," which first appeared in twelve numbers

of _The North American Review_ (1903) and was published as a whole the same year. The situation involved

is gathered up betimes, that is in the second chapter of Book Fifth, for the reader's benefit, into as few words

as possible planted or "sunk," stiffly and saliently, in the centre of the current, almost perhaps to the

obstruction of traffic. Never can a composition of this sort have sprung straighter from a dropped grain of

suggestion, and never can that grain, developed, overgrown and smothered, have yet lurked more in the mass

as an independent particle. The whole case, in fine, is in Lambert Strether's irrepressible outbreak to little

Bilham on the Sunday afternoon in Gloriani's garden, the candour with which he yields, for his young friend's

enlightenment, to the charming admonition of that crisis. The idea of the tale resides indeed in the very fact

that an hour of such unprecedented ease should have been felt by him AS a crisis, and he is at pains to

express it for us as neatly as we could desire. The remarks to which he thus gives utterance contain the

essence of "The Ambassadors," his fingers close, before he has done, round the stem of the fullblown

flower; which, after that fashion, he continues officiously to present to us. "Live all you can; it's a mistake not

to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that

what HAVE you had? I'm too oldtoo old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no

mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don't, like me today, be without the

memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I'm a

case of reaction against the mistake. Do what you like so long as you don't make it. For it WAS a mistake.

Live, live!" Such is the gist of Strether's appeal to the impressed youth, whom he likes and whom he desires

to befriend; the word "mistake" occurs several times, it will be seen, in the course of his remarks which

gives the measure of the signal warning he feels attached to his case. He has accordingly missed too much,

though perhaps after all constitutionally qualified for a better part, and he wakes up to it in conditions that

press the spring of a terrible question. WOULD there yet perhaps be time for reparation?reparation, that is,

for the injury done his character; for the affront, he is quite ready to say, so stupidly put upon it and in which

he has even himself had so clumsy a hand? The answer to which is that he now at all events SEES; so that the

business of my tale and the march of my action, not to say the precious moral of everything, is just my

Nothing can exceed the closeness with which the whole fits again into its germ. That had been given me

bodily, as usual, by the spoken word, for I was to take the image over exactly as I happened to have met it. A

friend had repeated to me, with great appreciation, a thing or two said to him by a man of distinction, much

his senior, and to which a sense akin to that of Strether's melancholy eloquence might be imputedsaid as

chance would have, and so easily might, in Paris, and in a charming old garden attached to a house of art, and

on a Sunday afternoon of summer, many persons of great interest being present. The observation there

listened to and gathered up had contained part of the "note" that I was to recognise on the spot as to my

purposehad contained in fact the greater part; the rest was in the place and the time and the scene they

sketched: these constituents clustered and combined to give me further support, to give me what I may call

the note absolute. There it stands, accordingly, full in the tideway; driven in, with hard taps, like some strong

stake for the noose of a cable, the swirl of the current roundabout it. What amplified the hint to more than the

bulk of hints in general was the gift with it of the old Paris garden, for in that token were sealed up values

infinitely precious. There was of course the seal to break and each item of the packet to count over and handle

and estimate; but somehow, in the light of the hint, all the elements of a situation of the sort most to my taste

were there. I could even remember no occasion on which, so confronted, I had found it of a livelier interest to

take stock, in this fashion, of suggested wealth. For I think, verily, that there are degrees of merit in

subjectsin spite of the fact that to treat even one of the most ambiguous with due decency we must for the

time, for the feverish and prejudiced hour, at least figure its merit and its dignity as POSSIBLY absolute.

What it comes to, doubtless, is that even among the supremely goodsince with such alone is it one's theory

of one's honour to be concernedthere is an ideal BEAUTY of goodness the invoked action of which is to

raise the artistic faith to its maximum. Then truly, I hold, one's theme may be said to shine, and that of "The

Ambassadors," I confess, wore this glow for me from beginning to end. Fortunately thus I am able to estimate

this as, frankly, quite the best, "all round," of all my productions; any failure of that justification would have

I recall then in this connexion no moment of subjective intermittence, never one of those alarms as for a

suspected hollow beneath one's feet, a felt ingratitude in the scheme adopted, under which confidence fails

and opportunity seems but to mock. If the motive of "The Wings of the Dove," as I have noted, was to worry

me at moments by a sealingup of its facethough without prejudice to its again, of a sudden, fairly

grimacing with expressionso in this other business I had absolute conviction and constant clearness to deal

with; it had been a frank proposition, the whole bunch of data, installed on my premises like a monotony of

fine weather. (The order of composition, in these things, I may mention, was reversed by the order of

publication; the earlier written of the two books having appeared as the later.) Even under the weight of my

hero's years I could feel my postulate firm; even under the strain of the difference between those of Madame

de Vionnet and those of Chad Newsome, a difference liable to be denounced as shocking, I could still feel it

serene. Nothing resisted, nothing betrayed, I seem to make out, in this full and sound sense of the matter; it

shed from any side I could turn it to the same golden glow. I rejoiced in the promise of a hero so mature, who

would give me thereby the more to bite intosince it's only into thickened motive and accumulated

character, I think, that the painter of life bites more than a little. My poor friend should have accumulated

character, certainly; or rather would be quite naturally and handsomely possessed of it, in the sense that he

would have, and would always have felt he had, imagination galore, and that this yet wouldn't have wrecked

him. It was immeasurable, the opportunity to "do" a man of imagination, for if THERE mightn't be a chance

to "bite," where in the world might it be? This personage of course, so enriched, wouldn't give me, for his

type, imagination in PREDOMINANCE or as his prime faculty, nor should I, in view of other matters, have

found that convenient. So particular a luxury some occasion, that is, for study of the high gift in

SUPREME command of a case or of a careerwould still doubtless come on the day I should be ready to

pay for it; and till then might, as from far back, remain hung up well in view and just out of reach. The

comparative case meanwhile would serveit was only on the minor scale that I had treated myself even to

I was to hasten to add however that, happy stopgaps as the minor scale had thus yielded, the instance in hand

should enjoy the advantage of the full range of the major; since most immediately to the point was the

question of that SUPPLEMENT of situation logically involved in our gentleman's impulse to deliver himself

in the Paris garden on the Sunday afternoonor if not involved by strict logic then all ideally and

enchantingly implied in it. (I say "ideally," because I need scarce mention that for development, for

expression of its maximum, my glimmering story was, at the earliest stage, to have nipped the thread of

connexion with the possibilities of the actual reported speaker. HE remains but the happiest of accidents; his

actualities, all too definite, precluded any range of possibilities; it had only been his charming office to

project upon that wide field of the artist's visionwhich hangs there ever in place like the white sheet

suspended for the figures of a child's magiclanterna more fantastic and more moveable shadow.) No

privilege of the teller of tales and the handler of puppets is more delightful, or has more of the suspense and

the thrill of a game of difficulty breathlessly played, than just this business of looking for the unseen and the

occult, in a scheme halfgrasped, by the light or, so to speak, by the clinging scent, of the gage already in

hand. No dreadful old pursuit of the hidden slave with bloodhounds and the rag of association can ever, for

"excitement," I judge, have bettered it at its best. For the dramatist always, by the very law of his genius,

believes not only in a possible right issue from the rightlyconceived tight place; he does much more than

thishe believes, irresistibly, in the necessary, the precious "tightness" of the place (whatever the issue) on

the strength of any respectable hint. It being thus the respectable hint that I had with such avidity picked up,

what would be the story to which it would most inevitably form the centre? It is part of the charm attendant

on such questions that the "story," with the omens true, as I say, puts on from this stage the authenticity of

concrete existence. It then is, essentiallyit begins to be, though it may more or less obscurely lurk, so that

the point is not in the least what to make of it, but only, very delightfully and very damnably, where to put

In which truth resides surely much of the interest of that admirable mixture for salutary application which we

know as art. Art deals with what we see, it must first contribute fullhanded that ingredient; it plucks its

material, otherwise expressed, in the garden of lifewhich material elsewhere grown is stale and uneatable.

But it has no sooner done this than it has to take account of a PROCESSfrom which only when it's the

basest of the servants of man, incurring ignominious dismissal with no "character," does it, and whether

under some muddled pretext of morality or on any other, pusillanimously edge away. The process, that of the

expression, the literal squeezingout, of value is another affairwith which the happy luck of mere finding

has little to do. The joys of finding, at this stage, are pretty well over; that quest of the subject as a whole by

"matching," as the ladies say at the shops, the big piece with the snippet, having ended, we assume, with a

capture. The subject is found, and if the problem is then transferred to the ground of what to do with it the

field opens out for any amount of doing. This is precisely the infusion that, as I submit, completes the strong

mixture. It is on the other hand the part of the business that can least be likened to the chase with horn and

hound. It's all a sedentary part involves as much ciphering, of sorts, as would merit the highest salary paid

to a chief accountant. Not, however, that the chief accountant hasn't HIS gleams of bliss; for the felicity, or at

least the equilibrium of the artist's state dwells less, surely, in the further delightful complications he can

smuggle in than in those he succeeds in keeping out. He sows his seed at the risk of too thick a crop;

wherefore yet again, like the gentlemen who audit ledgers, he must keep his head at any price. In

consequence of all which, for the interest of the matter, I might seem here to have my choice of narrating my

"hunt" for Lambert Strether, of describing the capture of the shadow projected by my friend's anecdote, or of

reporting on the occurrences subsequent to that triumph. But I had probably best attempt a little to glance in

each direction; since it comes to me again and again, over this licentious record, that one's bag of adventures,

conceived or conceivable, has been only halfemptied by the mere telling of one's story. It depends so on

what one means by that equivocal quantity. There is the story of one's hero, and then, thanks to the intimate

connexion of things, the story of one's story itself. I blush to confess it, but if one's a dramatist one's a

dramatist, and the latter imbroglio is liable on occasion to strike me as really the more objective of the two.

The philosophy imputed to him in that beautiful outbreak, the hour there, amid such happy provision, striking

for him, would have been then, on behalf of my man of imagination, to be logically and, as the artless craft of

comedy has it, "led up" to; the probable course to such a goal, the goal of so conscious a predicament, would

have in short to be finely calculated. Where has he come from and why has he come, what is he doing (as we

AngloSaxons, and we only, say, in our foredoomed clutch of exotic aids to expression) in that galere? To

answer these questions plausibly, to answer them as under crossexamination in the witnessbox by counsel

for the prosecution, in other words satisfactorily to account for Strether and for his "peculiar tone," was to

possess myself of the entire fabric. At the same time the clue to its whereabouts would lie in a certain

principle of probability: he wouldn't have indulged in his peculiar tone without a reason; it would take a felt

predicament or a false position to give him so ironic an accent. One hadn't been noting "tones" all one's life

without recognising when one heard it the voice of the false position. The dear man in the Paris garden was

then admirably and unmistakeably IN onewhich was no small point gained; what next accordingly

concerned us was the determination of THIS identity. One could only go by probabilities, but there was the

advantage that the most general of the probabilities were virtual certainties. Possessed of our friend's

nationality, to start with, there was a general probability in his narrower localism; which, for that matter, one

had really but to keep under the lens for an hour to see it give up its secrets. He would have issued, our rueful

worthy, from the very heart of New Englandat the heels of which matter of course a perfect train of secrets

tumbled for me into the light. They had to be sifted and sorted, and I shall not reproduce the detail of that

process; but unmistakeably they were all there, and it was but a question, auspiciously, of picking among

them. What the "position" would infallibly be, and why, on his hands, it had turned "false"these inductive

steps could only be as rapid as they were distinct. I accounted for everythingand "everything" had by this

time become the most promising quantityby the view that he had come to Paris in some state of mind

which was literally undergoing, as a result of new and unexpected assaults and infusions, a change almost

from hour to hour. He had come with a view that might have been figured by a clear green liquid, say, in a

neat glass phial; and the liquid, once poured into the open cup of APPLICATION, once exposed to the action

of another air, had begun to turn from green to red, or whatever, and might, for all he knew, be on its way to

purple, to black, to yellow. At the still wilder extremes represented perhaps, for all he could say to the

contrary, by a variability so violent, he would at first, naturally, but have gazed in surprise and alarm;

whereby the SITUATION clearly would spring from the play of wildness and the development of extremes. I

saw in a moment that, should this development proceed both with force and logic, my "story" would leave

nothing to be desired. There is always, of course, for the storyteller, the irresistible determinant and the

incalculable advantage of his interest in the story AS SUCH; it is ever, obviously, overwhelmingly, the prime

and precious thing (as other than this I have never been able to see it); as to which what makes for it, with

whatever headlong energy, may be said to pale before the energy with which it simply makes for itself. It

rejoices, none the less, at its best, to seem to offer itself in a light, to seem to know, and with the very last

knowledge, what it's aboutliable as it yet is at moments to be caught by us with its tongue in its cheek and

absolutely no warrant but its splendid impudence. Let us grant then that the impudence is always

therethere, so to speak, for grace and effect and ALLURE; there, above all, because the Story is just the

spoiled child of art, and because, as we are always disappointed when the pampered don't "play up," we like

it, to that extent, to look all its character. It probably does so, in truth, even when we most flatter ourselves

All of which, again, is but to say that the STEPS, for my fable, placed themselves with a prompt and, as it

were, functional assurancean air quite as of readiness to have dispensed with logic had I been in fact too

stupid for my clue. Never, positively, none the less, as the links multiplied, had I felt less stupid than for the

determination of poor Strether's errand and for the apprehension of his issue. These things continued to fall

together, as by the neat action of their own weight and form, even while their commentator scratched his head

about them; he easily sees now that they were always well in advance of him. As the case completed itself he

had in fact, from a good way behind, to catch up with them, breathless and a little flurried, as he best could.

THE false position, for our belated man of the world belated because he had endeavoured so long to

escape being one, and now at last had really to face his doomthe false position for him, I say, was

obviously to have presented himself at the gate of that boundless menagerie primed with a moral scheme of

the most approved pattern which was yet framed to break down on any approach to vivid facts; that is to any

at all liberal appreciation of them. There would have been of course the case of the Strether prepared,

wherever presenting himself, only to judge and to feel meanly; but HE would have moved for me, I confess,

enveloped in no legend whatever. The actual man's note, from the first of our seeing it struck, is the note of

discrimination, just as his drama is to become, under stress, the drama of discrimination. It would have been

his blest imagination, we have seen, that had already helped him to discriminate; the element that was for so

much of the pleasure of my cutting thick, as I have intimated, into his intellectual, into his moral substance.

Yet here it was, at the same time, just here, that a shade for a moment fell across the scene.

There was the dreadful little old tradition, one of the platitudes of the human comedy, that people's moral

scheme DOES break down in Paris; that nothing is more frequently observed; that hundreds of thousands of

more or less hypocritical or more or less cynical persons annually visit the place for the sake of the probable

catastrophe, and that I came late in the day to work myself up about it. There was in fine the TRIVIAL

association, one of the vulgarest in the world; but which give me pause no longer, I think, simply because its

vulgarity is so advertised. The revolution performed by Strether under the influence of the most interesting of

great cities was to have nothing to do with any betise of the imputably "tempted" state; he was to be thrown

forward, rather, thrown quite with violence, upon his lifelong trick of intense reflexion: which friendly test

indeed was to bring him out, through winding passages, through alternations of darkness and light, very much

IN Paris, but with the surrounding scene itself a minor matter, a mere symbol for more things than had been

dreamt of in the philosophy of Woollett. Another surrounding scene would have done as well for our show

could it have represented a place in which Strether's errand was likely to lie and his crisis to await him. The

LIKELY place had the great merit of sparing me preparations; there would have been too many

involvednot at all impossibilities, only rather worrying and delaying difficultiesin positing elsewhere

Chad Newsome's interesting relation, his so interesting complexity of relations. Strether's appointed stage, in

fine, could be but Chad's most luckily selected one. The young man had gone in, as they say, for circumjacent

charm; and where he would have found it, by the turn of his mind, most "authentic," was where his earnest

friend's analysis would most find HIM; as well as where, for that matter, the former's whole analytic faculty

"The Ambassadors" had been, all conveniently, "arranged for"; its first appearance was from month to month,

in the _North American Review_ during 1903, and I had been open from far back to any pleasant provocation

for ingenuity that might reside in one's actively adoptingso as to make it, in its way, a small compositional

lawrecurrent breaks and resumptions. I had made up my mind here regularly to exploit and enjoy these

often rather rude jolts having found, as I believed an admirable way to it; yet every question of form and

pressure, I easily remember, paled in the light of the major propriety, recognised as soon as really weighed;

that of employing but one centre and keeping it all within my hero's compass. The thing was to be so much

this worthy's intimate adventure that even the projection of his consciousness upon it from beginning to end

without intermission or deviation would probably still leave a part of its value for him, and a fortiori for

ourselves, unexpressed. I might, however, express every grain of it that there would be room foron

condition of contriving a splendid particular economy. Other persons in no small number were to people the

scene, and each with his or her axe to grind, his or her situation to treat, his or her coherency not to fail of, his

or her relation to my leading motive, in a word, to establish and carry on. But Strether's sense of these things,

and Strether's only, should avail me for showing them; I should know them but through his more or less

groping knowledge of them, since his very gropings would figure among his most interesting motions, and a

full observance of the rich rigour I speak of would give me more of the effect I should be most "after" than all

other possible observances together. It would give me a large unity, and that in turn would crown me with the

grace to which the enlightened storyteller will at any time, for his interest, sacrifice if need be all other

graces whatever. I refer of course to the grace of intensity, which there are ways of signally achieving and

ways of signally missingas we see it, all round us, helplessly and woefully missed. Not that it isn't, on the

other hand, a virtue eminently subject to appreciationthere being no strict, no absolute measure of it; so

that one may hear it acclaimed where it has quite escaped one's perception, and see it unnoticed where one

has gratefully hailed it. After all of which I am not sure, either, that the immense amusement of the whole

cluster of difficulties so arrayed may not operate, for the fond fabulist, when judicious not less than fond, as

his best of determinants. That charming principle is always there, at all events, to keep interest fresh: it is a

principle, we remember, essentially ravenous, without scruple and without mercy, appeased with no cheap

nor easy nourishment. It enjoys the costly sacrifice and rejoices thereby in the very odour of difficultyeven

as ogres, with their "Feefawfum!" rejoice in the smell of the blood of Englishmen.

Thus it was, at all events, that the ultimate, though after all so speedy, definition of my gentleman's jobhis

coming out, all solemnly appointed and deputed, to "save" Chad, and his then finding the young man so

disobligingly and, at first, so bewilderingly not lost that a new issue altogether, in the connexion,

prodigiously faces them, which has to be dealt with in a new lightpromised as many calls on ingenuity and

on the higher branches of the compositional art as one could possibly desire. Again and yet again, as, from

book to book, I proceed with my survey, I find no source of interest equal to this verification after the fact, as

I may call it, and the more in detail the better, of the scheme of consistency "gone in" for. As always since

the charm never failsthe retracing of the process from point to point brings back the old illusion. The old

intentions bloom again and flowerin spite of all the blossoms they were to have dropped by the way. This

is the charm, as I say, of adventure TRANSPOSEDthe thrilling ups and downs, the intricate ins and outs of

the compositional problem, made after such a fashion admirably objective, becoming the question at issue

and keeping the author's heart in his mouth. Such an element, for instance, as his intention that Mrs.

Newsome, away off with her finger on the pulse of Massachusetts, should yet be no less intensely than

circuitously present through the whole thing, should be no less felt as to be reckoned with than the most

direct exhibition, the finest portrayal at first hand could make her, such a sign of artistic good faith, I say,

once it's unmistakeably there, takes on again an actuality not too much impaired by the comparative dimness

of the particular success. Cherished intention too inevitably acts and operates, in the book, about fifty times

as little as I had fondly dreamt it might; but that scarce spoils for me the pleasure of recognising the fifty

ways in which I had sought to provide for it. The mere charm of seeing such an idea constituent, in its degree;

the fineness of the measures takena real extension, if successful, of the very terms and possibilities of

representation and figurationsuch things alone were, after this fashion, inspiring, such things alone were a

gage of the probable success of that dissimulated calculation with which the whole effort was to square. But

oh the cares begotten, none the less, of that same "judicious" sacrifice to a particular form of interest! One's

work should have composition, because composition alone is positive beauty; but all the whileapart from

one's inevitable consciousness too of the dire paucity of readers ever recognising or ever missing positive

beautyhow, as to the cheap and easy, at every turn, how, as to immediacy and facility, and even as to the

commoner vivacity, positive beauty might have to be sweated for and paid for! Once achieved and installed it

may always be trusted to make the poor seeker feel he would have blushed to the roots of his hair for failing

of it; yet, how, as its virtue can be essentially but the virtue of the whole, the wayside traps set in the interest

of muddlement and pleading but the cause of the moment, of the particular bit in itself, have to be kicked out

of the path! All the sophistications in life, for example, might have appeared to muster on behalf of the

menace the menace to a bright varietyinvolved in Strether's having all the subjective "say," as it were, to

Had I, meanwhile, made him at once hero and historian, endowed him with the romantic privilege of the

"first person"the darkest abyss of romance this, inveterately, when enjoyed on the grand scalevariety,

and many other queer matters as well, might have been smuggled in by a back door. Suffice it, to be brief,

that the first person, in the long piece, is a form foredoomed to looseness and that looseness, never much my

affair, had never been so little so as on this particular occasion. All of which reflexions flocked to the

standard from the momenta very early onethe question of how to keep my form amusing while sticking

so close to my central figure and constantly taking its pattern from him had to be faced. He arrives (arrives at

Chester) as for the dreadful purpose of giving his creator "no end" to tell about himbefore which rigorous

mission the serenest of creators might well have quailed. I was far from the serenest; I was more than agitated

enough to reflect that, grimly deprived of one alternative or one substitute for "telling," I must address myself

tooth and nail to another. I couldn't, save by implication, make other persons tell EACH OTHER about

himblest resource, blest necessity, of the drama, which reaches its effects of unity, all remarkably, by paths

absolutely opposite to the paths of the novel: with other persons, save as they were primarily HIS persons

(not he primarily but one of theirs), I had simply nothing to do. I had relations for him none the less, by the

mercy of Providence, quite as much as if my exhibition was to be a muddle; if I could only by implication

and a show of consequence make other persons tell each other about him, I could at least make him tell

THEM whatever in the world he must; and could so, by the same tokenwhich was a further luxury thrown

insee straight into the deep differences between what that could do for me, or at all events for HIM, and

the large ease of "autobiography." It may be asked why, if one so keeps to one's hero, one shouldn't make a

single mouthful of "method," shouldn't throw the reins on his neck and, letting them flap there as free as in

"Gil Blas" or in "David Copperfield," equip him with the double privilege of subject and objecta course

that has at least the merit of brushing away questions at a sweep. The answer to which is, I think, that one

makes that surrender only if one is prepared NOT to make certain precious discriminations.

The "first person" then, so employed, is addressed by the author directly to ourselves, his possible readers,

whom he has to reckon with, at the best, by our English tradition, so loosely and vaguely after all, so little

respectfully, on so scant a presumption of exposure to criticism. Strether, on the other hand, encaged and

provided for as "The Ambassadors" encages and provides, has to keep in view proprieties much stiffer and

more salutary than any our straight and credulous gape are likely to bring home to him, has exhibitional

conditions to meet, in a word, that forbid the terrible FLUIDITY of selfrevelation. I may seem not to better

the case for my discrimination if I say that, for my first care, I had thus inevitably to set him up a confidant or

two, to wave away with energy the custom of the seated mass of explanation after the fact, the inserted block

of merely referential narrative, which flourishes so, to the shame of the modern impatience, on the serried

page of Balzac, but which seems simply to appal our actual, our general weaker, digestion. "Harking back to

make up" took at any rate more doing, as the phrase is, not only than the reader of today demands, but than

he will tolerate at any price any call upon him either to understand or remotely to measure; and for the beauty

of the thing when done the current editorial mind in particular appears wholly without sense. It is not,

however, primarily for either of these reasons, whatever their weight, that Strether's friend Waymarsh is so

keenly clutched at, on the threshold of the book, or that no less a pounce is made on Maria Gostreywithout

even the pretext, either, of HER being, in essence, Strether's friend. She is the reader's friend much ratherin

consequence of dispositions that make him so eminently require one; and she acts in that capacity, and

REALLY in that capacity alone, with exemplary devotion from beginning to and of the book. She is an

enrolled, a direct, aid to lucidity; she is in fine, to tear off her mask, the most unmitigated and abandoned of

ficelles. Half the dramatist's art, as we well knowsince if we don't it's not the fault of the proofs that lie

scattered about usis in the use of ficelles; by which I mean in a deep dissimulation of his dependence on

them. Waymarsh only to a slighter degree belongs, in the whole business, less to my subject than to my

treatment of it; the interesting proof, in these connexions, being that one has but to take one's subject for the

The material of "The Ambassadors," conforming in this respect exactly to that of "The Wings of the Dove,"

published just before it, is taken absolutely for the stuff of drama; so that, availing myself of the opportunity

given me by this edition for some prefatory remarks on the latter work, I had mainly to make on its behalf the

point of its scenic consistency. It disguises that virtue, in the oddest way in the world, by just LOOKING, as

we turn its pages, as little scenic as possible; but it sharply divides itself, just as the composition before us

does, into the parts that prepare, that tend in fact to overprepare, for scenes, and the parts, or otherwise into

the scenes, that justify and crown the preparation. It may definitely be said, I think, that everything in it that is

not scene (not, I of course mean, complete and functional scene, treating ALL the submitted matter, as by

logical start, logical turn, and logical finish) is discriminated preparation, is the fusion and synthesis of

picture. These alternations propose themselves all recogniseably, I think, from an early stage, as the very

form and figure of "The Ambassadors"; so that, to repeat, such an agent as Miss Gostrey preengaged at a

high salary, but waits in the draughty wing with her shawl and her smellingsalts. Her function speaks at

once for itself, and by the time she has dined with Strether in London and gone to a play with him her

intervention as a ficelle is, I hold, expertly justified. Thanks to it we have treated scenically, and scenically

alone, the whole lumpish question of Strether's "past," which has seen us more happily on the way than

anything else could have done; we have strained to a high lucidity and vivacity (or at least we hope we have)

certain indispensable facts; we have seen our two or three immediate friends all conveniently and profitably

in "action"; to say nothing of our beginning to descry others, of a remoter intensity, getting into motion, even

if a bit vaguely as yet, for our further enrichment. Let my first point be here that the scene in question, that in

which the whole situation at Woollett and the complex forces that have propelled my hero to where this lively

extractor of his value and distiller of his essence awaits him, is normal and entire, is really an excellent

STANDARD scene; copious, comprehensive, and accordingly never short, but with its office as definite as

that of the hammer on the gong of the clock, the office of expressing ALL THAT IS IN the hour.

The "ficelle" character of the subordinate party is as artfully dissimulated, throughout, as may be, and to that

extent that, with the seams or joints of Maria Gostrey's ostensible connectedness taken particular care of, duly

smoothed over, that is, and anxiously kept from showing as "pieced on;" this figure doubtless achieves, after

a fashion, something of the dignity of a prime idea: which circumstance but shows us afresh how many quite

incalculable but none the less clear sources of enjoyment for the infatuated artist, how many copious springs

of our nevertobeslighted "fun" for the reader and critic susceptible of contagion, may sound their

incidental plash as soon as an artistic process begins to enjoy free development. Exquisitein illustration of

this the mere interest and amusement of such at once "creative" and critical questions as how and where

and why to make Miss Gostrey's false connexion carry itself, under a due high polish, as a real one. Nowhere

is it more of an artful expedient for mere consistency of form, to mention a case, than in the last "scene" of

the book, where its function is to give or to add nothing whatever, but only to express as vividly as possible

certain things quite other than itself and that are of the already fixed and appointed measure. Since, however,

all art is EXPRESSION, and is thereby vividness, one was to find the door open here to any amount of

delightful dissimulation. These verily are the refinements and ecstasies of methodamid which, or certainly

under the influence of any exhilarated demonstration of which, one must keep one's head and not lose one's

way. To cultivate an adequate intelligence for them and to make that sense operative is positively to find a

charm in any produced ambiguity of appearance that is not by the same stroke, and all helplessly, an

ambiguity of sense. To project imaginatively, for my hero, a relation that has nothing to do with the matter

(the matter of my subject) but has everything to do with the manner (the manner of my presentation of the

same) and yet to treat it, at close quarters and for fully economic expression's possible sake, as if it were

important and essentialto do that sort of thing and yet muddle nothing may easily become, as one goes, a

signally attaching proposition; even though it all remains but part and parcel, I hasten to recognise, of the

merely general and related question of expressional curiosity and expressional decency.

I am moved to add after so much insistence on the scenic side of my labour that I have found the steps of

reperusal almost as much waylaid here by quite another style of effort in the same signal interestor have

in other words not failed to note how, even so associated and so discriminated, the finest proprieties and

charms of the nonscenic may, under the right hand for them, still keep their intelligibility and assert their

office. Infinitely suggestive such an observation as this last on the whole delightful head, where

representation is concerned, of possible variety, of effective expressional change and contrast. One would

like, at such an hour as this, for critical licence, to go into the matter of the noted inevitable deviation (from

too fond an original vision) that the exquisite treachery even of the straightest execution may ever be trusted

to inflict even on the most mature planthe case being that, though one's last reconsidered production

always seems to bristle with that particular evidence, "The Ambassadors" would place a flood of such light at

my service. I must attach to my final remark here a different import; noting in the other connexion I just

glanced at that such passages as that of my hero's first encounter with Chad Newsome, absolute attestations

of the nonscenic form though they be, yet lay the firmest hand tooso far at least as intention goeson

representational effect. To report at all closely and completely of what "passes" on a given occasion is

inevitably to become more or less scenic; and yet in the instance I allude to, WITH the conveyance,

expressional curiosity and expressional decency are sought and arrived at under quite another law. The true

inwardness of this may be at bottom but that one of the suffered treacheries has consisted precisely, for

Chad's whole figure and presence, of a direct presentability diminished and compromiseddespoiled, that is,

of its PROPORTIONAL advantage; so that, in a word, the whole economy of his author's relation to him has

at important points to be redetermined. The book, however, critically viewed, is touchingly full of these

disguised and repaired losses, these insidious recoveries, these intensely redemptive consistencies. The pages

in which Mamie Pocock gives her appointed and, I can't but think, duly felt lift to the whole action by the so

inscrutablyapplied sidestroke or shortcut of our just watching and as quite at an angle of vision as yet

untried, her single hour of suspense in the hotel salon, in our partaking of her concentrated study of the sense

of matters bearing on her own case, all the bright warm Paris afternoon, from the balcony that overlooks the

Tuileries gardenthese are as marked an example of the representational virtue that insists here and there on

being, for the charm of opposition and renewal, other than the scenic. It wouldn't take much to make me

further argue that from an equal play of such oppositions the book gathers an intensity that fairly adds to the

dramaticthough the latter is supposed to be the sum of all intensities; or that has at any rate nothing to fear

from juxtaposition with it. I consciously fail to shrink in fact from that extravaganceI risk it rather, for the

sake of the moral involved; which is not that the particular production before us exhausts the interesting

questions it raises, but that the Novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most

Strether's first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh

was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from him bespeaking a

room "only if not noisy," reply paid, was produced for the enquirer at the office, so that the understanding

they should meet at Chester rather than at Liverpool remained to that extent sound. The same secret principle,

however, that had prompted Strether not absolutely to desire Waymarsh's presence at the dock, that had led

him thus to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of it, now operated to make him feel he could still wait

without disappointment. They would dine together at the worst, and, with all respect to dear old

Waymarshif not even, for that matter, to himselfthere was little fear that in the sequel they shouldn't see

enough of each other. The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly

disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctivethe fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to

find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled

should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first "note," of

Europe. Mixed with everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether's part, that it would, at best,

That note had been meanwhilesince the previous afternoon, thanks to this happier devicesuch a

consciousness of personal freedom as he hadn't known for years; such a deep taste of change and of having

above all for the moment nobody and nothing to consider, as promised already, if headlong hope were not too

foolish, to colour his adventure with cool success. There were people on the ship with whom he had easily

consortedso far as ease could up to now be imputed to himand who for the most part plunged straight

into the current that set from the landingstage to London; there were others who had invited him to a tryst at

the inn and had even invoked his aid for a "look round" at the beauties of Liverpool; but he had stolen away

from every one alike, had kept no appointment and renewed no acquaintance, had been indifferently aware of

the number of persons who esteemed themselves fortunate in being, unlike himself, "met," and had even

independently, unsociably, alone, without encounter or relapse and by mere quiet evasion, given his

afternoon and evening to the immediate and the sensible. They formed a qualified draught of Europe, an

afternoon and an evening on the banks of the Mersey, but such as it was he took his potion at least undiluted.

He winced a little, truly, at the thought that Waymarsh might be already at Chester; he reflected that, should

he have to describe himself there as having "got in" so early, it would be difficult to make the interval look

particularly eager; but he was like a man who, elatedly finding in his pocket more money than usual, handles

it a while and idly and pleasantly chinks it before addressing himself to the business of spending. That he was

prepared to be vague to Waymarsh about the hour of the ship's touching, and that he both wanted extremely

to see him and enjoyed extremely the duration of delaythese things, it is to be conceived, were early signs

in him that his relation to his actual errand might prove none of the simplest. He was burdened, poor

Stretherit had better be confessed at the outset with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was

After the young woman in the glass cage had held up to him across her counter the palepink leaflet bearing

his friend's name, which she neatly pronounced, he turned away to find himself, in the hall, facing a lady who

met his eyes as with an intention suddenly determined, and whose featuresnot freshly young, not markedly

fine, but on happy terms with each othercame back to him as from a recent vision. For a moment they

stood confronted; then the moment placed her: he had noticed her the day before, noticed her at his previous

inn, whereagain in the hallshe had been briefly engaged with some people of his own ship's company.

Nothing had actually passed between them, and he would as little have been able to say what had been the

sign of her face for him on the first occasion as to name the ground of his present recognition. Recognition at

any rate appeared to prevail on her own side as wellwhich would only have added to the mystery. All she

now began by saying to him nevertheless was that, having chanced to catch his enquiry, she was moved to

ask, by his leave, if it were possibly a question of Mr. Waymarsh of Milrose ConnecticutMr. Waymarsh

"Oh yes," he replied, "my very wellknown friend. He's to meet me here, coming up from Malvern, and I

supposed he'd already have arrived. But he doesn't come till later, and I'm relieved not to have kept him. Do

It wasn't till after he had spoken that he became aware of how much there had been in him of response; when

the tone of her own rejoinder, as well as the play of something more in her face something more, that is,

than its apparently usual restless light seemed to notify him. "I've met him at Milrosewhere I used

sometimes, a good while ago, to stay; I had friends there who were friends of his, and I've been at his house. I

won't answer for it that he would know me," Strether's new acquaintance pursued; "but I should be delighted

to see him. Perhaps," she added, "I shallfor I'm staying over." She paused while our friend took in these

things, and it was as if a good deal of talk had already passed. They even vaguely smiled at it, and Strether

presently observed that Mr. Waymarsh would, no doubt, be easily to be seen. This, however, appeared to

affect the lady as if she might have advanced too far. She appeared to have no reserves about anything. "Oh,"

she said, "he won't care!"and she immediately thereupon remarked that she believed Strether knew the

But he didn't, it happened, know the Munsters well enough to give the case much of a lift; so that they were

left together as if over the mere laid table of conversation. Her qualification of the mentioned connexion had

rather removed than placed a dish, and there seemed nothing else to serve. Their attitude remained, none the

less, that of not forsaking the board; and the effect of this in turn was to give them the appearance of having

accepted each other with an absence of preliminaries practically complete. They moved along the hall

together, and Strether's companion threw off that the hotel had the advantage of a garden. He was aware by

this time of his strange inconsequence: he had shirked the intimacies of the steamer and had muffled the

shock of Waymarsh only to find himself forsaken, in this sudden case, both of avoidance and of caution. He

passed, under this unsought protection and before he had so much as gone up to his room, into the garden of

the hotel, and at the end of ten minutes had agreed to meet there again, as soon as he should have made

himself tidy, the dispenser of such good assurances. He wanted to look at the town, and they would forthwith

look together. It was almost as if she had been in possession and received him as a guest. Her acquaintance

with the place presented her in a manner as a hostess, and Strether had a rueful glance for the lady in the glass

When in a quarter of an hour he came down, what his hostess saw, what she might have taken in with a vision

kindly adjusted, was the lean, the slightly loose figure of a man of the middle height and something more

perhaps than the middle agea man of fiveandfifty, whose most immediate signs were a marked

bloodless brownness of face, a thick dark moustache, of characteristically American cut, growing strong and

falling low, a head of hair still abundant but irregularly streaked with grey, and a nose of bold free

prominence, the even line, the high finish, as it might have been called, of which, had a certain effect of

mitigation. A perpetual pair of glasses astride of this fine ridge, and a line, unusually deep and drawn, the

prolonged penstroke of time, accompanying the curve of the moustache from nostril to chin, did something

to complete the facial furniture that an attentive observer would have seen catalogued, on the spot, in the

vision of the other party to Strether's appointment. She waited for him in the garden, the other party, drawing

on a pair of singularly fresh soft and elastic light gloves and presenting herself with a superficial readiness

which, as he approached her over the small smooth lawn and in the watery English sunshine, he might, with

his rougher preparation, have marked as the model for such an occasion. She had, this lady, a perfect plain

propriety, an expensive subdued suitability, that her companion was not free to analyse, but that struck him,

so that his consciousness of it was instantly acute, as a quality quite new to him. Before reaching her he

stopped on the grass and went through the form of feeling for something, possibly forgotten, in the light

overcoat he carried on his arm; yet the essence of the act was no more than the impulse to gain time. Nothing

could have been odder than Strether's sense of himself as at that moment launched in something of which the

sense would be quite disconnected from the sense of his past and which was literally beginning there and

then. It had begun in fact already upstairs and before the dressing glass that struck him as blocking further, so

strangely, the dimness of the window of his dull bedroom; begun with a sharper survey of the elements of

Appearance than he had for a long time been moved to make. He had during those moments felt these

elements to be not so much to his hand as he should have liked, and then had fallen back on the thought that

they were precisely a matter as to which help was supposed to come from what he was about to do. He was

about to go up to London, so that hat and necktie might wait. What had come as straight to him as a ball in a

wellplayed gameand caught moreover not less neatlywas just the air, in the person of his friend, of

having seen and chosen, the air of achieved possession of those vague qualities and quantities that

collectively figured to him as the advantage snatched from lucky chances. Without pomp or circumstance,

certainly, as her original address to him, equally with his own response, had been, he would have sketched to

himself his impression of her as: "Well, she's more thoroughly civilized!" If "More thoroughly than

WHOM?" would not have been for him a sequel to this remark, that was just by reason of his deep

The amusement, at all events, of a civilisation intenser was what familiar compatriot as she was, with the

full tone of the compatriot and the rattling link not with mystery but only with dear dyspeptic

Waymarshshe appeared distinctly to promise. His pause while he felt in his overcoat was positively the

pause of confidence, and it enabled his eyes to make out as much of a case for her, in proportion, as her own

made out for himself. She affected him as almost insolently young; but an easily carried fiveandthirty

could still do that. She was, however, like himself marked and wan; only it naturally couldn't have been

known to him how much a spectator looking from one to the other might have discerned that they had in

common. It wouldn't for such a spectator have been altogether insupposable that, each so finely brown and so

sharply spare, each confessing so to dents of surface and aids to sight, to a disproportionate nose and a head

delicately or grossly grizzled, they might have been brother and sister. On this ground indeed there would

have been a residuum of difference; such a sister having surely known in respect to such a brother the

extremity of separation, and such a brother now feeling in respect to such a sister the extremity of surprise.

Surprise, it was true, was not on the other hand what the eyes of Strether's friend most showed him while she

gave him, stroking her gloves smoother, the time he appreciated. They had taken hold of him straightway

measuring him up and down as if they knew how; as if he were human material they had already in some sort

handled. Their possessor was in truth, it may be communicated, the mistress of a hundred cases or categories,

receptacles of the mind, subdivisions for convenience, in which, from a full experience, she pigeonholed her

fellow mortals with a hand as free as that of a compositor scattering type. She was as equipped in this

particular as Strether was the reverse, and it made an opposition between them which he might well have

shrunk from submitting to if he had fully suspected it. So far as he did suspect it he was on the contrary, after

a short shake of his consciousness, as pleasantly passive as might be. He really had a sort of sense of what she

knew. He had quite the sense that she knew things he didn't, and though this was a concession that in general

he found not easy to make to women, he made it now as goodhumouredly as if it lifted a burden. His eyes

were so quiet behind his eternal nippers that they might almost have been absent without changing his face,

which took its expression mainly, and not least its stamp of sensibility, from other sources, surface and grain

and form. He joined his guide in an instant, and then felt she had profited still better than he by his having

been for the moments just mentioned, so at the disposal of her intelligence. She knew even intimate things

about him that he hadn't yet told her and perhaps never would. He wasn't unaware that he had told her rather

remarkably many for the time, but these were not the real ones. Some of the real ones, however, precisely,

They were to pass again through the hall of the inn to get into the street, and it was here she presently

"Oh dear, yesas soon as you left me. I went to the office and asked. Hadn't YOU better do the same?"

He wondered. "Find out who you are?after the uplifted young woman there has seen us thus scrape

She laughed on her side now at the shade of alarm in his amusement. "Isn't it a reason the more? If what

you're afraid of is the injury for memy being seen to walk off with a gentleman who has to ask who I

aml assure you I don't in the least mind. Here, however," she continued, "is my card, and as I find there's

something else again I have to say at the office, you can just study it during the moment I leave you."

She left him after he had taken from her the small pasteboard she had extracted from her pocketbook, and he

had extracted another from his own, to exchange with it, before she came back. He read thus the simple

designation "Maria Gostrey," to which was attached, in a corner of the card, with a number, the name of a

street, presumably in Paris, without other appreciable identity than its foreignness. He put the card into his

waistcoat pocket, keeping his own meanwhile in evidence; and as he leaned against the doorpost he met

with the smile of a straying thought what the expanse before the hotel offered to his view. It was positively

droll to him that he should already have Maria Gostrey, whoever she wasof which he hadn't really the least

ideain a place of safe keeping. He had somehow an assurance that he should carefully preserve the little

token he had just tucked in. He gazed with unseeing lingering eyes as he followed some of the implications of

his act, asking himself if he really felt admonished to qualify it as disloyal. It was prompt, it was possibly

even premature, and there was little doubt of the expression of face the sight of it would have produced in a

certain person. But if it was "wrong"why then he had better not have come out at all. At this, poor man,

had he alreadyand even before meeting Waymarsharrived. He had believed he had a limit, but the limit

had been transcended within thirtysix hours. By how long a space on the plane of manners or even of

morals, moreover, he felt still more sharply after Maria Gostrey had come back to him and with a gay

decisive "So now!" led him forth into the world. This counted, it struck him as he walked beside her with

his overcoat on an arm, his umbrella under another and his personal pasteboard a little stiffly retained

between forefinger and thumb, this struck him as really, in comparison his introduction to things. It hadn't

been "Europe" at Liverpool nonot even in the dreadful delightful impressive streets the night beforeto

the extent his present companion made it so. She hadn't yet done that so much as when, after their walk had

lasted a few minutes and he had had time to wonder if a couple of sidelong glances from her meant that he

had best have put on gloves she almost pulled him up with an amused challenge. "But whyfondly as it's so

easy to imagine your clinging to itdon't you put it away? Or if it's an inconvenience to you to carry it, one's

Then he saw both that his way of marching with his own prepared tribute had affected her as a deviation in

one of those directions he couldn't yet measure, and that she supposed this emblem to be still the one he had

received from her. He accordingly handed her the card as if in restitution, but as soon as she had it she felt the

difference and, with her eyes on it, stopped short for apology. "I like," she observed, "your name."

"Oh," he answered, "you won't have heard of it!" Yet he had his reasons for not being sure but that she

Ah it was but too visible! She read it over again as one who had never seen it. "'Mr. Lewis Lambert

Strether'"she sounded it almost as freely as for any stranger. She repeated however that she liked

"I know that too," Strether smiled. To which he added with an irrelevance that was only superficial: "I come

from Woollett Massachusetts." It made her for some reasonthe irrelevance or whateverlaugh. Balzac

had described many cities, but hadn't described Woollett Massachusetts. "You say that," she returned, "as if

"Oh I think it's a thing," he said, "that you must already have made out. I feel it so that I certainly must look

it, speak it, and, as people say there, 'act' it. It sticks out of me, and you knew surely for yourself as soon as

"Well, the fact of where I come from. There at any rate it IS; so that you won't be able, if anything happens,

"I see"and Miss Gostrey looked really interested in the point he had made. "But what do you think of as

Though he wasn't shywhich was rather anomalousStrether gazed about without meeting her eyes; a

motion that was frequent with him in talk, yet of which his words often seemed not at all the effect. "Why

that you should find me too hopeless." With which they walked on again together while she answered, as they

went, that the most "hopeless" of her countryfolk were in general precisely those she liked best. All sorts of

other pleasant small thingssmall things that were yet large for himflowered in the air of the occasion, but

the bearing of the occasion itself on matters still remote concerns us too closely to permit us to multiply our

illustrations. Two or three, however, in truth, we should perhaps regret to lose. The tortuous wallgirdle,

long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by careful civic handswanders in narrow

file between parapets smoothed by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a

bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely

streets and under the brows of gables, views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled English town

and ordered English country. Too deep almost for words was the delight of these things to Strether; yet as

deeply mixed with it were certain images of his inward picture. He had trod this walks in the faroff time, at

twentyfive; but that, instead of spoiling it, only enriched it for present feeling and marked his renewal as a

thing substantial enough to share. It was with Waymarsh he should have shared it. and he was now

accordingly taking from him something that was his due. He looked repeatedly at his watch, and when he had

It so touched the place that he quite changed colour and his laugh grew almost awkward. "Am I enjoying it as

"Oh it's not your privilege! It has nothing to do with me. It has to do with yourself. Your failure's general."

"Precisely. Woollett isn't sure it ought to enjoy. If it were it would. But it hasn't, poor thing," Strether

They had stopped, in the afternoon sunshineconstantly pausing, in their stroll, for the sharper sense of what

they sawand Strether rested on one of the high sides of the old stony groove of the little rampart. He leaned

back on this support with his face to the tower of the cathedral, now admirably commanded by their station,

the high redbrown mass, square and subordinately spired and crocketed, retouched and restored, but

charming to his longsealed eyes and with the first swallows of the year weaving their flight all round it.

Miss Gostrey lingered near him, full of an air, to which she more and more justified her right, of

understanding the effect of things. She quite concurred. "You've indeed somebody." And she added: "I wish

She kept on him a moment, through her glasses and through his own, a certain pleasant pointedness. "Ah no,

you're not! You're not in the least, thank goodness! If you had been we shouldn't so soon have found

"I think I do!but that's exactly what I'm afraid of. I shouldn't mind if I didn't. It's falling thus in twenty

minutes so utterly into your hands. I dare say," Strether continued, "it's a sort of thing you're thoroughly

She watched him with all her kindness. "That means simply that you've recognised mewhich IS rather

beautiful and rare. You see what I am." As on this, however, he protested, with a goodhumoured headshake,

a resignation of any such claim, she had a moment of explanation. "If you'll only come on further as you

HAVE come you'll at any rate make out. My own fate has been too many for me, and I've succumbed to it.

I'm a general guideto 'Europe,' don't you know? I wait for peoplel put them through. I pick them up I

set them down. I'm a sort of superior 'couriermaid.' I'm a companion at large. I take people, as I've told you,

about. I never sought itit has come to me. It has been my fate, and one's fate one accepts. It's a dreadful

thing to have to say, in so wicked a world, but I verily believe that, such as you see me, there's nothing I don't

know. I know all the shops and the pricesbut I know worse things still. I bear on my back the huge load of

our national consciousness, or, in other wordsfor it comes to that of our nation itself. Of what is our

nation composed but of the men and women individually on my shoulders? I don't do it, you know, for any

particular advantage. I don't do it, for instancesome people do, you knowfor money."

Strether could only listen and wonder and weigh his chance. "And yet, affected as you are then to so many of

your clients, you can scarcely be said to do it for love." He waited a moment. "How do we reward you?"

She had her own hesitation, but "You don't!" she finally returned, setting him again in motion. They went on,

but in a few minutes, though while still thinking over what she had said, he once more took out his watch;

mechanically, unconsciously and as if made nervous by the mere exhilaration of what struck him as her

strange and cynical wit. He looked at the hour without seeing it, and then, on something again said by his

He smiled a smile that he almost felt to be sickly. "Now you can see why I'm afraid of you."

"Because I've such illuminations? Why they're all for your help! It's what I told you," she added, "just now.

He fell back once more, settling himself against the parapet as if to hear more about it. "Then get me out!"

Her face fairly brightened for the joy of the appeal, but, as if it were a question of immediate action, she

"Oh nonot that," said poor Strether, looking grave. "I've got to wait for himand I want very much to see

him. But out of the terror. You did put your finger on it a few minutes ago. It's general, but it avails itself of

particular occasions. That's what it's doing for me now. I'm always considering something else; something

else, I mean, than the thing of the moment. The obsession of the other thing is the terror. I'm considering at

She continued to think. "Is it really an 'order' from you?that I shall take the job? WILL you give yourself

Poor Strether heaved his sigh. "If I only could! But that's the deuce of itthat I never can. NoI can't."

"Ah then, if you'll try!"and she took over the job, as she had called it, on the spot. "Trust me!" she

exclaimed, and the action of this, as they retraced their steps, was presently to make him pass his hand into

her arm in the manner of a benign dependent paternal old person who wishes to be "nice" to a younger one. If

he drew it out again indeed as they approached the inn this may have been because, after more talk had

passed between them, the relation of age, or at least of experiencewhich, for that matter, had already

played to and fro with some freedomaffected him as incurring a readjustment. It was at all events perhaps

lucky that they arrived in sufficiently separate fashion within range of the hoteldoor. The young lady they

had left in the glass cage watched as if she had come to await them on the threshold. At her side stood a

person equally interested, by his attitude, in their return, and the effect of the sight of whom was instantly to

determine for Strether another of those responsive arrests that we have had so repeatedly to note. He left it to

Miss Gostrey to name, with the fine full bravado as it almost struck him, of her "Mr. Waymarsh!" what was

to have been, whathe more than ever felt as his short stare of suspended welcome took things inwould

have been, but for herself, his doom. It was already upon him even at that distanceMr. Waymarsh was for

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 moonlightit 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 feltthe 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 hergave him an early illustration of a much shorter course. There was a

certitude he immediately graspeda conviction that Waymarsh would quite fail, as it were, and on whatever

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 halfhour 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 excitementto which

indeed he would have found it difficult instantly to give a namebrought 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

It was latenot 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 moonlighta dream, on Strether's part, of

romantic effects rather prosaically merged in a mere missing of thicker coatshad 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 smokingroom 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 Stretherconsisted, that is, in the detention of the latter for full

discoursethere 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 itor unless Waymarsh himself shouldit 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

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 facea 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 midcentury. He was of the personal typeand it was an element in

the power and promise that in their early time Strether had found in himof 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

gasglaring 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 hima person established in a railwaycoach 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 familygroup, 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 groundsgrounds all handled and numberedfor 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

"Well," said Strether, who fell as much as possible into step, "I guess I don't FEEL sick now that I've started.

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 itbetween 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 washingstand 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 dogtired when I sailed." It had the oddest sound of cheerfulness.

"I was dogtired," 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, Stretherand 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 carsthe 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 hereI want

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?"

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

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

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

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

"Just in thatthat 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

"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.

"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

It made his friendthough rather dimlysmile. "Dear no she's safe, thank goodnessas I think I more and

more feelat home. She thought of coming, but she gave it up. I've come in a manner instead of her; and

come to that extentfor you're right in your inferenceon her business. So you see there IS plenty of

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 afraidyou shall have them

from me: you'll probably find yourself having quite as much of them as you can do with. I shallif we keep

Waymarsh's acknowledgement of this tribute was characteristically indirect. "You mean to say you don't

"I only glance at the danger," Strether paternally said, "because when I hear you wail to go back I seem to see

Waymarsh took itsilent a littlelike 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 coffeeroom; 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 cluba compliment of which she professed a deep appreciation; and he

detained her as pleadingly as if he had alreadyand notably under pressure of the visions of the

nightlearned 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 orangesresponsibilities 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,

They had gone to wait together in the garden for the dressing of the meal, and Strether found her more

"Is to bring about for them such a complexity of relationsunless indeed we call it a simplicity!that the

"Any port will serve in a storm. I'mwith all my other functions an agent for repatriation. I want to

repeople 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

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

"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 formulaI feel quite enough, as I hinted yesterday, your abysses. Spent!" he echoed. "If that's

For a minute, amid the pleasantnesspoetry in tariffed items, but all the more, for guests already convicted,

a challenge to consumptionthey smiled at each other in confirmed fellowship. "Do you call it subtly? It's a

"Oh special casesthat'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 collapseshad 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

fareand quite without his knowing what was the matteras 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

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 placeswhere the lowbrowed galleries were darkest,

the opposite gables queerest, the solicitations of every kind densestthe 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 apologisedbrought 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 shopwindows 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 plateglass of ironmongers and saddlers, while Strether

flaunted an affinity with the dealers in stamped letterpaper 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 lawyerit 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,

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 Stretheras she permitted him at the mostthe 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 representalways for such sensitive ears as were in questionpossibilities 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 Waymarshthat was to say the enemy,

the monster of bulging eyes and farreaching quivering groping tentacleswas exactly society, exactly the

multiplication of shibboleths, exactly the discrimination of types and tones, exactly the wicked old Rows of

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

otherStrether 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 streetview. "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

Strether seemed to make it out, from their position, between the interstices of arrayed watches, of closehung

"Ah that's just whatif he buys anythingI'm afraid of: that I shall see something rather dreadful."

"Not for worlds. Besides we can't. We're paralysed. We exchange a long scared look, we publicly tremble.

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."

"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

"It's magnificent!" said Miss Gostrey to make an end of it. "And you should hear," she added, "the ease I

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

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.

Strether had still his eyes on the jeweller's front, and he waited a moment to answer. "He's a success of a kind

"He makes itto my belief. And I," said Strether, "though with a back quite as bent, have never made

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 today is too

hideous. Look about youlook at the successes. Would you BE one, on your honour? Look, moreover," she

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

"Well, my pastin 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

"Quite as little." Waymarsh was by this time near enough to show signs his friend could read, though he

She had had time to take in their companion's face; and with it, as such things were easy for her, she took in

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.

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 himan 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

Miss Gostrey had dined with him at his hotel, face to face over a small table on which the lighted candles had

rosecoloured shades; and the rosecoloured shades and the small table and the soft fragrance of the

ladyhad 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 jewelhe was rather complacently sure it was

antiqueattached 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

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 itemto 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

actfrivolous, no doubt, idiotic, and above all unexpectedof liking it: he had in addition taken it as a

startingpoint 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 dressvery 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

wearerand it was as "free" a remark as he had ever made to herthat 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 beforeno, literally neverhad 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 faraway 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 thateven 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 boyhe had never taken any one anywhere. It came over him in especialthough the

monition had, as happened, already sounded, fitfully gleamed, in other formsthat 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 himselfgave it simply by saying with

offhand 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

He felt as if the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow of his neighbour, a great stripped handsome

redhaired 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 lessa 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 goodlooking 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 itit 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 handleat least for

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

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 doesdoes 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

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

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

"I'm thinking of his mother," said Strether after a moment. "He has darkened her admirable life." He spoke

"Oh that's of course odious." She had a pause as if for renewed emphasis of this truth, but it ended on another

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."

This promptitudealmost, 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 twentyeight and a

daughter of thirty, in her very first youth. She married, however, extremely young."

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 ISwonderful. But I wasn't thinking of her

appearance," he explained"striking as that doubtless is. I was thinkingwell, 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

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

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 comeeither of them. They're very busy people and Mrs. Newsome in particular has

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."

"No," said Strether, "the other way round. She's at any rate delicate sensitive highstrung. She puts so much

Ah Maria knew these things! "That she has nothing left for anything else? Of course she hasn't. To whom do

you say it? Highstrung? Don't I spend my life, for them, jamming down the pedal? I see moreover how it

"Well," she lucidly returned, "we must from this moment bear on it together with all our might." And she

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

"Noit's exaltation, which is a very different thing. Courage," he, however, accommodatingly threw out, "is

She shook her head. "You say that only to patch me upto 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,

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

"Is more for her than anything else? Yesfar 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."

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

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

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

"Yesa workshop; a great production, a great industry. The concern's a manufactureand 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

makemake 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

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

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 onafter 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 wonderwonder

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 inwhat shall I say? Well, dignity, or the least approach to distinction. Right

"But surely not vulgarer than this." Then on his wondering as she herself had done: "Than everything about

It made between them a pause, which she, however, still fascinated by the mystery of the production at

Woollett, presently broke. "'Rather ridiculous'? Clothespins? Saleratus? Shoepolish?"

It brought him round. "Noyou don't even 'burn.' I don't think, you know, you'll guess it."

"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

unnameableshe could make their abstention enormously definite. There might indeed have been for

"Is it perhaps then because it's so badbecause your industry as you call it, IS so vulgarthat 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 appearwould 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 thatI 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 supplymoney left him by his grandfather, her own

"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 sourcethe apparent and public sourceof his income?"

Strether was able quite goodhumouredly to entertain the proposition. "The source of his grandfather's

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

Her comment on his hesitation was scarce the less marked for being mute. "Thank you. NOW don't you see,"

"But where and when," Strether asked, "is 'THE shame'where is any shametoday? The men I speak

ofthey did as every one does; and (besides being ancient history) it was all a matter of appreciation."

"In the midst of such doingsand, as I understand you, profiting by them, she at least has remained

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

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

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

"Well, I mean YOU." With which she had one of her swift changes of ground. "You say the concern needs

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

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

"Certainly. Woollett has a Reviewwhich 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

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

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

"A Woollett swellbon! I like the idea of a Woollett swell. And you must be rather one too, to be so mixed

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

"I beg your pardonthat'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 refuseheap of

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

"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

"The Review?" He seemed to wonder how he could best describe it. This resulted however but in a sketch.

"Well, she very far. I much less. I don't begin to have her faith. She provides," said Strether, "three fourths of

It evoked somehow a vision of gold that held for a little Miss Gostrey's eyes, and she looked as if she heard

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

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.

He accepted gaily enough the definition. "YesI really think that describes her."

"Ah that doesn't tell me. However, it doesn't matterI know. It's tremendously neata real reproach; quite

"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 ageis 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 expiatewhich is rather

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

"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 themthey 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 fourwheeler; she liked so in London, of

wet nights after wild pleasures, thinking things over, on the return, in lonely fourwheelers. 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

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."

"Than you see in yourself? Very likely. That's always one's right. What I was thinking of," she explained, "is

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

"I see. But there are all the same," she went on, "two quite distinct things thatgiven the wonderful place

he's inmay have happened to him. One is that he may have got brutalised. The other is that he may have

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

"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

"Quite positively. He'll come in for a particular chancea 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, not only. I'm acting with a sense for him of other things too. Consideration and comfort and

securitythe general safety of being anchored by a strong chain. He wants, as I see him, to be protected.

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

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 brotherinlaw's sister. Mrs. Jim's sisterinlaw."

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

"Chad's sisterwho was Sarah Newsome. She's marrieddidn'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

"Why Sally's husband. That's the only way we distinguish people at Woollett," he goodhumoredly

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

Once more their eyes met on it, and she held him an instant. "The green cover won'tnor will ANY

coveravail you with ME. You're of a depth of duplicity!" Still, she could in her own large grasp of the real

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

"Not perhaps with a great deal of thatbut 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

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 themwhat shall I call it? blameless. I mean your young

"So did I!" Strether confessed. "But you strike there a curious factthe 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

She was looking away, still in her vision, and she spoke with impatience and almost as if he hadn't

"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 moreas you're so much betterthan all of us put

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 whatby your successMr. Chad stands to gain. But you've not spoken to

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

Something in the tone of it pulled her up, but as their messenger still delayed she had another chance and she

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 fourwheeler 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?"

She kept him a moment, while his hand was on the door, by not answering; after which she answered by

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

Strether called, his second morning in Paris, on the bankers of the Rue Scribe to whom his letter of credit was

addressed, and he made this visit attended by Waymarsh, in whose company he had crossed from London

two days before. They had hastened to the Rue Scribe on the morrow of their arrival, but Strether had not

then found the letters the hope of which prompted this errand. He had had as yet none at all; hadn't expected

them in London, but had counted on several in Paris, and, disconcerted now, had presently strolled back to

the Boulevard with a sense of injury that he felt himself taking for as good a start as any other. It would serve,

this spur to his spirit, he reflected, as, pausing at the top of the street, he looked up and down the great foreign

avenue, it would serve to begin business with. His idea was to begin business immediately, and it did much

for him the rest of his day that the beginning of business awaited him. He did little else till night but ask

himself what he should do if he hadn't fortunately had so much to do; but he put himself the question in many

different situations and connexions. What carried him hither and yon was an admirable theory that nothing he

could do wouldn't be in some manner related to what he fundamentally had on hand, or WOULD be

should he happen to have a scruplewasted for it. He did happen to have a scruplea scruple about taking

no definite step till he should get letters; but this reasoning carried it off. A single day to feel his feethe had

felt them as yet only at Chester and in Londonwas he could consider, none too much; and having, as he

had often privately expressed it, Paris to reckon with, he threw these hours of freshness consciously into the

reckoning. They made it continually greater, but that was what it had best be if it was to be anything at all,

and he gave himself up till far into the evening, at the theatre and on the return, after the theatre, along the

bright congested Boulevard, to feeling it grow. Waymarsh had accompanied him this time to the play, and the

two men had walked together, as a first stage, from the Gymnase to the Cafe Riche, into the crowded

"terrace" of which establishmentthe night, or rather the morning, for midnight had struck, being bland and

populousthey had wedged themselves for refreshment. Waymarsh, as a result of some discussion with his

friend, had made a marked virtue of his having now let himself go; and there had been elements of

impression in their halfhour over their watered beerglasses that gave him his occasion for conveying that

he held this compromise with his stiffer self to have become extreme. He conveyed itfor it was still, after

all, his stiffer self who gloomed out of the glare of the terracein solemn silence; and there was indeed a

great deal of critical silence, every way, between the companions, even till they gained the Place de l'Opera,

This morning there WERE lettersletters which had reached London, apparently all together, the day of

Strether's journey, and had taken their time to follow him; so that, after a controlled impulse to go into them

in the receptionroom of the bank, which, reminding him of the postoffice at Woollett, affected him as the

abutment of some transatlantic bridge, he slipped them into the pocket of his loose grey overcoat with a sense

of the felicity of carrying them off. Waymarsh, who had had letters yesterday, had had them again today,

and Waymarsh suggested in this particular no controlled impulses. The last one he was at all events likely to

be observed to struggle with was clearly that of bringing to a premature close any visit to the Rue Scribe.

Strether had left him there yesterday; he wanted to see the papers, and he had spent, by what his friend could

make out, a succession of hours with the papers. He spoke of the establishment, with emphasis, as a post of

superior observation; just as he spoke generally of his actual damnable doom as a device for hiding from him

what was going on. Europe was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for dissociating the

confined American from that indispensable knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these

occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs. Strether, on his side, set himself to

walk againhe had his relief in his pocket; and indeed, much as he had desired his budget, the growth of

restlessness might have been marked in him from the moment he had assured himself of the superscription of

most of the missives it contained. This restlessness became therefore his temporary law; he knew he should

recognise as soon as see it the best place of all for settling down with his chief correspondent. He had for the

next hour an accidental air of looking for it in the windows of shops; he came down the Rue de la Paix in the

sun and, passing across the Tuileries and the river, indulged more than onceas if on finding himself

determinedin a sudden pause before the bookstalls of the opposite quay. In the garden of the Tuileries he

had lingered, on two or three spots, to look; it was as if the wonderful Paris spring had stayed him as he

roamed. The prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notesin a soft breeze and a sprinkled smell, in the

light flit, over the gardenfloor, of bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong boxes, in the type of

ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where terracewalls were warm, in the bluefrocked brasslabelled

officialism of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep references of a straightpacing priest or the sharp ones

of a whitegaitered redlegged soldier. He watched little brisk figures, figures whose movement was as the

tick of the great Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from point to point; the air had a taste as of

something mixed with art, something that presented nature as a whitecapped masterchef. The palace was

gone, Strether remembered the palace; and when he gazed into the irremediable void of its site the historic

sense in him might have been freely at playthe play under which in Paris indeed it so often winces like a

touched nerve. He filled out spaces with dim symbols of scenes; he caught the gleam of white statues at the

base of which, with his letters out, he could tilt back a strawbottomed chair. But his drift was, for reasons, to

the other side, and it floated him unspent up the Rue de Seine and as far as the Luxembourg. In the

Luxembourg Gardens he pulled up; here at last he found his nook, and here, on a penny chair from which

terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains, little trees in green tubs, little women in white caps and shrill little girls at

play all sunnily "composed" together, he passed an hour in which the cup of his impressions seemed truly to

overflow. But a week had elapsed since he quitted the ship, and there were more things in his mind than so

few days could account for. More than once, during the time, he had regarded himself as admonished; but the

admonition this morning was formidably sharp. It took as it hadn't done yet the form of a questionthe

question of what he was doing with such an extraordinary sense of escape. This sense was sharpest after he

had read his letters, but that was also precisely why the question pressed. Four of the letters were from Mrs.

Newsome and none of them short; she had lost no time, had followed on his heels while he moved, so

expressing herself that he now could measure the probable frequency with which he should hear. They would

arrive, it would seem, her communications, at the rate of several a week; he should be able to count, it might

even prove, on more than one by each mail. If he had begun yesterday with a small grievance he had

therefore an opportunity to begin today with its opposite. He read the letters successively and slowly,

putting others back into his pocket but keeping these for a long time afterwards gathered in his lap. He held

them there, lost in thought, as if to prolong the presence of what they gave him; or as if at the least to assure

them their part in the constitution of some lucidity. His friend wrote admirably, and her tone was even more

in her style than in her voicehe might almost, for the hour, have had to come this distance to get its full

carrying quality; yet the plentitude of his consciousness of difference consorted perfectly with the deepened

intensity of the connexion. It was the difference, the difference of being just where he was and AS he was,

that formed the escapethis difference was so much greater than he had dreamed it would be; and what he

finally sat there turning over was the strange logic of his finding himself so free. He felt it in a manner his

duty to think out his state, to approve the process, and when he came in fact to trace the steps and add up the

items they sufficiently accounted for the sum. He had never expectedthat was the truth of itagain to find

himself young, and all the years and other things it had taken to make him so were exactly his present

It all sprang at bottom from the beauty of Mrs. Newsome's desire that he should be worried with nothing that

was not of the essence of his task; by insisting that he should thoroughly intermit and break she had so

provided for his freedom that she would, as it were, have only herself to thank. Strether could not at this point

indeed have completed his thought by the image of what she might have to thank herself FOR: the image, at

best, of his own likenesspoor Lambert Strether washed up on the sunny strand by the waves of a single day,

poor Lambert Strether thankful for breathingtime and stiffening himself while he gasped. There he was, and

with nothing in his aspect or his posture to scandalise: it was only true that if he had seen Mrs. Newsome

coming he would instinctively have jumped up to walk away a little. He would have come round and back to

her bravely, but he would have had first to pull himself together. She abounded in news of the situation at

home, proved to him how perfectly she was arranging for his absence, told him who would take up this and

who take up that exactly where he had left it, gave him in fact chapter and verse for the moral that nothing

would suffer. It filled for him, this tone of hers, all the air; yet it struck him at the same time as the hum of

vain things. This latter effect was what he tried to justifyand with the success that, grave though the

appearance, he at last lighted on a form that was happy. He arrived at it by the inevitable recognition of his

having been a fortnight before one of the weariest of men. If ever a man had come off tired Lambert Strether

was that man; and hadn't it been distinctly on the ground of his fatigue that his wonderful friend at home had

so felt for him and so contrived? It seemed to him somehow at these instants that, could he only maintain

with sufficient firmness his grasp of that truth, it might become in a manner his compass and his helm. What

he wanted most was some idea that would simplify, and nothing would do this so much as the fact that he

was done for and finished. If it had been in such a light that he had just detected in his cup the dregs of youth,

that was a mere flaw of the surface of his scheme. He was so distinctly faggedout that it must serve

precisely as his convenience, and if he could but consistently be good for little enough he might do

Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a single boonthe common unattainable art of taking

things as they came. He appeared to himself to have given his best years to an active appreciation of the way

they didn't come; but perhapsas they would seemingly here be things quite otherthis long ache might at

last drop to rest. He could easily see that from the moment he should accept the notion of his foredoomed

collapse the last thing he would lack would be reasons and memories. Oh if he SHOULD do the sum no slate

would hold the figures! The fact that he had failed, as he considered, in everything, in each relation and in

half a dozen trades, as he liked luxuriously to put it, might have made, might still make, for an empty present;

but it stood solidly for a crowded past. It had not been, so much achievement missed, a light yoke nor a short

load.[sic] It was at present as if the backward picture had hung there, the long crooked course, grey in the

shadow of his solitude. It had been a dreadful cheerful sociable solitude, a solitude of life or choice, of

community; but though there had been people enough all round it there had been but three or four persons IN

it. Waymarsh was one of these, and the fact struck him just now as marking the record. Mrs. Newsome was

another, and Miss Gostrey had of a sudden shown signs of becoming a third. Beyond, behind them was the

pale figure of his real youth, which held against its breast the two presences paler than itselfthe young wife

he had early lost and the young son he had stupidly sacrificed. He had again and again made out for himself

that he might have kept his little boy, his little dull boy who had died at school of rapid diphtheria, if he had

not in those years so insanely given himself to merely missing the mother. It was the soreness of his remorse

that the child had in all likelihood not really been dullhad been dull, as he had been banished and

neglected, mainly because the father had been unwittingly selfish. This was doubtless but the secret habit of

sorrow, which had slowly given way to time; yet there remained an ache sharp enough to make the spirit, at

the sight now and again of some fair young man just growing up, wince with the thought of an opportunity

lost. Had ever a man, he had finally fallen into the way of asking himself, lost so much and even done so

much for so little? There had been particular reasons why all yesterday, beyond other days, he should have

had in one ear this cold enquiry. His name on the green cover, where he had put it for Mrs. Newsome,

expressed him doubtless just enough to make the world the world as distinguished, both for more and for

less, from Woollettask who he was. He had incurred the ridicule of having to have his explanation

explained. He was Lambert Strether because he was on the cover, whereas it should have been, for anything

like glory, that he was on the cover because he was Lambert Strether. He would have done anything for Mrs.

Newsome, have been still more ridiculousas he might, for that matter, have occasion to be yet; which came

He judged the quantity as small because it WAS small, and all the more egregiously since it couldn't, as he

saw the case, so much as thinkably have been larger. He hadn't had the gift of making the most of what he

tried, and if he had tried and tried againno one but himself knew how oftenit appeared to have been that

he might demonstrate what else, in default of that, COULD be made. Old ghosts of experiments came back to

him, old drudgeries and delusions, and disgusts, old recoveries with their relapses, old fevers with their chills,

broken moments of good faith, others of still better doubt; adventures, for the most part, of the sort qualified

as lessons. The special spring that had constantly played for him the day before was the

recognitionfrequent enough to surprise himof the promises to himself that he had after his other visit

never kept. The reminiscence today most quickened for him was that of the vow taken in the course of the

pilgrimage that, newlymarried, with the War just over, and helplessly young in spite of it, he had recklessly

made with the creature who was so much younger still. It had been a bold dash, for which they had taken

money set apart for necessities, but kept sacred at the moment in a hundred ways, and in none more so than

by this private pledge of his own to treat the occasion as a relation formed with the higher culture and see

that, as they said at Woollett, it should bear a good harvest. He had believed, sailing home again, that he had

gained something great, and his theorywith an elaborate innocent plan of reading, digesting, coming back

even, every few yearshad then been to preserve, cherish and extend it. As such plans as these had come to

nothing, however, in respect to acquisitions still more precious, it was doubtless little enough of a marvel that

he should have lost account of that handful of seed. Buried for long years in dark corners at any rate these

few germs had sprouted again under fortyeight hours of Paris. The process of yesterday had really been the

process of feeling the general stirred life of connexions long since individually dropped. Strether had become

acquainted even on this ground with short gusts of speculationsudden flights of fancy in Louvre galleries,

hungry gazes through clear plates behind which lemoncoloured volumes were as fresh as fruit on the tree.

There were instants at which he could ask whether, since there had been fundamentally so little question of

his keeping anything, the fate after all decreed for him hadn't been only to BE kept. Kept for something, in

that event, that he didn't pretend, didn't possibly dare as yet to divine; something that made him hover and

wonder and laugh and sigh, made him advance and retreat, feeling half ashamed of his impulse to plunge and

more than half afraid of his impulse to wait. He remembered for instance how he had gone back in the sixties

with lemoncoloured volumes in general on the brain as well as with a dozenselected for his wife tooin

his trunk; and nothing had at the moment shown more confidence than this invocation of the finer taste. They

were still somewhere at home, the dozenstale and soiled and never sent to the binder; but what had become

of the sharp initiation they represented? They represented now the mere sallow paint on the door of the

temple of taste that he had dreamed of raising upa structure he had practically never carried further.

Strether's present highest flights were perhaps those in which this particular lapse figured to him as a symbol,

a symbol of his long grind and his want of odd moments, his want moreover of money, of opportunity, of

positive dignity. That the memory of the vow of his youth should, in order to throb again, have had to wait

for this last, as he felt it, of all his accidentsthat was surely proof enough of how his conscience had been

encumbered. If any further proof were needed it would have been to be found in the fact that, as he perfectly

now saw, he had ceased even to measure his meagreness, a meagreness that sprawled, in this retrospect,

vague and comprehensive, stretching back like some unmapped Hinterland from a rough coastsettlement.

His conscience had been amusing itself for the fortyeight hours by forbidding him the purchase of a book;

he held off from that, held off from everything; from the moment he didn't yet call on Chad he wouldn't for

the world have taken any other step. On this evidence, however, of the way they actually affected him he

glared at the lemoncoloured covers in confession of the subconsciousness that, all the same, in the great

desert of the years, he must have had of them. The green covers at home comprised, by the law of their

purpose, no tribute to letters; it was of a mere rich kernel of economics, politics, ethics that, glazed and, as

Mrs. Newsome maintained rather against HIS view, preeminently pleasant to touch, they formed the

specious shell. Without therefore any needed instinctive knowledge of what was coming out, in Paris, on the

bright highway, he struck himself at present as having more than once flushed with a suspicion: he couldn't

otherwise at present be feeling so many fears confirmed. There were "movements" he was too late for:

weren't they, with the fun of them, already spent? There were sequences he had missed and great gaps in the

procession: he might have been watching it all recede in a golden cloud of dust. If the playhouse wasn't

closed his seat had at least fallen to somebody else. He had had an uneasy feeling the night before that if he

was at the theatre at allthough he indeed justified the theatre, in the specific sense, and with a

grotesqueness to which his imagination did all honour, as something he owed poor Waymarshhe should

This suggested the question of whether he could properly have taken him to such a play, and what effectit

was a point that suddenly rosehis peculiar responsibility might be held in general to have on his choice of

entertainment. It had literally been present to him at the Gymnasewhere one was held moreover

comparatively safethat having his young friend at his side would have been an odd feature of the work of

redemption; and this quite in spite of the fact that the picture presented might well, confronted with Chad's

own private stage, have seemed the pattern of propriety. He clearly hadn't come out in the name of propriety

but to visit unattended equivocal performances; yet still less had he done so to undermine his authority by

sharing them with the graceless youth. Was he to renounce all amusement for the sweet sake of that

authority? and WOULD such renouncement give him for Chad a moral glamour? The little problem bristled

the more by reason of poor Strether's fairly open sense of the irony of things. Were there then sides on which

his predicament threatened to look rather droll to him? Should he have to pretend to believe either to

himself or the wretched boythat there was anything that could make the latter worse? Wasn't some such

pretence on the other hand involved in the assumption of possible processes that would make him better? His

greatest uneasiness seemed to peep at him out of the imminent impression that almost any acceptance of Paris

might give one's authority away. It hung before him this morning, the vast bright Babylon, like some huge

iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences

comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment

seemed all depth the next. It was a place of which, unmistakeably, Chad was fond; wherefore if he, Strether,

should like it too much, what on earth, with such a bond, would become of either of them? It all depended of

coursewhich was a gleam of lighton how the "too much" was measured; though indeed our friend fairly

felt, while he prolonged the meditation I describe, that for himself even already a certain measure had been

reached. It will have been sufficiently seen that he was not a man to neglect any good chance for reflexion.

Was it at all possible for instance to like Paris enough without liking it too much? He luckily however hadn't

promised Mrs. Newsome not to like it at all. He was ready to recognise at this stage that such an engagement

WOULD have tied his hands. The Luxembourg Gardens were incontestably just so adorable at this hour by

reasonin addition to their intrinsic charmof his not having taken it. The only engagement he had taken,

It upset him a little none the less and after a while to find himself at last remembering on what current of

association he had been floated so far. Old imaginations of the Latin Quarter had played their part for him,

and he had duly recalled its having been with this scene of rather ominous legend that, like so many young

men in fiction as well as in fact, Chad had begun. He was now quite out of it, with his "home," as Strether

figured the place, in the Boulevard Malesherbes; which was perhaps why, repairing, not to fail of justice

either, to the elder neighbourhood, our friend had felt he could allow for the element of the usual, the

immemorial, without courting perturbation. He was not at least in danger of seeing the youth and the

particular Person flaunt by together; and yet he was in the very air of whichjust to feel what the early

natural note must have beenhe wished most to take counsel. It became at once vivid to him that he had

originally had, for a few days, an almost envious vision of the boy's romantic privilege. Melancholy Murger,

with Francine and Musette and Rodolphe, at home, in the company of the tattered, oneif he not in his

single self two or threeof the unbound, the papercovered dozen on the shelf; and when Chad had written,

five years ago, after a sojourn then already prolonged to six months, that he had decided to go in for economy

and the real thing, Strether's fancy had quite fondly accompanied him in this migration, which was to convey

him, as they somewhat confusedly learned at Woollett, across the bridges and up the Montagne

SainteGenevieve. This was the regionChad had been quite distinct about itin which the best French,

and many other things, were to be learned at least cost, and in which all sorts of clever fellows, compatriots

there for a purpose, formed an awfully pleasant set. The clever fellows, the friendly countrymen were mainly

young painters, sculptors, architects, medical students; but they were, Chad sagely opined, a much more

profitable lot to be witheven on the footing of not being quite one of themthan the "terrible toughs"

(Strether remembered the edifying discrimination) of the American bars and banks roundabout the Opera.

Chad had thrown out, in the communications following this onefor at that time he did once in a while

communicatethat several members of a band of earnest workers under one of the great artists had taken

him right in, making him dine every night, almost for nothing, at their place, and even pressing him not to

neglect the hypothesis of there being as much "in him" as in any of them. There had been literally a moment

at which it appeared there might be something in him; there had been at any rate a moment at which he had

written that he didn't know but what a month or two more might see him enrolled in some atelier. The season

had been one at which Mrs. Newsome was moved to gratitude for small mercies; it had broken on them all as

a blessing that their absentee HAD perhaps a consciencethat he was sated in fine with idleness, was

ambitious of variety. The exhibition was doubtless as yet not brilliant, but Strether himself, even by that time

much enlisted and immersed, had determined, on the part of the two ladies, a temperate approval and in fact,

But the very next thing that happened had been a dark drop of the curtain. The son and brother had not

browsed long on the Montagne SainteGenevievehis effective little use of the name of which, like his

allusion to the best French, appeared to have been but one of the notes of his rough cunning. The light

refreshment of these vain appearances had not accordingly carried any of them very far. On the other hand it

had gained Chad time; it had given him a chance, unchecked, to strike his roots, had paved the way for

initiations more direct and more deep. It was Strether's belief that he had been comparatively innocent before

this first migration, and even that the first effects of the migration would not have been, without some

particular bad accident, to have been deplored. There had been three monthshe had sufficiently figured it

outin which Chad had wanted to try. He HAD tried, though not very hardhe had had his little hour of

good faith. The weakness of this principle in him was that almost any accident attestedly bad enough was

stronger. Such had at any rate markedly been the case for the precipitation of a special series of impressions.

They had proved, successively, these impressionsall of Musette and Francine, but Musette and Francine

vulgarised by the larger evolution of the typeirresistibly sharp: he had "taken up," by what was at the time

to be shrinkingly gathered, as it was scantly mentioned, with one ferociously "interested" little person after

another. Strether had read somewhere of a Latin motto, a description of the hours, observed on a clock by a

traveller in Spain; and he had been led to apply it in thought to Chad's number one, number two, number

three. Omnes vulnerant, ultima necatthey had all morally wounded, the last had morally killed. The last

had been longest in possessionin possession, that is, of whatever was left of the poor boy's finer mortality.

And it hadn't been she, it had been one of her early predecessors, who had determined the second migration,

the expensive return and relapse, the exchange again, as was fairly to be presumed, of the vaunted best

He pulled himself then at last together for his own progress back; not with the feeling that he had taken his

walk in vain. He prolonged it a little, in the immediate neighbourhood, after he had quitted his chair; and the

upshot of the whole morning for him was that his campaign had begun. He had wanted to put himself in

relation, and he would be hanged if he were NOT in relation. He was that at no moment so much as while,

under the old arches of the Odeon, he lingered before the charming openair array of literature classic and

casual. He found the effect of tone and tint, in the long charged tables and shelves, delicate and appetising;

the impressionsubstituting one kind of lowpriced consommation for anothermight have been that of

one of the pleasant cafes that overlapped, under an awning, to the pavement; but he edged along, grazing the

tables, with his hands firmly behind him. He wasn't there to dip, to consumehe was there to reconstruct. He

wasn't there for his own profitnot, that is, the direct; he was there on some chance of feeling the brush of

the wing of the stray spirit of youth. He felt it in fact, he had it beside him; the old arcade indeed, as his inner

sense listened, gave out the faint sound, as from far off, of the wild waving of wings. They were folded now

over the breasts of buried generations; but a flutter or two lived again in the turned page of shockheaded

slouchhatted loiterers whose young intensity of type, in the direction of pale acuteness, deepened his vision,

and even his appreciation, of racial differences, and whose manipulation of the uncut volume was too often,

however, but a listening at closed doors. He reconstructed a possible groping Chad of three or four years

before, a Chad who had, after all, simplyfor that was the only way to see itbeen too vulgar for his

privilege. Surely it WAS a privilege to have been young and happy just there. Well, the best thing Strether

But his own actual business half an hour later was with a third floor on the Boulevard Malesherbesso much

as that was definite; and the fact of the enjoyment by the thirdfloor windows of a continuous balcony, to

which he was helped by this knowledge, had perhaps something to do with his lingering for five minutes on

the opposite side of the street. There were points as to which he had quite made up his mind, and one of these

bore precisely on the wisdom of the abruptness to which events had finally committed him, a policy that he

was pleased to find not at all shaken as he now looked at his watch and wondered. He HAD announced

himselfsix months before; had written out at least that Chad wasn't to be surprised should he see him some

day turn up. Chad had thereupon, in a few words of rather carefully colourless answer, offered him a general

welcome; and Strether, ruefully reflecting that he might have understood the warning as a hint to hospitality,

a bid for an invitation, had fallen back upon silence as the corrective most to his own taste. He had asked

Mrs. Newsome moreover not to announce him again; he had so distinct an opinion on his attacking his job,

should he attack it at all, in his own way. Not the least of this lady's high merits for him was that he could

absolutely rest on her word. She was the only woman he had known, even at Woollett, as to whom his

conviction was positive that to lie was beyond her art. Sarah Pocock, for instance, her own daughter, though

with social ideals, as they said, in some respects differentSarah who WAS, in her way, aesthetic, had never

refused to human commerce that mitigation of rigour; there were occasions when he had distinctly seen her

apply it. Since, accordingly, at all events, he had had it from Mrs. Newsome that she had, at whatever cost to

her more strenuous view, conformed, in the matter of preparing Chad, wholly to his restrictions, he now

looked up at the fine continuous balcony with a safe sense that if the case had been bungled the mistake was

at least his property. Was there perhaps just a suspicion of that in his present pause on the edge of the

Many things came over him here, and one of them was that he should doubtless presently know whether he

had been shallow or sharp. Another was that the balcony in question didn't somehow show as a convenience

easy to surrender. Poor Strether had at this very moment to recognise the truth that wherever one paused in

Paris the imagination reacted before one could stop it. This perpetual reaction put a price, if one would, on

pauses; but it piled up consequences till there was scarce room to pick one's steps among them. What call had

he, at such a juncture, for example, to like Chad's very house? High broad clearhe was expert enough to

make out in a moment that it was admirably builtit fairly embarrassed our friend by the quality that, as he

would have said, it "sprang" on him. He had struck off the fancy that it might, as a preliminary, be of service

to him to be seen, by a happy accident, from the thirdstory windows, which took all the March sun, but of

what service was it to find himself making out after a moment that the quality "sprung," the quality produced

by measure and balance, the fine relation of part to part and space to space, was probably aided by the

presence of ornament as positive as it was discreet, and by the complexion of the stone, a cold fair grey,

warmed and polished a little by lifeneither more nor less than a case of distinction, such a case as he could

only feel unexpectedly as a sort of delivered challenge? Meanwhile, however, the chance he had allowed

forthe chance of being seen in time from the balconyhad become a fact. Two or three of the windows

stood open to the violet air; and, before Strether had cut the knot by crossing, a young man had come out and

looked about him, had lighted a cigarette and tossed the match over, and then, resting on the rail, had given

himself up to watching the life below while he smoked. His arrival contributed, in its order, to keeping

Strether in position; the result of which in turn was that Strether soon felt himself noticed. The young man

This was interesting so far as it went, but the interest was affected by the young man's not being Chad.

Strether wondered at first if he were perhaps Chad altered, and then saw that this was asking too much of

alteration. The young man was light bright and alertwith an air too pleasant to have been arrived at by

patching. Strether had conceived Chad as patched, but not beyond recognition. He was in presence, he felt, of

amendments enough as they stood; it was a sufficient amendment that the gentleman up there should be

Chad's friend. He was young too then, the gentleman up therehe was very young; young enough

apparently to be amused at an elderly watcher, to be curious even to see what the elderly watcher would do

on finding himself watched. There was youth in that, there was youth in the surrender to the balcony, there

was youth for Strether at this moment in everything but his own business; and Chad's thus pronounced

association with youth had given the next instant an extraordinary quick lift to the issue. The balcony, the

distinguished front, testified suddenly, for Strether's fancy, to something that was up and up; they placed the

whole case materially, and as by an admirable image, on a level that he found himself at the end of another

moment rejoicing to think he might reach. The young man looked at him still, he looked at the young man;

and the issue, by a rapid process, was that this knowledge of a perched privacy appeared to him the last of

luxuries. To him too the perched privacy was open, and he saw it now but in one lightthat of the only

domicile, the only fireside, in the great ironic city, on which he had the shadow of a claim. Miss Gostrey had

a fireside; she had told him of it, and it was something that doubtless awaited him; but Miss Gostrey hadn't

yet arrivedshe mightn't arrive for days; and the sole attenuation of his excluded state was his vision of the

small, the admittedly secondary hotel in the byestreet from the Rue de la Paix, in which her solicitude for

his purse had placed him, which affected him somehow as all indoor chill, glassroofed court and slippery

staircase, and which, by the same token, expressed the presence of Waymarsh even at times when Waymarsh

might have been certain to be round at the bank. It came to pass before he moved that Waymarsh, and

Waymarsh alone, Waymarsh not only undiluted but positively strengthened, struck him as the present

alternative to the young man in the balcony. When he did move it was fairly to escape that alternative. Taking

his way over the street at last and passing through the portecochere of the house was like consciously

Strether told Waymarsh all about it that very evening, on their dining together at the hotel; which needn't

have happened, he was all the while aware, hadn't he chosen to sacrifice to this occasion a rarer opportunity.

The mention to his companion of the sacrifice was moreover exactly what introduced his recitalor, as he

would have called it with more confidence in his interlocutor, his confession. His confession was that he had

been captured and that one of the features of the affair had just failed to be his engaging himself on the spot

to dinner. As by such a freedom Waymarsh would have lost him he had obeyed his scruple; and he had

likewise obeyed another scruplewhich bore on the question of his himself bringing a guest.

Waymarsh looked gravely ardent, over the finished soup, at this array of scruples; Strether hadn't yet got

quite used to being so unprepared for the consequences of the impression he produced. It was comparatively

easy to explain, however, that he hadn't felt sure his guest would please. The person was a young man whose

acquaintance he had made but that afternoon in the course of rather a hindered enquiry for another

personan enquiry his new friend had just prevented in fact from being vain. "Oh," said Strether, "I've all

sorts of things to tell you!"and he put it in a way that was a virtual hint to Waymarsh to help him to enjoy

the telling. He waited for his fish, he drank of his wine, he wiped his long moustache, he leaned back in his

chair, he took in the two English ladies who had just creaked past them and whom he would even have

articulately greeted if they hadn't rather chilled the impulse; so that all he could do wasby way of doing

somethingto say "Merci, Francois!" out quite loud when his fish was brought. Everything was there that he

wanted, everything that could make the moment an occasion, that would do beautifullyeverything but what

Waymarsh might give. The little waxed salleamanger was sallow and sociable; Francois, dancing over it,

all smiles, was a man and a brother; the highshouldered patronne, with her highheld, muchrubbed hands,

seemed always assenting exuberantly to something unsaid; the Paris evening in short was, for Strether, in the

very taste of the soup, in the goodness, as he was innocently pleased to think it, of the wine, in the pleasant

coarse texture of the napkin and the crunch of the thickcrusted bread. These all were things congruous with

his confession, and his confession was that he HAD it would come out properly just there if Waymarsh

would only take it properlyagreed to breakfast out, at twelve literally, the next day. He didn't quite know

where; the delicacy of the case came straight up in the remembrance of his new friend's "We'll see; I'll take

you somewhere!"for it had required little more than that, after all, to let him right in. He was affected after

a minute, face to face with his actual comrade, by the impulse to overcolour. There had already been things in

respect to which he knew himself tempted by this perversity. If Waymarsh thought them bad he should at

least have his reason for his discomfort; so Strether showed them as worse. Still, he was now, in his way,

Chad had been absent from the Boulevard Malesherbeswas absent from Paris altogether; he had learned

that from the concierge, but had nevertheless gone up, and gone upthere were no two ways about itfrom

an uncontrollable, a really, if one would, depraved curiosity. The concierge had mentioned to him that a

friend of the tenant of the troisieme was for the time in possession; and this had been Strether's pretext for a

further enquiry, an experiment carried on, under Chad's roof, without his knowledge. "I found his friend in

fact there keeping the place warm, as he called it, for him; Chad himself being, as appears, in the south. He

went a month ago to Cannes and though his return begins to be looked for it can't be for some days. I might,

you see, perfectly have waited a week; might have beaten a retreat as soon as I got this essential knowledge.

But I beat no retreat; I did the opposite; I stayed, I dawdled, I trifled; above all I looked round. I saw, in fine;

and I don't know what to call itI sniffed. It's a detail, but it's as if there were somethingsomething

Waymarsh's face had shown his friend an attention apparently so remote that the latter was slightly surprised

Waymarsh waited an instant for more, then resumed. "Has he taken her off with him?"

"And will he bring her back?"Strether fell into the enquiry. But he wound it up as before. "I don't know."

The way he wound it up, accompanied as this was with another drop back, another degustation of the

Leoville, another wipe of his moustache and another good word for Francois, seemed to produce in his

"Well," said Strether almost gaily, "I guess I don't know anything!" His gaiety might have been a tribute to

the fact that the state he had been reduced to did for him again what had been done by his talk of the matter

with Miss Gostrey at the London theatre. It was somehow enlarging; and the air of that amplitude was now

doubtless more or lessand all for Waymarsh to feelin his further response. "That's what I found out from

"It's just," said Strether, "what I've come to you to help me to discover. I mean anything about anything over

here. I FELT that, up there. It regularly rose before me in its might. The young man moreoverChad's

"As good as told you you know nothing about anything?" Waymarsh appeared to look at some one who

"Oh I took a good deal moresince, as I tell you, I took an invitation to dejeuner."

"If you'll come with me. He wants you too, you know. I told him about you. He gave me his card," Strether

pursued, "and his name's rather funny. It's John Little Bilham, and he says his two surnames are, on account

"Well," Waymarsh asked with due detachment from these details, "what's he doing up there?"

"His account of himself is that he's 'only a little artistman.' That seemed to me perfectly to describe him. But

he's yet in the phase of study; this, you know, is the great artschoolto pass a certain number of years in

which he came over. And he's a great friend of Chad's, and occupying Chad's rooms just now because they're

so pleasant. HE'S very pleasant and curious too," Strether added"though he's not from Boston."

Strether thought. "I don't know that, either. But he's 'notoriously,' as he put it himself, not from Boston."

"Well," Waymarsh moralised from dry depths, "every one can't notoriously be from Boston. Why," he

"Perhaps just for THATfor one thing! But really," Strether added, "for everything. When you meet him

"Oh I don't want to meet him," Waymarsh impatiently growled. "Why don't he go home?"

This appeared in particular more than Waymarsh could bear. "He ought then to be ashamed of himself, and,

Strether's reply again took time. "Perhaps I do think so myself though I don't quite yet admit it. I'm not a

bit sureit's again one of the things I want to find out. I liked him, and CAN you like people? But no

matter." He pulled himself up. "There's no doubt I want you to come down on me and squash me."

Waymarsh helped himself to the next course, which, however proving not the dish he had just noted as

supplied to the English ladies, had the effect of causing his imagination temporarily to wander. But it

presently broke out at a softer spot. "Have they got a handsome place up there?"

"Oh a charming place; full of beautiful and valuable things. I never saw such a place"and Strether's

thought went back to it. "For a little artistman!" He could in fact scarce express it.

"Well, life can hold nothing better. Besides, they're things of which he's in charge."

"So that he does doorkeeper for your precious pair? Can life," Waymarsh enquired, "hold nothing better than

THAT?" Then as Strether, silent, seemed even yet to wonder, "Doesn't he know what SHE is?" he went on.

"I don't know. I didn't ask him. I couldn't. It was impossible. You wouldn't either. Besides I didn't want to. No

more would you." Strether in short explained it at a stroke. "You can't make out over here what people do

As, however, this last assertion caused Waymarsh again to look at him hardsuch being the latter's doubt of

its implicationshe felt his justification lame. Which was still more the case when Waymarsh presently said:

"Nodamn your tone. I mean your nosing round. Quit the whole job. Let them stew in their juice. You're

being used for a thing you ain't fit for. People don't take a finetooth comb to groom a horse."

"Am I a finetooth comb?" Strether laughed. "It's something I never called myself!"

"It's what you are, all the same. You ain't so young as you were, but you've kept your teeth."

He acknowledged his friend's humour. "Take care I don't get them into YOU! You'd like them, my friends at

home, Waymarsh," he declared; "you'd really particularly like them. And I know"it was slightly irrelevant,

Yet Strether still lingered with his hands in his pockets. "It's really quite as indispensable as I say that Chad

It might be merciless, but he continued not to flinch. "I think it might have some effect on our personal

understanding. Chad's of real importanceor can easily become so if he willto the business."

"Well, I naturally want what my future wife wants. And the thing will be much better if we have our own

"If you have your own man in it, in other words," Waymarsh said, "you'll marryyou personallymore

money. She's already rich, as I understand you, but she'll be richer still if the business can be made to boom

"I haven't laid them down," Strether promptly returned. "Mr. Newsome who knew extraordinarily well

Oh well, Waymarsh seemed to indicate with a shake of his mane, THAT didn't matter! "You're fierce for the

His friend weighed a moment in silence the justice of the charge. "I can scarcely be called fierce, I think,

when I so freely take my chance of the possibility, the danger, of being influenced in a sense counter to Mrs.

Waymarsh gave this proposition a long hard look. "I see. You're afraid yourself of being squared. But you're

"Yes, you ask me for protectionwhich makes you very interesting; and then you won't take it. You say you

"Ah but not so easily! Don't you see," Strether demanded "where my interest, as already shown you, lies? It

lies in my not being squared. If I'm squared where's my marriage? If I miss my errand I miss that; and if I

Waymarshbut all relentlesslytook this in. "What do I care where you are if you're spoiled?"

Their eyes met on it an instant. "Thank you awfully," Strether at last said. "But don't you think HER

It kept them again face to face, and the end of this was that Strether again laughed. "You do her injustice.

He breakfasted with Mr. Bilham on the morrow, and, as inconsequently befell, with Waymarsh massively of

the party. The latter announced, at the eleventh hour and much to his friend's surprise, that, damn it, he would

as soon join him as do anything else; on which they proceeded together, strolling in a state of detachment

practically luxurious for them to the Boulevard Malesherbes, a couple engaged that day with the sharp spell

of Paris as confessedly, it might have been seen, as any couple among the daily thousands so compromised.

They walked, wandered, wondered and, a little, lost themselves; Strether hadn't had for years so rich a

consciousness of timea bag of gold into which he constantly dipped for a handful. It was present to him

that when the little business with Mr. Bilham should be over he would still have shining hours to use

absolutely as he liked. There was no great pulse of haste yet in this process of saving Chad; nor was that

effect a bit more marked as he sat, half an hour later, with his legs under Chad's mahogany, with Mr. Bilham

on one side, with a friend of Mr. Bilham's on the other, with Waymarsh stupendously opposite, and with the

great hum of Paris coming up in softness, vaguenessfor Strether himself indeed already positive

sweetnessthrough the sunny windows toward which, the day before, his curiosity had raised its wings from

below. The feeling strongest with him at that moment had borne fruit almost faster than he could taste it, and

Strether literally felt at the present hour that there was a precipitation in his fate. He had known nothing and

nobody as he stood in the street; but hadn't his view now taken a bound in the direction of every one and of

"What's he up to, what's he up to?"something like that was at the back of his head all the while in respect

to little Bilham; but meanwhile, till he should make out, every one and every thing were as good as

represented for him by the combination of his host and the lady on his left. The lady on his left, the lady thus

promptly and ingeniously invited to "meet" Mr. Strether and Mr. Waymarshit was the way she herself

expressed her casewas a very marked person, a person who had much to do with our friend's asking

himself if the occasion weren't in its essence the most baited, the most gilded of traps. Baited it could

properly be called when the repast was of so wise a savour, and gilded surrounding objects seemed inevitably

to need to be when Miss Barracewhich was the lady's namelooked at them with convex Parisian eyes

and through a glass with a remarkably long tortoiseshell handle. Why Miss Barrace, mature meagre erect

and eminently gay, highly adorned, perfectly familiar, freely contradictions and reminding him of some

lastcentury portrait of a clever head without powderwhy Miss Barrace should have been in particular the

note of a "trap" Strether couldn't on the spot have explained; he blinked in the light of a conviction that he

should know later on, and know wellas it came over him, for that matter, with force, that he should need

to. He wondered what he was to think exactly of either of his new friends; since the young man, Chad's

intimate and deputy, had, in thus constituting the scene, practised so much more subtly than he had been

prepared for, and since in especial Miss Barrace, surrounded clearly by every consideration, hadn't scrupled

to figure as a familiar object. It was interesting to him to feel that he was in the presence of new measures,

other standards, a different scale of relations, and that evidently here were a happy pair who didn't think of

things at all as he and Waymarsh thought. Nothing was less to have been calculated in the business than that

The latter was magnificentthis at least was an assurance privately given him by Miss Barrace. "Oh your

friend's a type, the grand old Americanwhat shall one call it? The Hebrew prophet, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, who

used when I was a little girl in the Rue Montaigne to come to see my father and who was usually the

American Minister to the Tuileries or some other court. I haven't seen one these ever so many years; the sight

of it warms my poor old chilled heart; this specimen is wonderful; in the right quarter, you know, he'll have a

succes fou." Strether hadn't failed to ask what the right quarter might be, much as he required his presence of

mind to meet such a change in their scheme. "Oh the artistquarter and that kind of thing; HERE already, for

instance, as you see." He had been on the point of echoing "'Here'?is THIS the artistquarter?" but she had

already disposed of the question with a wave of all her tortoiseshell and an easy "Bring him to ME!" He

knew on the spot how little he should be able to bring him, for the very air was by this time, to his sense,

thick and hot with poor Waymarsh's judgement of it. He was in the trap still more than his companion and,

unlike his companion, not making the best of it; which was precisely what doubtless gave him his admirable

sombre glow. Little did Miss Barrace know that what was behind it was his grave estimate of her own laxity.

The general assumption with which our two friends had arrived had been that of finding Mr. Bilham ready to

conduct them to one or other of those resorts of the earnest, the aesthetic fraternity which were shown among

the sights of Paris. In this character it would have justified them in a proper insistence on discharging their

score. Waymarsh's only proviso at the last had been that nobody should pay for him; but he found himself, as

the occasion developed, paid for on a scale as to which Strether privately made out that he already nursed

retribution. Strether was conscious across the table of what worked in him, conscious when they passed back

to the small salon to which, the previous evening, he himself had made so rich a reference; conscious most of

all as they stepped out to the balcony in which one would have had to be an ogre not to recognise the perfect

place for easy aftertastes. These things were enhanced for Miss Barrace by a succession of excellent

cigarettesacknowledged, acclaimed, as a part of the wonderful supply left behind him by Chadin an

almost equal absorption of which Strether found himself blindly, almost wildly pushing forward. He might

perish by the sword as well as by famine, and he knew that his having abetted the lady by an excess that was

rare with him would count for little in the sumas Waymarsh might so easily add it upof her licence.

Waymarsh had smoked of old, smoked hugely; but Waymarsh did nothing now, and that gave him his

advantage over people who took things up lightly just when others had laid them heavily down. Strether had

never smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted at his friend that this had been only because of a reason. The

reason, it now began to appear even to himself, was that he had never had a lady to smoke with.

It was this lady's being there at all, however, that was the strange free thing; perhaps, since she WAS there,

her smoking was the least of her freedoms. If Strether had been sure at each juncture of whatwith Bilham

in especialshe talked about, he might have traced others and winced at them and felt Waymarsh wince; but

he was in fact so often at sea that his sense of the range of reference was merely general and that he on

several different occasions guessed and interpreted only to doubt. He wondered what they meant, but there

were things he scarce thought they could be supposed to mean, and "Oh nonot THAT!" was at the end of

most of his ventures. This was the very beginning with him of a condition as to which, later on, it will be

seen, he found cause to pull himself up; and he was to remember the moment duly as the first step in a

process. The central fact of the place was neither more nor less, when analysedand a pressure superficial

sufficedthan the fundamental impropriety of Chad's situation, round about which they thus seemed

cynically clustered. Accordingly, since they took it for granted, they took for granted all that was in

connexion with it taken for granted at Woollettmatters as to which, verily, he had been reduced with Mrs.

Newsome to the last intensity of silence. That was the consequence of their being too bad to be talked about,

and was the accompaniment, by the same token, of a deep conception of their badness. It befell therefore that

when poor Strether put it to himself that their badness was ultimately, or perhaps even insolently, what such a

scene as the one before him was, so to speak, built upon, he could scarce shirk the dilemma of reading a

roundabout echo of them into almost anything that came up. This, he was well aware, was a dreadful

necessity; but such was the stern logic, he could only gather, of a relation to the irregular life.

It was the way the irregular life sat upon Bilham and Miss Barrace that was the insidious, the delicate marvel.

He was eager to concede that their relation to it was all indirect, for anything else in him would have shown

the grossness of bad manners; but the indirectness was none the less consonantTHAT was strikingwith a

grateful enjoyment of everything that was Chad's. They spoke of him repeatedly, invoking his good name and

good nature, and the worst confusion of mind for Strether was that all their mention of him was of a kind to

do him honour. They commended his munificence and approved his taste, and in doing so sat down, as it

seemed to Strether, in the very soil out of which these things flowered. Our friend's final predicament was

that he himself was sitting down, for the time, WITH them, and there was a supreme moment at which,

compared with his collapse, Waymarsh's erectness affected him as really high. One thing was certainhe

saw he must make up his mind. He must approach Chad, must wait for him, deal with him, master him, but

he mustn't dispossess himself of the faculty of seeing things as they were. He must bring him to HIMnot

go himself, as it were, so much of the way. He must at any rate be clearer as to what should he continue to

do that for conveniencehe was still condoning. It was on the detail of this quantityand what could the

fact be but mystifying?that Bilham and Miss Barrace threw so little light. So there they were.

When Miss Gostrey arrived, at the end of a week, she made him a sign; he went immediately to see her, and it

wasn't till then that he could again close his grasp on the idea of a corrective. This idea however was luckily

all before him again from the moment he crossed the threshold of the little entresol of the Quartier Marboeuf

into which she had gathered, as she said, picking them up in a thousand flights and funny little passionate

pounces, the makings of a final nest. He recognised in an instant that there really, there only, he should find

the boon with the vision of which he had first mounted Chad's stairs. He might have been a little scared at the

picture of how much more, in this place, he should know himself "in" hadn't his friend been on the spot to

measure the amount to his appetite. Her compact and crowded little chambers, almost dusky, as they at first

struck him, with accumulations, represented a supreme general adjustment to opportunities and conditions.

Wherever he looked he saw an old ivory or an old brocade, and he scarce knew where to sit for fear of a

misappliance. The life of the occupant struck him of a sudden as more charged with possession even than

Chad's or than Miss Barrace's; wide as his glimpse had lately become of the empire of "things," what was

before him still enlarged it; the lust of the eyes and the pride of life had indeed thus their temple. It was the

innermost nook of the shrineas brown as a pirate's cave. In the brownness were glints of gold; patches of

purple were in the gloom; objects all that caught, through the muslin, with their high rarity, the light of the

low windows. Nothing was clear about them but that they were precious, and they brushed his ignorance with

their contempt as a flower, in a liberty taken with him, might have been whisked under his nose. But after a

full look at his hostess he knew none the less what most concerned him. The circle in which they stood

together was warm with life, and every question between them would live there as nowhere else. A question

came up as soon as they had spoken, for his answer, with a laugh, was quickly: "Well, they've got hold of

me!" Much of their talk on this first occasion was his development of that truth. He was extraordinarily glad

to see her, expressing to her frankly what she most showed him, that one might live for years without a

blessing unsuspected, but that to know it at last for no more than three days was to need it or miss it for ever.

She was the blessing that had now become his need, and what could prove it better than that without her he

"What do you mean?" she asked with an absence of alarm that, correcting him as if he had mistaken the

"period" of one of her pieces, gave him afresh a sense of her easy movement through the maze he had but

"Ah that sort of thing was of the essence of your case and to have been allowed for from the first." And it was

only after this that, quite as a minor matter, she asked who in the world little Bilham might be. When she

learned that he was a friend of Chad's and living for the time in Chad's rooms in Chad's absence, quite as if

acting in Chad's spirit and serving Chad's cause, she showed, however, more interest. "Should you mind my

"Never in the world! We escape that with a perfection! I feel it to be largely, no doubt, because I don't

halfunderstand him; but our modus vivendi isn't spoiled even by that. You must dine with me to meet him,"

"Dear nothey seem to cost so little. But that I do it to THEM. I ought to hold off."

She thought againshe laughed. "The money you must be spending to think it cheap! But I must be out of

He looked for a moment as if she were really failing him. "Then you won't meet them?" It was almost as if

"Why little Bilham to begin with." He kept back for the moment Miss Barrace. "And Chadwhen he

"When Bilham has had time to write him, and hear from him about me. Bilham, however," he pursued, "will

report favourably favourably for Chad. That will make him not afraid to come. I want you the more

"Oh you'll do yourself for your bluff." She was perfectly easy. "At the rate you've gone I'm quiet."

He let her, with this, however ruefully, have the whole truth. "I haven't yet found a single thing."

"Of the sort I came out about?" Strether took a moment. "How do I know? And what do I care?"

"Oh oh!"and her laughter spread. He was struck in fact by the effect on her of his joke. He saw now how

he meant it as a joke. SHE saw, however, still other things, though in an instant she had hidden them. "You've

"Ah that, in Paris," she quickly returned, "proves nothing. That is rather it DISproves nothing. They may very

well, you see, the people your mission is concerned with, have done it FOR him."

"Exactly. And it was on the scene of their doings then that Waymarsh and I sat guzzling."

"Oh if you forbore to guzzle here on scenes of doings," she replied, "you might easily die of starvation." With

"Ah I've EVERYTHING before me. But on our hypothesis, you know, they must be wonderful."

"They ARE!" said Miss Gostrey. "You're not therefore, you see," she added, "wholly without facts. They've

To have got at something comparatively definite appeared at last a little to helpa wave by which moreover,

the next moment, recollection was washed. "My young man does admit furthermore that they're our friend's

He had bent, with neared glasses, over a group of articles on a small stand; and at this he came up. "It was a

mere allusion, but, on the lookout as I was, it struck me. 'Awful, you know, as Chad is'those were Bilham's

"'Awful, you know'? Oh!"and Miss Gostrey turned them over. She seemed, however, satisfied. "Well,

He glanced once more at a bibelot or two, and everything sent him back. "But it is all the same as if they

"Why what I speak of. The amenity. They can stun you with that as well as with anything else."

"Oh," she answered, "you'll come round! I must see them each," she went on, "for myself. I mean Mr. Bilham

and Mr. NewsomeMr. Bilham naturally first. Once onlyonce for each; that will do. But face to

facefor half an hour. What's Mr. Chad," she immediately pursued, "doing at Cannes? Decent men don't go

"No, elsewhere, but not to Cannes. Cannes is different. Cannes is better. Cannes is best. I mean it's all people

you knowwhen you do know them. And if HE does, why that's different too. He must have gone alone.

"I haven't," Strether confessed in his weakness, "the least idea." There seemed much in what she said, but he

was able after a little to help her to a nearer impression. The meeting with little Bilham took place, by easy

arrangement, in the great gallery of the Louvre; and when, standing with his fellow visitor before one of the

splendid Titiansthe overwhelming portrait of the young man with the strangelyshaped glove and the

bluegrey eyeshe turned to see the third member of their party advance from the end of the waxed and

gilded vista, he had a sense of having at last taken hold. He had agreed with Miss Gostreyit dated even

from Chesterfor a morning at the Louvre, and he had embraced independently the same idea as thrown out

by little Bilham, whom he had already accompanied to the museum of the Luxembourg. The fusion of these

schemes presented no difficulty, and it was to strike him again that in little Bilham's company contrarieties in

"Oh he's all righthe's one of US!" Miss Gostrey, after the first exchange, soon found a chance to murmur to

her companion; and Strether, as they proceeded and paused and while a quick unanimity between the two

appeared to have phrased itself in half a dozen remarksStrether knew that he knew almost immediately

what she meant, and took it as still another sign that he had got his job in hand. This was the more grateful to

him that he could think of the intelligence now serving him as an acquisition positively new. He wouldn't

have known even the day before what she meantthat is if she meant, what he assumed, that they were

intense Americans together. He had just worked roundand with a sharper turn of the screw than any

yetto the conception of an American intense as little Bilham was intense. The young man was his first

specimen; the specimen had profoundly perplexed him; at present however there was light. It was by little

Bilham's amazing serenity that he had at first been affected, but he had inevitably, in his circumspection, felt

it as the trail of the serpent, the corruption, as he might conveniently have said, of Europe; whereas the

promptness with which it came up for Miss Gostrey but as a special little form of the oldest thing they knew

justified it at once to his own vision as well. He wanted to be able to like his specimen with a clear good

conscience, and this fully permitted it. What had muddled him was precisely the small artistman's way it

was so completeof being more American than anybody. But it now for the time put Strether vastly at his

The amiable youth then looked out, as it had first struck Strether, at a world in respect to which he hadn't a

prejudice. The one our friend most instantly missed was the usual one in favour of an occupation accepted.

Little Bilham had an occupation, but it was only an occupation declined; and it was by his general exemption

from alarm, anxiety or remorse on this score that the impression of his serenity was made. He had come out

to Paris to paintto fathom, that is, at large, that mystery; but study had been fatal to him so far as anything

COULD be fatal, and his productive power faltered in proportion as his knowledge grew. Strether had

gathered from him that at the moment of his finding him in Chad's rooms he hadn't saved from his shipwreck

a scrap of anything but his beautiful intelligence and his confirmed habit of Paris. He referred to these things

with an equal fond familiarity, and it was sufficiently clear that, as an outfit, they still served him. They were

charming to Strether through the hour spent at the Louvre, where indeed they figured for him as an

unseparated part of the charged iridescent air, the glamour of the name, the splendour of the space, the colour

of the masters. Yet they were present too wherever the young man led, and the day after the visit to the

Louvre they hung, in a different walk, about the steps of our party. He had invited his companions to cross

the river with him, offering to show them his own poor place; and his own poor place, which was very poor,

gave to his idiosyncrasies, for Stretherthe small sublime indifference and independences that had struck

the latter as freshan odd and engaging dignity. He lived at the end of an alley that went out of an old short

cobbled street, a street that went in turn out of a new long smooth avenuestreet and avenue and alley

having, however, in common a sort of social shabbiness; and he introduced them to the rather cold and blank

little studio which he had lent to a comrade for the term of his elegant absence. The comrade was another

ingenuous compatriot, to whom he had wired that tea was to await them "regardless," and this reckless repast,

and the second ingenuous compatriot, and the faraway makeshift life, with its jokes and its gaps, its delicate

daubs and its three or four chairs, its overflow of taste and conviction and its lack of nearly all elsethese

things wove round the occasion a spell to which our hero unreservedly surrendered.

He liked the ingenuous compatriotsfor two or three others soon gathered; he liked the delicate daubs and

the free discriminationsinvolving references indeed, involving enthusiasms and execrations that made him,

as they said, sit up; he liked above all the legend of goodhumoured poverty, of mutual accommodation

fairly raised to the romantic, that he soon read into the scene. The ingenuous compatriots showed a candour,

he thought, surpassing even the candour of Woollett; they were redhaired and longlegged, they were

quaint and queer and dear and droll; they made the place resound with the vernacular, which he had never

known so marked as when figuring for the chosen language, he must suppose, of contemporary art. They

twanged with a vengeance the aesthetic lyrethey drew from it wonderful airs. This aspect of their life had

an admirable innocence; and he looked on occasion at Maria Gostrey to see to what extent that element

reached her. She gave him however for the hour, as she had given him the previous day, no further sign than

to show how she dealt with boys; meeting them with the air of old Parisian practice that she had for every

one, for everything, in turn. Wonderful about the delicate daubs, masterful about the way to make tea, trustful

about the legs of chairs and familiarly reminiscent of those, in the other time, the named, the numbered or the

caricatured, who had flourished or failed, disappeared or arrived, she had accepted with the best grace her

second course of little Bilham, and had said to Strether, the previous afternoon on his leaving them, that,

since her impression was to be renewed, she would reserve judgement till after the new evidence.

The new evidence was to come, as it proved, in a day or two. He soon had from Maria a message to the effect

that an excellent box at the Francais had been lent her for the following night; it seeming on such occasions

not the least of her merits that she was subject to such approaches. The sense of how she was always paying

for something in advance was equalled on Strether's part only by the sense of how she was always being paid;

all of which made for his consciousness, in the larger air, of a lively bustling traffic, the exchange of such

values as were not for him to handle. She hated, he knew, at the French play, anything but a boxjust as she

hated at the English anything but a stall; and a box was what he was already in this phase girding himself to

press upon her. But she had for that matter her community with little Bilham: she too always, on the great

issues, showed as having known in time. It made her constantly beforehand with him and gave him mainly

the chance to ask himself how on the day of their settlement their account would stand. He endeavoured even

now to keep it a little straight by arranging that if he accepted her invitation she should dine with him first;

but the upshot of this scruple was that at eight o'clock on the morrow he awaited her with Waymarsh under

the pillared portico. She hadn't dined with him, and it was characteristic of their relation that she had made

him embrace her refusal without in the least understanding it. She ever caused her rearrangements to affect

him as her tenderest touches. It was on that principle for instance that, giving him the opportunity to be

amiable again to little Bilham, she had suggested his offering the young man a seat in their box. Strether had

dispatched for this purpose a small blue missive to the Boulevard Malesherbes, but up to the moment of their

passing into the theatre he had received no response to his message. He held, however, even after they had

been for some time conveniently seated, that their friend, who knew his way about, would come in at his own

right moment. His temporary absence moreover seemed, as never yet, to make the right moment for Miss

Gostrey. Strether had been waiting till tonight to get back from her in some mirrored form her impressions

and conclusions. She had elected, as they said, to see little Bilham once; but now she had seen him twice and

Waymarsh meanwhile sat opposite him with their hostess between; and Miss Gostrey spoke of herself as an

instructor of youth introducing her little charges to a work that was one of the glories of literature. The glory

was happily unobjectionable, and the little charges were candid; for herself she had travelled that road and

she merely waited on their innocence. But she referred in due time to their absent friend, whom it was clear

they should have to give up. "He either won't have got your note," she said, "or you won't have got his: he has

had some kind of hindrance, and, of course, for that matter, you know, a man never writes about coming to a

box." She spoke as if, with her look, it might have been Waymarsh who had written to the youth, and the

latter's face showed a mixture of austerity and anguish. She went on however as if to meet this. "He's far and

"Why of all the long processionthe boys, the girls, or the old men and old women as they sometimes really

are; the hope, as one may say, of our country. They've all passed, year after year; but there has been no one in

particular I've ever wanted to stop. I feeldon't YOU?that I want to stop little Bilham; he's so exactly

right as he is." She continued to talk to Waymarsh. "He's too delightful. If he'll only not spoil it! But they

"I don't think Waymarsh knows," Strether said after a moment, "quite what it's open to Bilham to spoil."

"It can't be a good American," Waymarsh lucidly enough replied; "for it didn't strike me the young man had

"Ah," Miss Gostrey sighed, "the name of the good American is as easily given as taken away! What IS it, to

begin with, to BE one, and what's the extraordinary hurry? Surely nothing that's so pressing was ever so little

defined. It's such an order, really, that before we cook you the dish we must at least have your receipt.

Besides the poor chicks have time! What I've seen so often spoiled," she pursued, "is the happy attitude itself,

the state of faith andwhat shall I call it?the sense of beauty. You're right about him"she now took in

Strether; "little Bilham has them to a charm, we must keep little Bilham along." Then she was all again for

Waymarsh. "The others have all wanted so dreadfully to do something, and they've gone and done it in too

many cases indeed. It leaves them never the same afterwards; the charm's always somehow broken. Now HE,

I think, you know, really won't. He won't do the least dreadful little thing. We shall continue to enjoy him just

as he is. Nohe's quite beautiful. He sees everything. He isn't a bit ashamed. He has every scrap of the

courage of it that one could ask. Only think what he MIGHT do. One wants reallyfor fear of some

accidentto keep him in view. At this very moment perhaps what mayn't he be up to? I've had my

disappointmentsthe poor things are never really safe; or only at least when you have them under your eye.

One can never completely trust them. One's uneasy, and I think that's why I most miss him now."

She had wound up with a laugh of enjoyment over her embroidery of her ideaan enjoyment that her face

communicated to Strether, who almost wished none the less at this moment that she would let poor

Waymarsh alone. HE knew more or less what she meant; but the fact wasn't a reason for her not pretending to

Waymarsh that he didn't. It was craven of him perhaps, but he would, for the high amenity of the occasion,

have liked Waymarsh not to be so sure of his wit. Her recognition of it gave him away and, before she had

done with him or with that article, would give him worse. What was he, all the same, to do? He looked across

the box at his friend; their eyes met; something queer and stiff, something that bore on the situation but that it

was better not to touch, passed in silence between them. Well, the effect of it for Strether was an abrupt

reaction, a final impatience of his own tendency to temporise. Where was that taking him anyway? It was one

of the quiet instants that sometimes settle more matters than the outbreaks dear to the historic muse. The only

qualification of the quietness was the synthetic "Oh hang it!" into which Strether's share of the silence

soundlessly flowered. It represented, this mute ejaculation, a final impulse to burn his ships. These ships, to

the historic muse, may seem of course mere cockles, but when he presently spoke to Miss Gostrey it was with

"Between the two young men? Well, I don't pretend to be a seer or a prophetess," she presently replied; "but

if I'm simply a woman of sense he's working for you tonight. I don't quite know how but it's in my

bones." And she looked at him at last as if, little material as she yet gave him, he'd really understand. "For an

"Not to work for me tonight?" Strether wondered. "Then I hope he isn't doing anything very bad."

"They've got you," she merely repeated. Though she disclaimed the prophetic vision she was at this instant

the nearest approach he had ever met to the priestess of the oracle. The light was in her eyes. "You must face

"Every move in the game. And they've been arranging ever since. He has had every day his little telegram

"I do better. I see it. This was, before I met him, what I wondered whether I WAS to see. But as soon as I met

him I ceased to wonder, and our second meeting made me sure. I took him all in. He was actinghe is

"Dear old Paris," she seemed to explain. But there was more, and, with one of her turns, she risked it. "And

"Why of the wonderful consciousness of our friend here. You've helped too in your way to float him to where

He spoke as if he had just been thinking it out. "Well, quite already in Chad's hands, it would seem." And he

had had with this another thought. "Will that bejust all through Bilhamthe way he's going to work it? It

"Oh as much as you like! But the idea you speak of," she said, "won't have been his best. He'll have a better.

"That's what we shall see!" But quite as she spoke she turned, and Strether turned; for the door of the box had

opened, with the click of the ouvreuse, from the lobby, and a gentleman, a stranger to them, had come in with

a quick step. The door closed behind him, and, though their faces showed him his mistake, his air, which was

striking, was all good confidence. The curtain had just again arisen, and, in the hush of the general attention,

Strether's challenge was tacit, as was also the greeting, with a quickly deprecating hand and smile, of the

unannounced visitor. He discreetly signed that he would wait, would stand, and these things and his face, one

look from which she had caught, had suddenly worked for Miss Gostrey. She fitted to them all an answer for

Strether's last question. The solid stranger was simply the answeras she now, turning to her friend,

indicated. She brought it straight out for himit presented the intruder. "Why, through this gentleman!" The

gentleman indeed, at the same time, though sounding for Strether a very short name, did practically as much

to explain. Strether gasped the name backthen only had he seen Miss Gostrey had said more than she

Our friend was to go over it afterwards again and againhe was going over it much of the time that they

were together, and they were together constantly for three or four days: the note had been so strongly struck

during that first halfhour that everything happening since was comparatively a minor development. The fact

was that his perception of the young man's identityso absolutely checked for a minutehad been quite

one of the sensations that count in life; he certainly had never known one that had acted, as he might have

said, with more of a crowded rush. And the rush though both vague and multitudinous, had lasted a long

time, protected, as it were, yet at the same time aggravated, by the circumstance of its coinciding with a

stretch of decorous silence. They couldn't talk without disturbing the spectators in the part of the balcony just

below them; and it, for that matter, came to Stretherbeing a thing of the sort that did come to himthat

these were the accidents of a high civilisation; the imposed tribute to propriety, the frequent exposure to

conditions, usually brilliant, in which relief has to await its time. Relief was never quite near at hand for

kings, queens, comedians and other such people, and though you might be yourself not exactly one of those,

you could yet, in leading the life of high pressure, guess a little how they sometimes felt. It was truly the life

of high pressure that Strether had seemed to feel himself lead while he sat there, close to Chad, during the

long tension of the act. He was in presence of a fact that occupied his whole mind, that occupied for the

halfhour his senses themselves all together; but he couldn't without inconvenience show anythingwhich

moreover might count really as luck. What he might have shown, had he shown at all, was exactly the kind of

emotionthe emotion of bewildermentthat he had proposed to himself from the first, whatever should

occur, to show least. The phenomenon that had suddenly sat down there with him was a phenomenon of

change so complete that his imagination, which had worked so beforehand, felt itself, in the connexion,

without margin or allowance. It had faced every contingency but that Chad should not BE Chad, and this was

He asked himself if, by any chance, before he should have in some way to commit himself, he might feel his

mind settled to the new vision, might habituate it, so to speak, to the remarkable truth. But oh it was too

remarkable, the truth; for what could be more remarkable than this sharp rupture of an identity? You could

deal with a man as himselfyou couldn't deal with him as somebody else. It was a small source of peace

moreover to be reduced to wondering how little he might know in such an event what a sum he was setting

you. He couldn't absolutely not know, for you couldn't absolutely not let him. It was a CASE then simply, a

strong case, as people nowadays called such things,' a case of transformation unsurpassed, and the hope was

but in the general law that strong cases were liable to control from without. Perhaps he, Strether himself, was

the only person after all aware of it. Even Miss Gostrey, with all her science, wouldn't be, would she? and

he had never seen any one less aware of anything than Waymarsh as he glowered at Chad. The social

sightlessness of his old friend's survey marked for him afresh, and almost in an humiliating way, the

inevitable limits of direct aid from this source. He was not certain, however, of not drawing a shade of

compensation from the privilege, as yet untasted, of knowing more about something in particular than Miss

Gostrey did. His situation too was a case, for that matter, and he was now so interested, quite so privately

agog, about it, that he had already an eye to the fun it would be to open up to her afterwards. He derived

during his halfhour no assistance from her, and just this fact of her not meeting his eyes played a little, it

He had introduced Chad, in the first minutes, under his breath, and there was never the primness in her of the

person unacquainted; but she had none the less betrayed at first no vision but of the stage, where she

occasionally found a pretext for an appreciative moment that she invited Waymarsh to share. The latter's

faculty of participation had never had, all round, such an assault to meet; the pressure on him being the

sharper for this chosen attitude in her, as Strether judged it, of isolating, for their natural intercourse, Chad

and himself. This intercourse was meanwhile restricted to a frank friendly look from the young man,

something markedly like a smile, but falling far short of a grin, and to the vivacity of Strether's private

speculation as to whether HE carried himself like a fool. He didn't quite see how he could so feel as one

without somehow showing as one. The worst of that question moreover was that he knew it as a symptom the

sense of which annoyed him. "If I'm going to be odiously conscious of how I may strike the fellow," he

reflected, "it was so little what I came out for that I may as well stop before I begin." This sage consideration

too, distinctly, seemed to leave untouched the fact that he WAS going to be conscious. He was conscious of

He was to know afterwards, in the watches of the night, that nothing would have been more open to him than

after a minute or two to propose to Chad to seek with him the refuge of the lobby. He hadn't only not

proposed it, but had lacked even the presence of mind to see it as possible. He had stuck there like a

schoolboy wishing not to miss a minute of the show; though for that portion of the show then presented he

hadn't had an instant's real attention. He couldn't when the curtain fell have given the slightest account of

what had happened. He had therefore, further, not at that moment acknowledged the amenity added by this

acceptance of his awkwardness to Chad's general patience. Hadn't he none the less known at the very

timeknown it stupidly and without reactionthat the boy was accepting something? He was modestly

benevolent, the boythat was at least what he had been capable of the superiority of making out his chance

to be; and one had one's self literally not had the gumption to get in ahead of him. If we should go into all that

occupied our friend in the watches of the night we should have to mend our pen; but an instance or two may

mark for us the vividness with which he could remember. He remembered the two absurdities that, if his

presence of mind HAD failed, were the things that had had most to do with it. He had never in his life seen a

young man come into a box at ten o'clock at night, and would, if challenged on the question in advance, have

scarce been ready to pronounce as to different ways of doing so. But it was in spite of this definite to him that

Chad had had a way that was wonderful: a fact carrying with it an implication that, as one might imagine it,

Here already then were abounding results; he had on the spot and without the least trouble of intention taught

Strether that even in so small a thing as that there were different ways. He had done in the same line still

more than this; had by a mere shake or two of the head made his old friend observe that the change in him

was perhaps more than anything else, for the eye, a matter of the marked streaks of grey, extraordinary at his

age, in his thick black hair; as well as that this new feature was curiously becoming to him, did something for

him, as characterisation, also evenof all things in the worldas refinement, that had been a good deal

wanted. Strether felt, however, he would have had to confess, that it wouldn't have been easy just now, on

this and other counts, in the presence of what had been supplied, to be quite clear as to what had been missed.

A reflexion a candid critic might have made of old, for instance, was that it would have been happier for the

son to look more like the mother; but this was a reflexion that at present would never occur. The ground had

quite fallen away from it, yet no resemblance whatever to the mother had supervened. It would have been

hard for a young man's face and air to disconnect themselves more completely than Chad's at this juncture

from any discerned, from any imaginable aspect of a New England female parent. That of course was no

more than had been on the cards; but it produced in Strether none the less one of those frequent phenomena

Again and again as the days passed he had had a sense of the pertinence of communicating quickly with

Woollettcommunicating with a quickness with which telegraphy alone would rhyme; the fruit really of a

fine fancy in him for keeping things straight, for the happy forestalment of error. No one could explain better

when needful, nor put more conscience into an account or a report; which burden of conscience is perhaps

exactly the reason why his heart always sank when the clouds of explanation gathered. His highest ingenuity

was in keeping the sky of life clear of them. Whether or no he had a grand idea of the lucid, he held that

nothing ever was in factfor any one elseexplained. One went through the vain motions, but it was

mostly a waste of life. A personal relation was a relation only so long as people either perfectly understood

or, better still, didn't care if they didn't. From the moment they cared if they didn't it was living by the sweat

of one's brow; and the sweat of one's brow was just what one might buy one's self off from by keeping the

ground free of the wild weed of delusion. It easily grew too fast, and the Atlantic cable now alone could race

with it. That agency would each day have testified for him to something that was not what Woollett had

argued. He was not at this moment absolutely sure that the effect of the morrow'sor rather of the

night'sappreciation of the crisis wouldn't be to determine some brief missive. "Have at last seen him, but

oh dear!"some temporary relief of that sort seemed to hover before him. It hovered somehow as preparing

them allyet preparing them for what? If he might do so more luminously and cheaply he would tick out in

four words: "Awfully oldgrey hair." To this particular item in Chad's appearance he constantly, during

their mute halfhour, reverted; as if so very much more than he could have said had been involved in it. The

most he could have said would have been: "If he's going to make me feel young!" which indeed, however,

carried with it quite enough. If Strether was to feel young, that is, it would be because Chad was to feel old;

The question of Chadwick's true time of life was, doubtless, what came up quickest after the adjournment of

the two, when the play was over, to a cafe in the Avenue de l'Opera. Miss Gostrey had in due course been

perfect for such a step; she had known exactly what they wantedto go straight somewhere and talk; and

Strether had even felt she had known what he wished to say and that he was arranging immediately to begin.

She hadn't pretended this, as she HAD pretended on the other hand, to have divined Waymarsh's wish to

extend to her an independent protection homeward; but Strether nevertheless found how, after he had Chad

opposite to him at a small table in the brilliant halls that his companion straightway selected, sharply and

easily discriminated from others, it was quite, to his mind, as if she heard him speak; as if, sitting up, a mile

away, in the little apartment he knew, she would listen hard enough to catch. He found too that he liked that

idea, and he wished that, by the same token, Mrs. Newsome might have caught as well. For what had above

all been determined in him as a necessity of the first order was not to lose another hour, nor a fraction of one;

was to advance, to overwhelm, with a rush. This was how he would anticipateby a nightattack, as might

beany forced maturity that a crammed consciousness of Paris was likely to take upon itself to assert on

behalf of the boy. He knew to the full, on what he had just extracted from Miss Gostrey, Chad's marks of

alertness; but they were a reason the more for not dawdling. If he was himself moreover to be treated as

young he wouldn't at all events be so treated before he should have struck out at least once. His arms might

be pinioned afterwards, but it would have been left on record that he was fifty. The importance of this he had

indeed begun to feel before they left the theatre; it had become a wild unrest, urging him to seize his chance.

He could scarcely wait for it as they went; he was on the verge of the indecency of bringing up the question

in the street; he fairly caught himself going onso he afterwards invidiously named itas if there would be

for him no second chance should the present be lost. Not till, on the purple divan before the perfunctory bock,

he had brought out the words themselves, was he sure, for that matter, that the present would be saved.

"I've come, you know, to make you break with everything, neither more nor less, and take you straight home;

so you'll be so good as immediately and favourably to consider it!"Strether, face to face with Chad after

the play, had sounded these words almost breathlessly, and with an effect at first positively disconcerting to

himself alone. For Chad's receptive attitude was that of a person who had been gracefully quiet while the

messenger at last reaching him has run a mile through the dust. During some seconds after he had spoken

Strether felt as if HE had made some such exertion; he was not even certain that the perspiration wasn't on his

brow. It was the kind of consciousness for which he had to thank the look that, while the strain lasted, the

young man's eyes gave him. They reflectedand the deuce of the thing was that they reflected really with a

sort of shyness of kindnesshis momentarily disordered state; which fact brought on in its turn for our

friend the dawn of a fear that Chad might simply "take it out"take everything outin being sorry for him.

Such a fear, any fear, was unpleasant. But everything was unpleasant; it was odd how everything had

suddenly turned so. This however was no reason for letting the least thing go. Strether had the next minute

proceeded as roundly as if with an advantage to follow up. "Of course I'm a busybody, if you want to fight

the case to the death; but after all mainly in the sense of having known you and having given you such

attention as you kindly permitted when you were in jackets and knickerbockers. Yesit was knickerbockers,

I'm busybody enough to remember that; and that you had, for your ageI speak of the first faraway

timetremendously stout legs. Well, we want you to break. Your mother's heart's passionately set upon it,

but she has above and beyond that excellent arguments and reasons. I've not put them into her headI

needn't remind you how little she's a person who needs that. But they existyou must take it from me as a

friend both of hers and yoursfor myself as well. I didn't invent them, I didn't originally work them out; but

I understand them, I think I can explain themby which I mean make you actively do them justice; and

that's why you see me here. You had better know the worst at once. It's a question of an immediate rupture

and an immediate return. I've been conceited enough to dream I can sugar that pill. I take at any rate the

greatest interest in the question. I took it already before I left home, and I don't mind telling you that, altered

as you are, I take it still more now that I've seen you. You're older andI don't know what to call it!more

of a handful; but you're by so much the more, I seem to make out, to our purpose."

"Do I strike you as improved?" Strether was to recall that Chad had at this point enquired.

He was likewise to recalland it had to count for some time as his greatest comfortthat it had been

"given" him, as they said at Woollett, to reply with some presence of mind: "I haven't the least idea." He was

really for a while to like thinking he had been positively hard. On the point of conceding that Chad had

improved in appearance, but that to the question of appearance the remark must be confined, he checked even

that compromise and left his reservation bare. Not only his moral, but also, as it were, his aesthetic sense had

a little to pay for this, Chad being unmistakeablyand wasn't it a matter of the confounded grey hair

again?handsomer than he had ever promised. That however fell in perfectly with what Strether had said.

They had no desire to keep down his proper expansion, and he wouldn't be less to their purpose for not

looking, as he had too often done of old, only bold and wild. There was indeed a signal particular in which he

would distinctly be more so. Strether didn't, as he talked, absolutely follow himself; he only knew he was

clutching his thread and that he held it from moment to moment a little tighter; his mere uninterruptedness

during the few minutes helped him to do that. He had frequently for a month, turned over what he should say

on this very occasion, and he seemed at last to have said nothing he had thought ofeverything was so

But in spite of all he had put the flag at the window. This was what he had done, and there was a minute

during which he affected himself as having shaken it hard, flapped it with a mighty flutter, straight in front of

his companion's nose. It gave him really almost the sense of having already acted his part. The momentary

reliefas if from the knowledge that nothing of THAT at least could be undonesprang from a particular

cause, the cause that had flashed into operation, in Miss Gostrey's box, with direct apprehension, with amazed

recognition, and that had been concerned since then in every throb of his consciousness. What it came to was

that with an absolutely new quantity to deal with one simply couldn't know. The new quantity was

represented by the fact that Chad had been made over. That was all; whatever it was it was everything.

Strether had never seen the thing so done beforeit was perhaps a speciality of Paris. If one had been

present at the process one might little by little have mastered the result; but he was face to face, as matters

stood, with the finished business. It had freely been noted for him that he might be received as a dog among

skittles, but that was on the basis of the old quantity. He had originally thought of lines and tones as things to

be taken, but these possibilities had now quite melted away. There was no computing at all what the young

man before him would think or feel or say on any subject whatever. This intelligence Strether had afterwards,

to account for his nervousness, reconstituted as he might, just as he had also reconstituted the promptness

with which Chad had corrected his uncertainty. An extraordinarily short time had been required for the

correction, and there had ceased to be anything negative in his companion's face and air as soon as it was

made. "Your engagement to my mother has become then what they call here a fait accompli?"it had

Well, that was enough, Strether had felt while his answer hung fire. He had felt at the same time, however,

that nothing could less become him than that it should hang fire too long. "Yes," he said brightly, "it was on

the happy settlement of the question that I started. You see therefore to what tune I'm in your family.

"Oh I've been supposing it for a long time, and what you tell me helps me to understand that you should want

to do something. To do something, I mean," said Chad, "to commemorate an event sowhat do they call

it?so auspicious. I see you make out, and not unnaturally," he continued, "that bringing me home in

triumph as a sort of weddingpresent to Mother would commemorate it better than anything else. You want

to make a bonfire in fact," he laughed, "and you pitch me on. Thank you, thank you!" he laughed again.

He was altogether easy about it, and this made Strether now see how at bottom, and in spite of the shade of

shyness that really cost him nothing, he had from the first moment been easy about everything. The shade of

shyness was mere good taste. People with manners formed could apparently have, as one of their best cards,

the shade of shyness too. He had leaned a little forward to speak; his elbows were on the table; and the

inscrutable new face that he had got somewhere and somehow was brought by the movement nearer to his

critics There was a fascination for that critic in its not being, this ripe physiognomy, the face that, under

observation at least, he had originally carried away from Woollett. Strether found a certain freedom on his

own side in defining it as that of a man of the worlda formula that indeed seemed to come now in some

degree to his relief; that of a man to whom things had happened and were variously known. In gleams, in

glances, the past did perhaps peep out of it; but such lights were faint and instantly merged. Chad was brown

and thick and strong, and of old Chad had been rough. Was all the difference therefore that he was actually

smooth? Possibly; for that he WAS smooth was as marked as in the taste of a sauce or in the rub of a hand.

The effect of it was generalit had retouched his features, drawn them with a cleaner line. It had cleared his

eyes and settled his colour and polished his fine square teeththe main ornament of his face; and at the same

time that it had given him a form and a surface, almost a design, it had toned his voice, established his accent,

encouraged his smile to more play and his other motions to less. He had formerly, with a great deal of action,

expressed very little; and he now expressed whatever was necessary with almost none at all. It was as if in

short he had really, copious perhaps but shapeless, been put into a firm mould and turned successfully out.

The phenomenonStrether kept eyeing it as a phenomenon, an eminent casewas marked enough to be

touched by the finger. He finally put his hand across the table and laid it on Chad's arm. "If you'll promise

mehere on the spot and giving me your word of honourto break straight off, you'll make the future the

real right thing for all of us alike. You'll ease off the strain of this decent but none the less acute suspense in

which I've for so many days been waiting for you, and let me turn in to rest. I shall leave you with my

Chad again fell back at this and, his hands pocketed, settled himself a little; in which posture he looked,

though he rather anxiously smiled, only the more earnest. Then Strether seemed to see that he was really

nervous, and he took that as what he would have called a wholesome sign. The only mark of it hitherto had

been his more than once taking off and putting on his widebrimmed crush hat. He had at this moment made

the motion again to remove it, then had only pushed it back, so that it hung informally on his strong young

grizzled crop. It was a touch that gave the note of the familiarthe intimate and the belatedto their quiet

colloquy; and it was indeed by some such trivial aid that Strether became aware at the same moment of

something else. The observation was at any rate determined in him by some light too fine to distinguish from

so many others, but it was none the less sharply determined. Chad looked unmistakeably during these

instants well, as Strether put it to himself, all he was worth. Our friend had a sudden apprehension of what

that would on certain sides be. He saw him in a flash as the young man marked out by women; and for a

concentrated minute the dignity, the comparative austerity, as he funnily fancied it, of this character affected

him almost with awe. There was an experience on his interlocutor's part that looked out at him from under the

displaced hat, and that looked out moreover by a force of its own, the deep fact of its quantity and quality,

and not through Chad's intending bravado or swagger. That was then the way men marked out by women

WEREand also the men by whom the women were doubtless in turn sufficiently distinguished. It affected

Strether for thirty seconds as a relevant truth, a truth which, however, the next minute, had fallen into its

relation. "Can't you imagine there being some questions," Chad asked, "that a fellowhowever much

impressed by your charming way of stating thingswould like to put to you first?"

"Oh yeseasily. I'm here to answer everything. I think I can even tell you things, of the greatest interest to

you, that you won't know enough to ask me. We'll take as many days to it as you like. But I want," Strether

Chad had spoken in such surprise that he was amused. "Can't you believe it?with what you put me

"Do you mean there's so much more to come?" Strether laughed. "All the more reason then that I should gird

myself." And as if to mark what he felt he could by this time count on he was already on his feet.

Chad, still seated, stayed him, with a hand against him, as he passed between their table and the next. "Oh we

The tone was, as who should say, everything Strether could have desired; and quite as good the expression of

face with which the speaker had looked up at him and kindly held him. All these things lacked was their not

showing quite so much as the fruit of experience. Yes, experience was what Chad did play on him, if he

didn't play any grossness of defiance. Of course experience was in a manner defiance; but it wasn't, at any

raterather indeed quite the contrary!grossness; which was so much gained. He fairly grew older,

Strether thought, while he himself so reasoned. Then with his mature pat of his visitor's arm he also got up;

and there had been enough of it all by this time to make the visitor feel that something WAS settled. Wasn't it

settled that he had at least the testimony of Chad's own belief in a settlement? Strether found himself treating

Chad's profession that they would get on as a sufficient basis for going to bed. He hadn't nevertheless after

this gone to bed directly; for when they had again passed out together into the mild bright night a check had

virtually sprung from nothing more than a small circumstance which might have acted only as confirming

quiescence. There were people, expressive sound, projected light, still abroad, and after they had taken in for

a moment, through everything, the great clear architectural street, they turned off in tacit union to the quarter

of Strether's hotel. "Of course," Chad here abruptly began, "of course Mother's making things out with you

about me has been naturaland of course also you've had a good deal to go upon. Still, you must have filled

He had stopped, leaving his friend to wonder a little what point he wished to make; and this it was that

enabled Strether meanwhile to make one. "Oh we've never pretended to go into detail. We weren't in the least

But Chad rather oddly insisted, though under the high lamp at their corner, where they paused, he had at first

looked as if touched by Strether's allusion to the long sense, at home, of his absence. "What I mean is you

It affected Strether: horrors were so littlesuperficially at leastin this robust and reasoning image. But he

was none the less there to be veracious. "Yes, I dare say we HAVE imagined horrors. But where's the harm if

Chad raised his face to the lamp, and it was one of the moments at which he had, in his extraordinary way,

most his air of designedly showing himself. It was as if at these instants he just presented himself, his identity

so rounded off, his palpable presence and his massive young manhood, as such a link in the chain as might

practically amount to a kind of demonstration. It was as ifand how but anomalously?he couldn't after all

help thinking sufficiently well of these things to let them go for what they were worth. What could there be in

this for Strether but the hint of some selfrespect, some sense of power, oddly perverted; something latent

and beyond access, ominous and perhaps enviable? The intimation had the next thing, in a flash, taken on a

namea name on which our friend seized as he asked himself if he weren't perhaps really dealing with an

irreducible young Pagan. This descriptionhe quite jumped at ithad a sound that gratified his mental ear,

so that of a sudden he had already adopted it. Pagan yes, that was, wasn't it? what Chad WOULD logically

be. It was what he must be. It was what he was. The idea was a clue and, instead of darkening the prospect,

projected a certain clearness. Strether made out in this quick ray that a Pagan was perhaps, at the pass they

had come to, the thing most wanted at Woollett. They'd be able to do with onea good one; he'd find an

opening yes; and Strether's imagination even now prefigured and accompanied the first appearance there

of the rousing personage. He had only the slight discomfort of feeling, as the young man turned away from

the lamp, that his thought had in the momentary silence possibly been guessed. "Well, I've no doubt," said

Chad, "you've come near enough. The details, as you say, don't matter. It HAS been generally the case that

I've let myself go. But I'm coming roundI'm not so bad now." With which they walked on again to

"Do you mean," the latter asked as they approached the door, "that there isn't any woman with you now?"

"Of my going home?" Chad was clearly surprised. "Oh not much! Do you think that when I want to go any

"To keep you"Strether took him straight up"from carrying out your wish? Well, our idea has been that

somebody has hithertoor a good many persons perhapskept you pretty well from 'wanting.' That's

whatif you're in anybody's handsmay again happen. You don't answer my question"he kept it up;

"but if you aren't in anybody's hands so much the better. There's nothing then but what makes for your

Chad turned this over. "I don't answer your question?" He spoke quite without resenting it. "Well, such

questions have always a rather exaggerated side. One doesn't know quite what you mean by being in women's

'hands.' It's all so vague. One is when one isn't. One isn't when one is. And then one can't quite give people

away." He seemed kindly to explain. "I've NEVER got stuckso very hard; and, as against anything at any

time really better, I don't think I've ever been afraid." There was something in it that held Strether to wonder,

and this gave him time to go on. He broke out as with a more helpful thought. "Don't you know how I like

The upshot was indeed to make our friend marvel. "Oh if THAT'S all that's the matter with you!" It was

Strether hesitated, but it came out. "Not enough for your mother!" Spoken, however, it sounded a trifle

oddthe effect of which was that Chad broke into a laugh. Strether, at this, succumbed as well, though with

extreme brevity. "Permit us to have still our theory. But if you ARE so free and so strong you're inexcusable.

Strether, before the closed portecochere, fixed him a moment. "It's more, my boy, than YOU do! But our

Chad's pride seemed none the less a little touched. "I never WAS thatlet me insist. I always had my own

"Then what are you here for? What has kept you," Strether asked, "if you HAVE been able to leave?"

It made Chad, after a stare, throw himself back. "Do you think one's kept only by women?" His surprise and

his verbal emphasis rang out so clear in the still street that Strether winced till he remembered the safety of

their English speech. "Is that," the young man demanded, "what they think at Woollett?" At the good faith in

the question Strether had changed colour, feeling that, as he would have said, he had put his foot in it. He had

appeared stupidly to misrepresent what they thought at Woollett; but before he had time to rectify Chad again

It so fell in, unhappily for Strether, with that reflexion of his own prompted in him by the pleasant air of the

Boulevard Malesherbes, that its disconcerting force was rather unfairly great. It was a dig that, administered

by himselfand administered even to poor Mrs. Newsomewas no more than salutary; but administered by

Chadand quite logicallyit came nearer drawing blood. They HADn't a low mindnor any approach to

one; yet incontestably they had worked, and with a certain smugness, on a basis that might be turned against

them. Chad had at any rate pulled his visitor up; he had even pulled up his admirable mother; he had

absolutely, by a turn of the wrist and a jerk of the farflung noose, pulled up, in a bunch, Woollett browsing

in its pride. There was no doubt Woollett HAD insisted on his coarseness; and what he at present stood there

for in the sleeping street was, by his manner of striking the other note, to make of such insistence a

preoccupation compromising to the insisters. It was exactly as if they had imputed to him a vulgarity that he

had by a mere gesture caused to fall from him. The devil of the case was that Strether felt it, by the same

stroke, as falling straight upon himself. He had been wondering a minute ago if the boy weren't a Pagan, and

he found himself wondering now if he weren't by chance a gentleman. It didn't in the least, on the spot, spring

up helpfully for him that a person couldn't at the same time be both. There was nothing at this moment in the

air to challenge the combination; there was everything to give it on the contrary something of a flourish. It

struck Strether into the bargain as doing something to meet the most difficult of the questions; though

perhaps indeed only by substituting another. Wouldn't it be precisely by having learned to be a gentleman that

he had mastered the consequent trick of looking so well that one could scarce speak to him straight? But what

in the world was the clue to such a prime producing cause? There were too many clues then that Strether still

lacked, and these clues to clues were among them. What it accordingly amounted to for him was that he had

to take full in the face a fresh attribution of ignorance. He had grown used by this time to reminders,

especially from his own lips, of what he didn't know; but he had borne them because in the first place they

were private and because in the second they practically conveyed a tribute. He didn't know what was bad,

andas others didn't know how little he knew ithe could put up with his state. But if he didn't know, in so

important a particular, what was good, Chad at least was now aware he didn't; and that, for some reason,

affected our friend as curiously public. It was in fact an exposed condition that the young man left him in

long enough for him to feel its chilltill he saw fit, in a word, generously again to cover him. This last was

in truth what Chad quite gracefully did. But he did it as with a simple thought that met the whole of the case.

"Oh I'm all right!" It was what Strether had rather bewilderedly to go to bed on.

It really looked true moreover from the way Chad was to behave after this. He was full of attentions to his

mother's ambassador; in spite of which, all the while, the latter's other relations rather remarkably contrived

to assert themselves. Strether's sittings pen in hand with Mrs. Newsome up in his own room were broken, yet

they were richer; and they were more than ever interspersed with the hours in which he reported himself, in a

different fashion, but with scarce less earnestness and fulness, to Maria Gostrey. Now that, as he would have

expressed it, he had really something to talk about he found himself, in respect to any oddity that might reside

for him in the double connexion, at once more aware and more indifferent. He had been fine to Mrs.

Newsome about his useful friend, but it had begun to haunt his imagination that Chad, taking up again for her

benefit a pen too long disused, might possibly be finer. It wouldn't at all do, he saw, that anything should

come up for him at Chad's hand but what specifically was to have come; the greatest divergence from which

would be precisely the element of any lubrication of their intercourse by levity It was accordingly to forestall

such an accident that he frankly put before the young man the several facts, just as they had occurred, of his

funny alliance. He spoke of these facts, pleasantly and obligingly, as "the whole story," and felt that he might

qualify the alliance as funny if he remained sufficiently grave about it. He flattered himself that he even

exaggerated the wild freedom of his original encounter with the wonderful lady; he was scrupulously definite

about the absurd conditions in which they had made acquaintancetheir having picked each other up almost

in the street; and he had (finest inspiration of all!) a conception of carrying the war into the enemy's country

He had always had a notion that this last was the grand style of fighting; the greater therefore the reason for

it, as he couldn't remember that he had ever before fought in the grand style. Every one, according to this,

knew Miss Gostrey: how came it Chad didn't know her? The difficulty, the impossibility, was really to escape

it; Strether put on him, by what he took for granted, the burden of proof of the contrary. This tone was so far

successful as that Chad quite appeared to recognise her as a person whose fame had reached him, but against

his acquaintance with whom much mischance had worked. He made the point at the same time that his social

relations, such as they could be called, were perhaps not to the extent Strether supposed with the rising flood

of their compatriots. He hinted at his having more and more given way to a different principle of selection;

the moral of which seemed to be that he went about little in the "colony." For the moment certainly he had

quite another interest. It was deep, what he understood, and Strether, for himself, could only so observe it. He

couldn't see as yet how deep. Might he not all too soon! For there was really too much of their question that

Chad had already committed himself to liking. He liked, to begin with, his prospective stepfather; which was

distinctly what had not been on the cards. His hating him was the untowardness for which Strether had been

best prepared; he hadn't expected the boy's actual form to give him more to do than his imputed. It gave him

more through suggesting that he must somehow make up to himself for not being sure he was sufficiently

disagreeable. That had really been present to him as his only way to be sure he was sufficiently thorough. The

point was that if Chad's tolerance of his thoroughness were insincere, were but the best of devices for gaining

That seemed at the end of ten days the upshot of the abundant, the recurrent talk through which Strether

poured into him all it concerned him to know, put him in full possession of facts and figures. Never cutting

these colloquies short by a minute, Chad behaved, looked and spoke as if he were rather heavily, perhaps

even a trifle gloomily, but none the less fundamentally and comfortably free. He made no crude profession of

eagerness to yield, but he asked the most intelligent questions, probed, at moments, abruptly, even deeper

than his friend's layer of information, justified by these touches the native estimate of his latent stuff, and had

in every way the air of trying to live, reflectively, into the square bright picture. He walked up and down in

front of this production, sociably took Strether's arm at the points at which he stopped, surveyed it repeatedly

from the right and from the left, inclined a critical head to either quarter, and, while he puffed a still more

critical cigarette, animadverted to his companion on this passage and that. Strether sought reliefthere were

hours when he required itin repeating himself; it was in truth not to be blinked that Chad had a way. The

main question as yet was of what it was a way TO. It made vulgar questions no more easy; but that was

unimportant when all questions save those of his own asking had dropped. That he was free was answer

enough, and it wasn't quite ridiculous that this freedom should end by presenting itself as what was difficult

to move. His changed state, his lovely home, his beautiful things, his easy talk, his very appetite for Strether,

insatiable and, when all was said, flatteringwhat were such marked matters all but the notes of his

freedom? He had the effect of making a sacrifice of it just in these handsome forms to his visitor; which was

mainly the reason the visitor was privately, for the time, a little out of countenance. Strether was at this period

again and again thrown back on a felt need to remodel somehow his plan. He fairly caught himself shooting

rueful glances, shy looks of pursuit, toward the embodied influence, the definite adversary, who had by a

stroke of her own failed him and on a fond theory of whose palpable presence he had, under Mrs. Newsome's

inspiration, altogether proceeded. He had once or twice, in secret, literally expressed the irritated wish that

He couldn't quite yet force it upon Woollett that such a career, such a perverted young life, showed after all a

certain plausible side, DID in the case before them flaunt something like an impunity for the social man; but

he could at least treat himself to the statement that would prepare him for the sharpest echo. This echoas

distinct over there in the dry thin air as some shrill "heading" above a column of printseemed to reach him

even as he wrote. "He says there's no woman," he could hear Mrs. Newsome report, in capitals almost of

newspaper size, to Mrs. Pocock; and he could focus in Mrs. Pocock the response of the reader of the journal.

He could see in the younger lady's face the earnestness of her attention and catch the full scepticism of her

but slightly delayed "What is there then?" Just so he could again as little miss the mother's clear decision:

"There's plenty of disposition, no doubt, to pretend there isn't." Strether had, after posting his letter, the whole

scene out; and it was a scene during which, coming and going, as befell, he kept his eye not least upon the

daughter. He had his fine sense of the conviction Mrs. Pocock would take occasion to reaffirma conviction

bearing, as he had from the first deeply divined it to bear, on Mr. Strether's essential inaptitude. She had

looked him in his conscious eyes even before he sailed, and that she didn't believe HE would find the woman

had been written in her book. [sic] Hadn't she at the best but a scant faith in his ability to find women? It

wasn't even as if he had found her motherso much more, to her discrimination, had her mother performed

the finding. Her mother had, in a case her private judgement of which remained educative of Mrs. Pocock's

critical sense, found the man. The man owed his unchallenged state, in general, to the fact that Mrs.

Newsome's discoveries were accepted at Woollett; but he knew in his bones, our friend did, how almost

irresistibly Mrs. Pocock would now be moved to show what she thought of his own. Give HER a free hand,

His impression of Miss Gostrey after her introduction to Chad was meanwhile an impression of a person

almost unnaturally on her guard. He struck himself as at first unable to extract from her what he wished;

though indeed OF what he wished at this special juncture he would doubtless have contrived to make but a

crude statement. It sifted and settled nothing to put to her, tout betement, as she often said, "Do you like him,

eh?"thanks to his feeling it actually the least of his needs to heap up the evidence in the young man's

favour. He repeatedly knocked at her door to let her have it afresh that Chad's casewhatever else of minor

interest it might yieldwas first and foremost a miracle almost monstrous. It was the alteration of the entire

man, and was so signal an instance that nothing else, for the intelligent observer, couldCOULD

it?signify. "It's a plot," he declared "there's more in it than meets the eye." He gave the rein to his fancy.

"Well, the party responsible is, I suppose, the fate that waits for one, the dark doom that rides. What I mean is

that with such elements one can't count. I've but my poor individual, my modest human means. It isn't playing

the game to turn on the uncanny. All one's energy goes to facing it, to tracking it. One wants, confound it,

don't you see?" he confessed with a queer face"one wants to enjoy anything so rare. Call it then life"he

puzzled it out "call it poor dear old life simply that springs the surprise. Nothing alters the fact that the

surprise is paralysing, or at any rate engrossingall, practically, hang it, that one sees, that one CAN see."

Her silences were never barren, nor even dull. "Is that what you've written home?"

She had another pause while, across her carpets, he had another walk. "If you don't look out you'll have them

The special tone of it made him, pulling up, look at her long. "What's that but just the question I've spent

treasures of patience and ingenuity in giving you, by the sight of himafter everything had led upevery

facility to answer? What is it but just the thing I came here today to get out of you? Will he?"

"I've known nothing but what I've seen; and I wonder," she declared with some impatience, that you didn't

She got up from her chair, at this, with a nearer approach than she had ever yet shown to dismay at his

It was a shade, fairly, that brought a flush into his face; so that for a moment, as they waited together, their

difference was between them. "You mean that just your hour with him told you so much of his story? Very

good; I'm not such a fool, on my side, as that I don't understand you, or as that I didn't in some degree

understand HIM. That he has done what he liked most isn't, among any of us, a matter the least in dispute.

There's equally little question at this time of day of what it is he does like most. But I'm not talking," he

reasonably explained, "of any mere wretch he may still pick up. I'm talking of some person who in his present

"That's exactly what I am!" said Miss Gostrey. But she as quickly made her point. "I thought you

thoughtor that they think at Woollettthat that's what mere wretches necessarily do. Mere wretches

necessarily DON'T!" she declared with spirit. "There must, behind every appearance to the contrary, still be

somebody somebody who's not a mere wretch, since we accept the miracle. What else but such a

"A good woman?" She threw up her arms with a laugh. "I should call her excellent!"

Miss Gostrey thought a moment. "Because she's too good to admit! Don't you see," she went on, "how she

Strether clearly, more and more, did see; yet it made him also see other things. "But isn't what we want that

"Well, he does. What you have before you is his way. You must forgive him if it isn't quite outspoken. In

Again she laughed out. "Yes, and even when the man is! There's always a caution in such cases," she more

seriously explained "for what it may seem to show. There's nothing that's taken as showing so much here

"I delight," she replied, "in your classifications. But do you want me," she asked, "to give you in the matter,

on this ground, the wisest advice I'm capable of? Don't consider her, don't judge her at all in herself. Consider

He had the courage at least of his companion's logic. "Because then I shall like her?" He almost looked, with

his quick imagination as if he already did, though seeing at once also the full extent of how little it would suit

She had to confess indeed that it wasn't. But there was something else. "Don't make up your mind. There are

This on his side Strether recognised; but his acuteness none the less showed him the danger. "Yes, but if the

Well, she found something. "That may bebut his disavowal of her isn't, all the same, pure consideration.

"Well, I mean there's a struggle, and a part of it is just what he hides. Take timethat's the only way not to

make some mistake that you'll regret. Then you'll see. He does really want to shake her off."

Our friend had by this time so got into the vision that he almost gasped. "After all she has done for him?"

Miss Gostrey gave him a look which broke the next moment into a wonderful smile. "He's not so good as you

They remained with him, these words, promising him, in their character of warning, considerable help; but

the support he tried to draw from them found itself on each renewal of contact with Chad defeated by

something else. What could it be, this disconcerting force, he asked himself, but the sense, constantly

renewed, that Chad WASquite in fact insisted on beingas good as he thought? It seemed somehow as if

he couldn't BUT be as good from the moment he wasn't as bad. There was a succession of days at all events

when contact with himand in its immediate effect, as if it could produce no otherelbowed out of

Strether's consciousness everything but itself. Little Bilham once more pervaded the scene, but little Bilham

became even in a higher degree than he had originally been one of the numerous forms of the inclusive

relation; a consequence promoted, to our friend's sense, by two or three incidents with which we have yet to

make acquaintance. Waymarsh himself, for the occasion, was drawn into the eddy; it absolutely, though but

temporarily, swallowed him down, and there were days when Strether seemed to bump against him as a

sinking swimmer might brush a submarine object. The fathomless medium held themChad's manner was

the fathomless medium; and our friend felt as if they passed each other, in their deep immersion, with the

round impersonal eye of silent fish. It was practically produced between them that Waymarsh was giving him

then his chance; and the shade of discomfort that Strether drew from the allowance resembled not a little the

embarrassment he had known at school, as a boy, when members of his family had been present at

exhibitions. He could perform before strangers, but relatives were fatal, and it was now as if, comparatively,

Waymarsh were a relative. He seemed to hear him say "Strike up then!" and to enjoy a foretaste of

conscientious domestic criticism. He HAD struck up, so far as he actually could; Chad knew by this time in

profusion what he wanted; and what vulgar violence did his fellow pilgrim expect of him when he had really

emptied his mind? It went somehow to and fro that what poor Waymarsh meant was "I told you sothat

you'd lose your immortal soul!" but it was also fairly explicit that Strether had his own challenge and that,

since they must go to the bottom of things, he wasted no more virtue in watching Chad than Chad wasted in

watching him. His dip for duty's sakewhere was it worse than Waymarsh's own? For HE needn't have

stopped resisting and refusing, needn't have parleyed, at that rate, with the foe.

The strolls over Paris to see something or call somewhere were accordingly inevitable and natural, and the

late sessions in the wondrous troisieme, the lovely home, when men dropped in and the picture composed

more suggestively through the haze of tobacco, of music more or less good and of talk more or less polyglot,

were on a principle not to be distinguished from that of the mornings and the afternoons. Nothing, Strether

had to recognise as he leaned back and smoked, could well less resemble a scene of violence than even the

liveliest of these occasions. They were occasions of discussion, none the less, and Strether had never in his

life heard so many opinions on so many subjects. There were opinions at Woollett, but only on three or four.

The differences were there to match; if they were doubtless deep, though few, they were quiet they were,

as might be said, almost as shy as if people had been ashamed of them. People showed little diffidence about

such things, on the other hand, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, and were so far from being ashamed of

themor indeed of anything else that they often seemed to have invented them to avert those agreements

that destroy the taste of talk. No one had ever done that at Woollett, though Strether could remember times

when he himself had been tempted to it without quite knowing why. He saw why at present he had but

These, however, were but parenthetic memories, and the turn taken by his affair on the whole was positively

that if his nerves were on the stretch it was because he missed violence. When he asked himself if none would

then, in connexion with it, ever come at all, he might almost have passed as wondering how to provoke it. It

would be too absurd if such a vision as THAT should have to be invoked for relief; it was already marked

enough as absurd that he should actually have begun with flutters and dignities on the score of a single

accepted meal. What sort of a brute had he expected Chad to be, anyway?Strether had occasion to make

the enquiry but was careful to make it in private. He could himself, comparatively recent as it wasit was

truly but the fact of a few days sincefocus his primal crudity; but he would on the approach of an observer,

as if handling an illicit possession, have slipped the reminiscence out of sight. There were echoes of it still in

Mrs. Newsome's letters, and there were moments when these echoes made him exclaim on her want of tact.

He blushed of course, at once, still more for the explanation than for the ground of it: it came to him in time

to save his manners that she couldn't at the best become tactful as quickly as he. Her tact had to reckon with

the Atlantic Ocean, the General PostOffice and the extravagant curve of the globe. Chad had one day

offered tea at the Boulevard Malesherbes to a chosen few, a group again including the unobscured Miss

Barrace; and Strether had on coming out walked away with the acquaintance whom in his letters to Mrs.

Newsome he always spoke of as the little artistman. He had had full occasion to mention him as the other

party, so oddly, to the only close personal alliance observation had as yet detected in Chad's existence. Little

Bilham's way this afternoon was not Strether's, but he had none the less kindly come with him, and it was

somehow a part of his kindness that as it had sadly begun to rain they suddenly found themselves seated for

conversation at a cafe in which they had taken refuge. He had passed no more crowded hour in Chad's society

than the one just ended; he had talked with Miss Barrace, who had reproached him with not having come to

see her, and he had above all hit on a happy thought for causing Waymarsh's tension to relax. Something

might possibly be extracted for the latter from the idea of his success with that lady, whose quick

apprehension of what might amuse her had given Strether a free hand. What had she meant if not to ask

whether she couldn't help him with his splendid encumbrance, and mightn't the sacred rage at any rate be kept

a little in abeyance by thus creating for his comrade's mind even in a world of irrelevance the possibility of a

relation? What was it but a relation to be regarded as so decorative and, in especial, on the strength of it, to be

whirled away, amid flounces and feathers, in a coupe lined, by what Strether could make out, with dark blue

brocade? He himself had never been whirled awaynever at least in a coupe and behind a footman; he had

driven with Miss Gostrey in cabs, with Mrs. Pocock, a few times, in an open buggy, with Mrs. Newsome in a

fourseated cart and, occasionally up at the mountains, on a buckboard; but his friend's actual adventure

transcended his personal experience. He now showed his companion soon enough indeed how inadequate, as

"What game under the sun is he playing?" He signified the next moment that his allusion was not to the fat

gentleman immersed in dominoes on whom his eyes had begun by resting, but to their host of the previous

hour, as to whom, there on the velvet bench, with a final collapse of all consistency, he treated himself to the

Little Bilham, in meditation, looked at him with a kindness almost paternal. "Don't you like it over here?"

Strether laughed outfor the tone was indeed droll; he let himself go. "What has that to do with it? The only

thing I've any business to like is to feel that I'm moving him. That's why I ask you whether you believe I AM?

Is the creature"and he did his best to show that he simply wished to ascertain"honest?"

His companion looked responsible, but looked it through a small dim smile. "What creature do you mean?"

It was on this that they did have for a little a mute interchange. "Is it untrue that he's free? How then,"

Strether here, with a rising hope, just thought, "We must take one of them at a time." But his coherence

lapsed. "IS there some woman? Of whom he's really afraid of course I meanor who does with him what

"It's awfully charming of you," Bilham presently remarked, "not to have asked me that before."

The exclamation had escaped our friend, but it made little Bilham more deliberate. "Chad's a rare case!" he

"The way he has improved? Oh yesI think every one must see it. But I'm not sure," said little Bilham, "that

"Well," the young man after a moment returned, "I'm not sure he was really meant by nature to be quite so

good. It's like the new edition of an old book that one has been fond ofrevised and amended, brought up to

date, but not quite the thing one knew and loved. However that may be at all events," he pursued, "I don't

think, you know, that he's really playing, as you call it, any game. I believe he really wants to go back and

take up a career. He's capable of one, you know, that will improve and enlarge him still more. He won't then,"

little Bilham continued to remark, "be my pleasant wellrubbed oldfashioned volume at all. But of course

I'm beastly immoral. I'm afraid it would be a funny world altogethera world with things the way I like

them. I ought, I dare say, to go home and go into business myself. Only I'd simply rather diesimply. And

I've not the least difficulty in making up my mind not to, and in knowing exactly why, and in defending my

ground against all comers. All the same," he wound up, "I assure you I don't say a word against itfor

himself, I meanto Chad. I seem to see it as much the best thing for him. You see he's not happy."

"DO I?"Strether stared. "I've been supposing I see just the oppositean extraordinary case of the

"Ah there you are!" Strether exclaimed. "That's just what I want to get at. You speak of your familiar volume

Little Bilham looked before him a minute in silence. "He ought to get married. THAT would do it. And he

Again little Bilham waited, and, with a sense that he had information, Strether scarce knew what was coming.

"He wants to be free. He isn't used, you see," the young man explained in his lucid way, "to being so good."

His companion matched his pause, but making it up with a quiet fulness. "DO take it from me."

"Well then why isn't he free? He swears to me he is, but meanwhile does nothingexcept of course that he's

so kind to meto prove it; and couldn't really act much otherwise if he weren't. My question to you just now

was exactly on this queer impression of his diplomacy: as if instead of really giving ground his line were to

As the halfhour meanwhile had ebbed Strether paid his score, and the waiter was presently in the act of

counting out change. Our friend pushed back to him a fraction of it, with which, after an emphatic

recognition, the personage in question retreated. "You give too much," little Bilham permitted himself

"Oh I always give too much!" Strether helplessly sighed. "But you don't," he went on as if to get quickly

away from the contemplation of that doom, "answer my question. Why isn't he free?"

Little Bilham had got up as if the transaction with the waiter had been a signal, and had already edged out

between the table and the divan. The effect of this was that a minute later they had quitted the place, the

gratified waiter alert again at the open door. Strether had found himself deferring to his companion's

abruptness as to a hint that he should be answered as soon as they were more isolated. This happened when

after a few steps in the outer air they had turned the next comer. There our friend had kept it up. "Why isn't he

Little Bilham looked him full in the face. "Because it's a virtuous attachment."

This had settled the question so effectually for the timethat is for the next few daysthat it had given

Strether almost a new lease of life. It must be added however that, thanks to his constant habit of shaking the

bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual

into his draught. His imagination had in other words already dealt with his young friend's assertion; of which

it had made something that sufficiently came out on the very next occasion of his seeing Maria Gostrey. This

occasion moreover had been determined promptly by a new circumstancea circumstance he was the last

man to leave her for a day in ignorance of. "When I said to him last night," he immediately began, "that

without some definite word from him now that will enable me to speak to them over there of our sailingor

at least of mine, giving them some sort of datemy responsibility becomes uncomfortable and my situation

awkward; when I said that to him what do you think was his reply?" And then as she this time gave it up:

"Why that he has two particular friends, two ladies, mother and daughter, about to arrive in Pariscoming

back from an absence; and that he wants me so furiously to meet them, know them and like them, that I shall

oblige him by kindly not bringing our business to a crisis till he has had a chance to see them again himself.

Is that," Strether enquired, "the way he's going to try to get off? These are the people," he explained, "that he

must have gone down to see before I arrived. They're the best friends he has in the world, and they take more

interest than any one else in what concerns him. As I'm his next best he sees a thousand reasons why we

should comfortably meet. He hasn't broached the question sooner because their return was

uncertainseemed in fact for the present impossible. But he more than intimates thatif you can believe

ittheir desire to make my acquaintance has had to do with their surmounting difficulties."

"Dying. Of course," said Strether, "they're the virtuous attachment." He had already told her about thathad

seen her the day after his talk with little Bilham; and they had then threshed out together the bearing of the

revelation. She had helped him to put into it the logic in which little Bilham had left it slightly deficient

Strether hadn't pressed him as to the object of the preference so unexpectedly described; feeling in the

presence of it, with one of his irrepressible scruples, a delicacy from which he had in the quest of the quite

other article worked himself sufficiently free. He had held off, as on a small principle of pride, from

permitting his young friend to mention a name; wishing to make with this the great point that Chad's virtuous

attachments were none of his business. He had wanted from the first not to think too much of his dignity, but

that was no reason for not allowing it any little benefit that might turn up. He had often enough wondered to

what degree his interference might pass for interested; so that there was no want of luxury in letting it be seen

whenever he could that he didn't interfere. That had of course at the same time not deprived him of the further

luxury of much private astonishment; which however he had reduced to some order before communicating

his knowledge. When he had done this at last it was with the remark that, surprised as Miss Gostrey might,

like himself, at first be, she would probably agree with him on reflexion that such an account of the matter

did after all fit the confirmed appearances. Nothing certainly, on all the indications, could have been a greater

change for him than a virtuous attachment, and since they had been in search of the "word" as the French

called it, of that change, little Bilham's announcement though so long and so oddly delayedwould serve

as well as another. She had assured Strether in fact after a pause that the more she thought of it the more it did

serve; and yet her assurance hadn't so weighed with him as that before they parted he hadn't ventured to

challenge her sincerity. Didn't she believe the attachment was virtuous?he had made sure of her again with

the aid of that question. The tidings he brought her on this second occasion were moreover such as would

She showed at first none the less as only amused. "You say there are two? An attachment to them both then

Our friend took the point, but he had his clue. "Mayn't he be still in the stage of not quite knowing which of

"Possibly. Yet what do we know," Strether asked, "about hers? She may be old enough."

"Why to marry Chad. That may be, you know, what they want. And if Chad wants it too, and little Bilham

wants it, and even we, at a pinch, could do with itthat is if she doesn't prevent repatriation why it may

It was always the case for him in these counsels that each of his remarks, as it came, seemed to drop into a

deeper well. He had at all events to wait a moment to hear the slight splash of this one. "I don't see why if Mr.

Newsome wants to marry the young lady he hasn't already done it or hasn't been prepared with some

statement to you about it. And if he both wants to marry her and is on good terms with them why isn't he

Strether, responsively, wondered indeed. "Perhaps the girl herself doesn't like him."

Strether's mind echoed the question, but also again met it. "Perhaps it's with the mother he's on good terms."

"Well, if she's trying to persuade the daughter to consent to him, what could make him like the mother more?

"Oh," said Miss Gostrey, "mayn't it be that every one else isn't quite so struck with him as you?"

"Doesn't regard him you mean as such an 'eligible' young man? Is that what I've come to?" he audibly and

rather gravely sought to know. "However," he went on, "his marriage is what his mother most desiresthat

is if it will help. And oughtn't ANY marriage to help? They must want him"he had already worked it

out"to be better off. Almost any girl he may marry will have a direct interest in his taking up his chances.

Miss Gostrey cast about. "Noyou reason well! But of course on the other hand there's always dear old

She waited a moment. "The young lady mayn't find herself able to swallow THAT quantity. She may think

Strether, ever restless in such debates, took a vague turn "It will all depend on who she is. That of

coursethe proved ability to deal with dear old Woollett, since I'm sure she does deal with itis what

He stopped short, at her tone, before her; then, though seeing that it represented not vagueness, but a

momentary embarrassed fulness, let his exclamation come. "You surely haven't forgotten about Mamie!"

"No, I haven't forgotten about Mamie," she smiled. "There's no doubt whatever that there's ever so much to

Strether resumed for a minute his walk. "She's really perfectly lovely, you know. Far prettier than any girl

"That's precisely on what I perhaps most build." And she mused a moment in her friend's way. "I should

He humoured the fancy, though indeed finally to deprecate it. "Oh but don't, in your zeal, go over to her! I

"Ah but don't they?after all that, as I've understood you you've told them about me?"

He had paused before her again, but he continued his course "They WILLbefore, as you say, I've done."

Then he came out with the point he had wished after all most to make. "It seems to give away now his game.

This is what he has been doingkeeping me along for. He has been waiting for them."

"I doubt if I see as much as you. Do you pretend," he went on, "that you don't see?"

"Why that there must be a lot between themand that it has been going on from the first; even from before I

"It mayn't be graveit may be gay. But at any rate it's marked. Only I don't know," Strether had to confess,

"anything about them. Their name for instance was a thing that, after little Bilham's information, I found it a

Her laugh produced in him a momentary gloom. "I don't think I've got off. I only think I'm breathing for

about five minutes. I dare say I SHALL have, at the best, still to get on." A look, over it all, passed between

them, and the next minute he had come back to good humour. "I don't meanwhile take the smallest interest in

"I don't care the least little 'hang,'" he smiled, "for their nationality. It would be nice if they're Polish!" he

"Very nice indeed." The transition kept up her spirits. "So you see you do care."

He did this contention a modified justice. "I think I should if they WERE Polish. Yes," he thought"there

"Let us then hope for it." But she came after this nearer to the question. "If the girl's of the right age of course

the mother can't be. I mean for the virtuous attachment. If the girl's twentyand she can't be lessthe

mother must be at least forty. So it puts the mother out. SHE'S too old for him."

Strether, arrested again, considered and demurred. "Do you think so? Do you think any one would be too old

for him? I'M eighty, and I'm too young. But perhaps the girl," he continued, "ISn't twenty. Perhaps she's only

tenbut such a little dear that Chad finds himself counting her in as an attraction of the acquaintance.

Perhaps she's only five. Perhaps the mother's but fiveandtwenty a charming young widow."

"I haven't the least idea!" They once more, in spite of this vagueness, exchanged a looka look that was

perhaps the longest yet. It seemed in fact, the next thing, to require to explain itself; which it did as it could.

Miss Gostrey's imagination had taken its own flight. "Perhaps she's NOT a widow."

Strether seemed to accept the possibility with reserve. Still he accepted it. "Then that's why the

But she looked as if she scarce followed. "Why is it virtuous if since she's freethere's nothing to impose

He laughed at her question. "Oh I perhaps don't mean as virtuous as THAT! Your idea is that it can be

virtuousin any sense worthy of the nameonly if she's NOT free? But what does it become then," he

"Ah that's another matter." He said nothing for a moment, and she soon went on. "I dare say you're right, at

any rate, about Mr. Newsome's little plan. He HAS been trying youhas been reporting on you to these

"Well, as we say, it's struggling up, breaking out, asserting itself as it can. We can be on the side, you see, of

his straightness. We can help him. But he has made out," said Miss Gostrey, "that you'll do."

"Why, for THEMfor ces dames. He has watched you, studied you, liked youand recognised that THEY

must. It's a great compliment to you, my dear man; for I'm sure they're particular. You came out for a success.

He took it from her with momentary patience and then turned abruptly away. It was always convenient to him

that there were so many fine things in her room to look at. But the examination of two or three of them

appeared soon to have determined a speech that had little to do with them. "You don't believe in it!"

But she defended herself. "I don't pretend to know anything about it. Everything's possible. We must see."

He had dropped on a sofa for dismay; but she seemed, as she stood over him, to have the last word. "Wasn't

The Sunday of the next week was a wonderful day, and Chad Newsome had let his friend know in advance

that he had provided for it. There had already been a question of his taking him to see the great Gloriani, who

was at home on Sunday afternoons and at whose house, for the most part, fewer bores were to be met than

elsewhere; but the project, through some accident, had not had instant effect, and now revived in happier

conditions. Chad had made the point that the celebrated sculptor had a queer old garden, for which the

weatherspring at last frank and fairwas propitious; and two or three of his other allusions had confirmed

for Strether the expectation of something special. He had by this time, for all introductions and adventures, let

himself recklessly go, cherishing the sense that whatever the young man showed him he was showing at least

himself. He could have wished indeed, so far as this went, that Chad were less of a mere cicerone; for he was

not without the impressionnow that the vision of his game, his plan, his deep diplomacy, did recurrently

assert itselfof his taking refuge from the realities of their intercourse in profusely dispensing, as our friend

mentally phrased et panem et circenses. Our friend continued to feel rather smothered in flowers, though he

made in his other moments the almost angry inference that this was only because of his odious ascetic

suspicion of any form of beauty. He periodically assured himselffor his reactions were sharpthat he

He had known beforehand that Madame de Vionnet and her daughter would probably be on view, an

intimation to that effect having constituted the only reference again made by Chad to his good friends from

the south. The effect of Strether's talk about them with Miss Gostrey had been quite to consecrate his

reluctance to pry; something in the very air of Chad's silencejudged in the light of that talkoffered it to

him as a reserve he could markedly match. It shrouded them about with he scarce knew what, a consideration,

a distinction; he was in presence at any rateso far as it placed him thereof ladies; and the one thing that

was definite for him was that they themselves should be, to the extent of his responsibility, in presence of a

gentleman. Was it because they were very beautiful, very clever, or even very goodwas it for one of these

reasons that Chad was, so to speak, nursing his effect? Did he wish to spring them, in the Woollett phrase,

with a fuller forceto confound his critic, slight though as yet the criticism, with some form of merit

exquisitely incalculable? The most the critic had at all events asked was whether the persons in question were

French; and that enquiry had been but a proper comment on the sound of their name. "Yes. That is no!" had

been Chad's reply; but he had immediately added that their English was the most charming in the world, so

that if Strether were wanting an excuse for not getting on with them he wouldn't in the least find one. Never

in fact had Stretherin the mood into which the place had quickly launched himfelt, for himself, less the

need of an excuse. Those he might have found would have been, at the worst, all for the others, the people

before him, in whose liberty to be as they were he was aware that he positively rejoiced. His fellow guests

were multiplying, and these things, their liberty, their intensity, their variety, their conditions at large, were in

The place itself was a great impressiona small pavilion, clearfaced and sequestered, an effect of polished

parquet, of fine white panel and spare sallow gilt, of decoration delicate and rare, in the heart of the Faubourg

SaintGermain and on the edge of a cluster of gardens attached to old noble houses. Far back from streets

and unsuspected by crowds, reached by a long passage and a quiet court, it was as striking to the unprepared

mind, he immediately saw, as a treasure dug up; giving him too, more than anything yet, the note of the range

of the immeasurable town and sweeping away, as by a last brave brush, his usual landmarks and terms. It was

in the garden, a spacious cherished remnant, out of which a dozen persons had already passed, that Chad's

host presently met them while the tall birdhaunted trees, all of a twitter with the spring and the weather, and

the high partywalls, on the other side of which grave hotels stood off for privacy, spoke of survival,

transmission, association, a strong indifferent persistent order. The day was so soft that the little party had

practically adjourned to the open air but the open air was in such conditions all a chamber of state. Strether

had presently the sense of a great convent, a convent of missions, famous for he scarce knew what, a nursery

of young priests, of scattered shade, of straight alleys and chapelbells, that spread its mass in one quarter; he

had the sense of names in the air, of ghosts at the windows, of signs and tokens, a whole range of expression,

This assault of images became for a moment, in the address of the distinguished sculptor, almost formidable:

Gloriani showed him, in such perfect confidence, on Chad's introduction of him, a fine worn handsome face,

a face that was like an open letter in a foreign tongue. With his genius in his eyes, his manners on his lips, his

long career behind him and his honours and rewards all round, the great artist, in the course of a single

sustained look and a few words of delight at receiving him, affected our friend as a dazzling prodigy of type.

Strether had seen in museumsin the Luxembourg as well as, more reverently, later on, in the New York of

the billionairesthe work of his hand; knowing too that after an earlier time in his native Rome he had

migrated, in midcareer, to Paris, where, with a personal lustre almost violent, he shone in a constellation: all

of which was more than enough to crown him, for his guest, with the light, with the romance, of glory.

Strether, in contact with that element as he had never yet so intimately been, had the consciousness of

opening to it, for the happy instant, all the windows of his mind, of letting this rather grey interior drink in for

once the sun of a clime not marked in his old geography. He was to remember again repeatedly the

medallike Italian face, in which every line was an artist's own, in which time told only as tone and

consecration; and he was to recall in especial, as the penetrating radiance, as the communication of the

illustrious spirit itself, the manner in which, while they stood briefly, in welcome and response, face to face,

he was held by the sculptor's eyes. He wasn't soon to forget them, was to think of them, all unconscious,

unintending, preoccupied though they were, as the source of the deepest intellectual sounding to which he

had ever been exposed. He was in fact quite to cherish his vision of it, to play with it in idle hours; only

speaking of it to no one and quite aware he couldn't have spoken without appearing to talk nonsense. Was

what it had told him or what it had asked him the greater of the mysteries? Was it the most special flare,

unequalled, supreme, of the aesthetic torch, lighting that wondrous world for ever, or was it above all the long

straight shaft sunk by a personal acuteness that life had seasoned to steel? Nothing on earth could have been

stranger and no one doubtless more surprised than the artist himself, but it was for all the world to Strether

just then as if in the matter of his accepted duty he had positively been on trial. The deep human expertness in

Gloriani's charming smileoh the terrible life behind it!was flashed upon him as a test of his stuff.

Chad meanwhile, after having easily named his companion, had still more easily turned away and was

already greeting other persons present. He was as easy, clever Chad, with the great artist as with his obscure

compatriot, and as easy with every one else as with either: this fell into its place for Strether and made almost

a new light, giving him, as a concatenation, something more he could enjoy. He liked Gloriani, but should

never see him again; of that he was sufficiently sure. Chad accordingly, who was wonderful with both of

them, was a kind of link for hopeless fancy, an implication of possibilitiesoh if everything had been

different! Strether noted at all events that he was thus on terms with illustrious spirits, and also thatyes,

distinctlyhe hadn't in the least swaggered about it. Our friend hadn't come there only for this figure of Abel

Newsome's son, but that presence threatened to affect the observant mind as positively central. Gloriani

indeed, remembering something and excusing himself, pursued Chad to speak to him, and Strether was left

musing on many things. One of them was the question of whether, since he had been tested, he had passed.

Did the artist drop him from having made out that he wouldn't do? He really felt just today that he might do

better than usual. Hadn't he done well enough, so far as that went, in being exactly so dazzled? and in not

having too, as he almost believed, wholly hidden from his host that he felt the latter's plummet? Suddenly,

across the garden, he saw little Bilham approach, and it was a part of the fit that was on him that as their eyes

met he guessed also HIS knowledge. If he had said to him on the instant what was uppermost he would have

said: "HAVE I passed?for of course I know one has to pass here." Little Bilham would have reassured

him, have told him that he exaggerated, and have adduced happily enough the argument of little Bilham's

own very presence; which, in truth, he could see, was as easy a one as Gloriani's own or as Chad's. He

himself would perhaps then after a while cease to be frightened, would get the point of view for some of the

facestypes tremendously alien, alien to Woollettthat he had already begun to take in. Who were they all,

the dispersed groups and couples, the ladies even more unlike those of Woollett than the gentlemen?this

was the enquiry that, when his young friend had greeted him, he did find himself making.

"Oh they're every oneall sorts and sizes; of course I mean within limits, though limits down perhaps rather

more than limits up. There are always artistshe's beautiful and inimitable to the cher confrere; and then

gros bonnets of many kindsambassadors, cabinet ministers, bankers, generals, what do I know? even Jews.

Above all always some awfully nice womenand not too many; sometimes an actress, an artist, a great

performerbut only when they're not monsters; and in particular the right femmes du monde. You can fancy

his history on that sideI believe it's fabulous: they NEVER give him up. Yet he keeps them down: no one

knows how he manages; it's too beautiful and bland. Never too manyand a mighty good thing too; just a

perfect choice. But there are not in any way many bores; it has always been so; he has some secret. It's

extraordinary. And you don't find it out. He's the same to every one. He doesn't ask questions.'

Strether followed the direction of his eyes. "Are they all, this time, femmes du monde?"

This was a category our friend had a feeling for; a light, romantic and mysterious, on the feminine element, in

His companion considered. "I think I make out a 'Portuguee.' But I've seen Turks."

"Oh in closer quarters they come out!" And then, while Strether was aware of fearing closer quarters, though

giving himself again to the harmonies, "Well," little Bilham went on, "it IS at the worst rather good, you

know. If you like it, you feel it, this way, that shows you're not in the least out But you always know things,"

Strether liked it and felt it only too much; so "I say, don't lay traps for me!" he rather helplessly murmured.

"Oh nohe doesn't know anything about THAT. That's half the battle herethat you can never hear

politics. We don't talk them. I mean to poor young wretches of all sorts. And yet it's always as charming as

this; it's as if, by something in the air, our squalor didn't show. It puts us all backinto the last century."

"I'm afraid," Strether said, amused, "that it puts me rather forward: oh ever so far!"

"Into the next? But isn't that only," little Bilham asked, "because you're really of the century before?"

"The century before the last? Thank you!" Strether laughed. "If I ask you about some of the ladies it can't be

"On the contrary they adorewe all adore herethe rococo, and where is there a better setting for it than

the whole thing, the pavilion and the garden, together? There are lots of people with collections," little

It made Strether for a moment give himself again to contemplation. There were faces he scarce knew what to

make of. Were they charming or were they only strange? He mightn't talk politics, yet he suspected a Pole or

two. The upshot was the question at the back of his head from the moment his friend had joined him. "Have

"I haven't seen them yet, but Miss Gostrey has come. She's in the pavilion looking at objects. One can see

"Oh yes, she's a collector, and I knew she was to come. Is Madame de Vionnet a collector?" Strether went on.

"Rather, I believe; almost celebrated." The young man met, on it, a little, his friend's eyes. "I happen to

knowfrom Chad, whom I saw last nightthat they've come back; but only yesterday. He wasn't sureup

to the last. This, accordingly," little Bilham went on, "will beif they ARE heretheir first appearance after

Strether, very quickly, turned these things over. "Chad told you last night? To me, on our way here, he said

"Well," said little Bilham, "you're not a person to whom it's easy to tell things you don't want to know.

Though it is easy, I admit it's quite beautiful," he benevolently added, "when you do want to."

Strether looked at him with an indulgence that matched his intelligence. "Is that the deep reasoning on

Little Bilham considered the depth of his reasoning. "I haven't been silent. I spoke of them to you the other

"I can only tell you that it's what they pass for. But isn't that enough? What more than a vain appearance does

the wisest of us know? I commend you," the young man declared with a pleasant emphasis, "the vain

Strether looked more widely round, and what he saw, from face to face, deepened the effect of his young

"Oh!" said Strether. After which, as his companion laughed: "How then can it be so good?"

"Oh mine!" Strether said rather strangely. But then as if to attenuate: "You mean they won't hear of

It had brought them, as she caught the last words, into relation with Miss Barrace, whom Strether had already

observedas he had never before seen a lady at a partymoving about alone. Coming within sound of them

she had already spoken, and she took again, through her longhandled glass, all her amused and amusing

possession. "How much, poor Mr. Strether, you seem to have to see about! But you can't say," she gaily

declared, "that I don't do what I can to help you. Mr. Waymarsh is placed. I've left him in the house with Miss

"The way," little Bilham exclaimed, "Mr. Strether gets the ladies to work for him! He's just preparing to draw

"Madame de Vionnet? Oh, oh, oh!" Miss Barrace cried in a wonderful crescendo. There was more in it, our

friend made out, than met the ear. Was it after all a joke that he should be serious about anything? He envied

Miss Barrace at any rate her power of not being. She seemed, with little cries and protests and quick

recognitions, movements like the darts of some fine highfeathered freepecking bird, to stand before life as

before some full shopwindow. You could fairly hear, as she selected and pointed, the tap of her

tortoiseshell against the glass. "It's certain that we do need seeing about; only I'm glad it's not I who have to

do it. One does, no doubt, begin that way; then suddenly one finds that one has given it up. It's too much, it's

too difficult. You're wonderful, you people," she continued to Strether, "for not feeling those thingsby

which I mean impossibilities. You never feel them. You face them with a fortitude that makes it a lesson to

"Ah but"little Bilham put it with discouragement"what do we achieve after all? We see about you and

"Oh you, Mr. Bilham," she replied as with an impatient rap on the glass, "you're not worth sixpence! You

come over to convert the savagesfor I know you verily did, I remember youand the savages simply

"Not even!" the young man woefully confessed: "they haven't gone through that form. They've simplythe

cannibals!eaten me; converted me if you like, but converted me into food. I'm but the bleached bones of a

"Well then there we are! Only"and Miss Barrace appealed again to Strether"don't let it discourage you.

You'll break down soon enough, but you'll meanwhile have had your moments. Il faut en avoir. I always like

She laughed out as at the alarm of it. "He'll resist even Miss Gostrey: so grand is it not to understand. He's

"He is indeed," Strether conceded. "He wouldn't tell me of this affaironly said he had an engagement; but

with such a gloom, you must let me insist, as if it had been an engagement to be hanged. Then silently and

"Oh I hope it's lasting!" Miss Barrace said. "But he only, at the best, bears with me. He doesn't

"Michelangelesque!"little Bilham completed her meaning. "He IS a success. Moses, on the ceiling,

"Certainly, if you mean by portable," she returned, "looking so well in one's carriage. He's too funny beside

me in his comer; he looks like somebody, somebody foreign and famous, en exil; so that people wonderit's

very amusingwhom I'm taking about. I show him Paris, show him everything, and he never turns a hair.

He's like the Indian chief one reads about, who, when he comes up to Washington to see the Great Father,

stands wrapt in his blanket and gives no sign. I might be the Great Fatherfrom the way he takes

everything." She was delighted at this hit of her identity with that personageit fitted so her character; she

declared it was the title she meant henceforth to adopt. "And the way he sits, too, in the corner of my room,

only looking at my visitors very hard and as if he wanted to start something! They wonder what he does want

to start. But he's wonderful," Miss Barrace once more insisted. "He has never started anything yet."

It presented him none the less, in truth, to her actual friends, who looked at each other in intelligence, with

frank amusement on Bilham's part and a shade of sadness on Strether's. Strether's sadness sprangfor the

image had its grandeurfrom his thinking how little he himself was wrapt in his blanket, how little, in

marble halls, all too oblivious of the Great Father, he resembled a really majestic aboriginal. But he had also

another reflexion. "You've all of you here so much visual sense that you've somehow all 'run' to it. There are

"Any moral," little Bilham explained, watching serenely, across the garden, the several femmes du monde.

"But Miss Barrace has a moral distinction," he kindly continued; speaking as if for Strether's benefit not less

"HAVE you?" Strether, scarce knowing what he was about, asked of her almost eagerly.

"Oh not a distinction"she was mightily amused at his tone"Mr. Bilham's too good. But I think I may say

a sufficiency. Yes, a sufficiency. Have you supposed strange things of me?"and she fixed him again,

through all her tortoiseshell, with the droll interest of it. "You ARE all indeed wonderful. I should awfully

disappoint you. I do take my stand on my sufficiency. But I know, I confess," she went on, "strange people. I

don't know how it happens; I don't do it on purpose; it seems to be my doomas if I were always one of

their habits: it's wonderful! I dare say moreover," she pursued with an interested gravity, "that I do, that we

all do here, run too much to mere eye. But how can it be helped? We're all looking at each otherand in the

light of Paris one sees what things resemble. That's what the light of Paris seems always to show. It's the fault

"Dear old Paris then!" Strether resignedly sighed while for a moment they looked at each other. Then he

broke out: "Does Madame de Vionnet do that? I mean really show for what she is?"

But Miss Barrace had meanwhile perceived relief. "Why not put your question straight to the person who can

"No," said little Bilham; "don't put any question; wait, rather it will be much more funto judge for

On which Strether saw that Chad was again at hand, and he afterwards scarce knew, absurd as it may seem,

what had then quickly occurred. The moment concerned him, he felt, more deeply than he could have

explained, and he had a subsequent passage of speculation as to whether, on walking off with Chad, he hadn't

looked either pale or red. The only thing he was clear about was that, luckily, nothing indiscreet had in fact

been said and that Chad himself was more than ever, in Miss Barrace's great sense, wonderful. It was one of

the connexionsthough really why it should be, after all, was none so apparentin which the whole change

in him came out as most striking. Strether recalled as they approached the house that he had impressed him

that first night as knowing how to enter a box. Well, he impressed him scarce less now as knowing how to

make a presentation. It did something for Strether's own qualitymarked it as estimated; so that our poor

friend, conscious and passive, really seemed to feel himself quite handed over and delivered; absolutely, as he

would have said, made a present of, given away. As they reached the house a young woman, about to come

forth, appeared, unaccompanied, on the steps; at the exchange with whom of a word on Chad's part Strether

immediately perceived that, obligingly, kindly, she was there to meet them. Chad had left her in the house,

but she had afterwards come halfway and then the next moment had joined them in the garden. Her air of

youth, for Strether, was at first almost disconcerting, while his second impression was, not less sharply, a

degree of relief at there not having just been, with the others, any freedom used about her. It was upon him at

a touch that she was no subject for that, and meanwhile, on Chad's introducing him, she had spoken to him,

very simply and gently, in an English clearly of the easiest to her, yet unlike any other he had ever heard. It

wasn't as if she tried; nothing, he could see after they had been a few minutes together, was as if she tried; but

her speech, charming correct and odd, was like a precaution against her passing for a Pole. There were

Later on he was to feel many more of them, but by that time he was to feel other things besides. She was

dressed in black, but in black that struck him as light and transparent; she was exceedingly fair, and, though

she was as markedly slim, her face had a roundness, with eyes far apart and a little strange. Her smile was

natural and dim; her hat not extravagant; he had only perhaps a sense of the clink, beneath her fine black

sleeves, of more gold bracelets and bangles than he had ever seen a lady wear. Chad was excellently free and

light about their encounter; it was one of the occasions on which Strether most wished he himself might have

arrived at such ease and such humour: "Here you are then, face to face at last; you're made for each

othervous allez voir; and I bless your union." It was indeed, after he had gone off, as if he had been partly

serious too. This latter motion had been determined by an enquiry from him about "Jeanne"; to which her

mother had replied that she was probably still in the house with Miss Gostrey, to whom she had lately

committed her. "Ah but you know," the young man had rejoined, "he must see her"; with which, while

Strether pricked up his ears, he had started as if to bring her, leaving the other objects of his interest together.

Strether wondered to find Miss Gostrey already involved, feeling that he missed a link; but feeling also, with

small delay, how much he should like to talk with her of Madame de Vionnet on this basis of evidence.

The evidence as yet in truth was meagre; which, for that matter, was perhaps a little why his expectation had

had a drop. There was somehow not quite a wealth in her; and a wealth was all that, in his simplicity, he had

definitely prefigured. Still, it was too much to be sure already that there was but a poverty. They moved away

from the house, and, with eyes on a bench at some distance, he proposed that they should sit down. "I've

heard a great deal about you," she said as they went; but he had an answer to it that made her stop short.

"Well, about YOU, Madame de Vionnet, I've heard, I'm bound to say, almost nothing"those struck him as

the only words he himself could utter with any lucidity; conscious as he was, and as with more reason, of the

determination to be in respect to the rest of his business perfectly plain and go perfectly straight. It hadn't at

any rate been in the least his idea to spy on Chad's proper freedom. It was possibly, however, at this very

instant and under the impression of Madame de Vionnet's pause, that going straight began to announce itself

as a matter for care. She had only after all to smile at him ever so gently in order to make him ask himself if

he weren't already going crooked. It might be going crooked to find it of a sudden just only clear that she

intended very definitely to be what he would have called nice to him. This was what passed between them

while, for another instant, they stood still; he couldn't at least remember afterwards what else it might have

been. The thing indeed really unmistakeable was its rolling over him as a wave that he had been, in

conditions incalculable and unimaginable, a subject of discussion. He had been, on some ground that

concerned her, answered for; which gave her an advantage he should never be able to match.

What had struck him first was the way he was bracketed with that lady; and he wondered what account Chad

would have given of their acquaintance. Something not as yet traceable, at all events. had obviously

This was one of the thingsthe "all" Miss Gostrey would now tell himthat, with every deference to

present preoccupation, was uppermost for Strether after they had taken their seat. One of the others was, at

the end of five minutes, that sheoh incontestably, yesDIFFERED less; differed, that is, scarcely at

allwell, superficially speaking, from Mrs. Newsome or even from Mrs. Pocock. She was ever so much

younger than the one and not so young as the other; but what WAS there in her, if anything, that would have

made it impossible he should meet her at Woollett? And wherein was her talk during their moments on the

bench together not the same as would have been found adequate for a Woollett gardenparty?unless

perhaps truly in not being quite so bright. She observed to him that Mr. Newsome had, to her knowledge,

taken extraordinary pleasure in his visit; but there was no good lady at Woollett who wouldn't have been at

least up to that. Was there in Chad, by chance, after all, deep down, a principle of aboriginal loyalty that had

made him, for sentimental ends, attach himself to elements, happily encountered, that would remind him

most of the old air and the old soil? Why accordingly be in a flutter Strether could even put it that

wayabout this unfamiliar phenomenon of the femme du monde? On these terms Mrs. Newsome herself

was as much of one. Little Bilham verily had testified that they came out, the ladies of the type, in close

quarters; but it was just in these quartersnow comparatively closethat he felt Madame de Vionnet's

common humanity. She did come out, and certainly to his relief, but she came out as the usual thing. There

might be motives behind, but so could there often be even at Woollett. The only thing was that if she showed

him she wished to like himas the motives behind might conceivably promptit would possibly have been

more thrilling for him that she should have shown as more vividly alien. Ah she was neither Turk nor

Pole!which would be indeed flat once more for Mrs. Newsome and Mrs. Pocock. A lady and two

gentlemen had meanwhile, however, approached their bench, and this accident stayed for the time further

They presently addressed his companion, the brilliant strangers; she rose to speak to them, and Strether noted

how the escorted lady, though mature and by no means beautiful, had more of the bold high look, the range of

expensive reference, that he had, as might have been said, made his plans for. Madame de Vionnet greeted

her as "Duchesse" and was greeted in turn, while talk started in French, as "Ma toutebelle"; little facts that

had their due, their vivid interest for Strether. Madame de Vionnet didn't, none the less, introduce hima

note he was conscious of as false to the Woollett scale and the Woollett humanity; though it didn't prevent the

Duchess, who struck him as confident and free, very much what he had obscurely supposed duchesses, from

looking at him as straight and as hardfor it WAS hardas if she would have liked, all the same, to know

him. "Oh yes, my dear, it's all right, it's ME; and who are YOU, with your interesting wrinkles and your most

effective (is it the handsomest, is it the ugliest?) of noses?"some such loose handful of bright flowers she

seemed, fragrantly enough, to fling at him. Strether almost wonderedat such a pace was he goingif some

divination of the influence of either party were what determined Madame de Vionnet's abstention. One of the

gentlemen, in any case, succeeded in placing himself in close relation with our friend's companion; a

gentleman rather stout and importantly short, in a hat with a wonderful wide curl to its brim and a frock coat

buttoned with an effect of superlative decision. His French had quickly turned to equal English, and it

occurred to Strether that he might well be one of the ambassadors. His design was evidently to assert a claim

to Madame de Vionnet's undivided countenance, and he made it good in the course of a minuteled her

away with a trick of three words; a trick played with a social art of which Strether, looking after them as the

He sank again upon his bench and, while his eyes followed the party, reflected, as he had done before, on

Chad's strange communities. He sat there alone for five minutes, with plenty to think of; above all with his

sense of having suddenly been dropped by a charming woman overlaid now by other impressions and in fact

quite cleared and indifferent. He hadn't yet had so quiet a surrender; he didn't in the least care if nobody

spoke to him more. He might have been, by his attitude, in for something of a march so broad that the want of

ceremony with which he had just been used could fall into its place as but a minor incident of the procession.

Besides, there would be incidents enough, as he felt when this term of contemplation was closed by the

reappearance of little Bilham, who stood before him a moment with a suggestive "Well?" in which he saw

himself reflected as disorganised, as possibly floored. He replied with a "Well!" intended to show that he

wasn't floored in the least. No indeed; he gave it out, as the young man sat down beside him, that if, at the

worst, he had been overturned at all, he had been overturned into the upper air, the sublimer element with

which he had an affinity and in which he might be trusted a while to float. It wasn't a descent to earth to say

after an instant and in sustained response to the reference: "You're quite sure her husband's living?"

Strether had after all to think. "Well, I'm sorry for them." But it didn't for the moment matter more than that.

He assured his young friend he was quite content. They wouldn't stir; were all right as they were. He didn't

want to be introduced; had been introduced already about as far as he could go. He had seen moreover an

immensity; liked Gloriani, who, as Miss Barrace kept saying, was wonderful; had made out, he was sure, the

halfdozen other 'men who were distinguished, the artists, the critics and oh the great dramatistHIM it was

easy to spot; but wantedno, thanks, reallyto talk with none of them; having nothing at all to say and

finding it would do beautifully as it was; do beautifully because what it waswell, was just simply too late.

And when after this little Bilham, submissive and responsive, but with an eye to the consolation nearest,

easily threw off some "Better late than never!" all he got in return for it was a sharp "Better early than late!"

This note indeed the next thing overflowed for Strether into a quiet stream of demonstration that as soon as he

had let himself go he felt as the real relief. It had consciously gathered to a head, but the reservoir had filled

sooner than he knew, and his companion's touch was to make the waters spread. There were some things that

had to come in time if they were to come at all. If they didn't come in time they were lost for ever. It was the

"It's not too late for YOU, on any side, and you don't strike me as in danger of missing the train; besides

which people can be in general pretty well trusted, of coursewith the clock of their freedom ticking as loud

as it seems to do hereto keep an eye on the fleeting hour. All the same don't forget that you're young

blessedly young; be glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It

doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what

HAVE you had? This place and these impressionsmild as you may find them to wind a man up so; all my

impressions of Chad and of people I've seen at HIS placewell, have had their abundant message for me,

have just dropped THAT into my mind. I see it now. I haven't done so enough before and now I'm old; too

old at any rate for what I see. Oh I DO see, at least; and more than you'd believe or I can express. It's too late.

And it's as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to know it

was there. Now I hear its faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses one loses;

make no mistake about that. The affair I mean the affair of lifecouldn't, no doubt, have been different

for me; for it's at the best a tin mould, either fluted and embossed, with ornamental excrescences, or else

smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one's consciousness is poured so that one 'takes'

the form as the great cook says, and is more or less compactly held by it: one lives in fine as one can. Still,

one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don't be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I was either,

at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it; I don't quite know which. Of course at present I'm a

case of reaction against the mistake; and the voice of reaction should, no doubt, always be taken with an

allowance. But that doesn't affect the point that the right time is now yours. The right time is ANY time that

one is still so lucky as to have. You've plenty; that's the great thing; you're, as I say, damn you, so happily and

hatefully young. Don't at any rate miss things out of stupidity. Of course I don't take you for a fool, or I

shouldn't be addressing you thus awfully. Do what you like so long as you don't make MY mistake. For it

was a mistake. Live!" . . . Slowly and sociably, with full pauses and straight dashes, Strether had so delivered

himself; holding little Bilham from step to step deeply and gravely attentive. The end of all was that the

young man had turned quite solemn, and that this was a contradiction of the innocent gaiety the speaker had

wished to promote. He watched for a moment the consequence of his words, and then, laying a hand on his

listener's knee and as if to end with the proper joke: "And now for the eye I shall keep on you!"

Little Bilham continued to think, but at last had a smile. "Well, you ARE amusingto ME."

"Impayable, as you say, no doubt. But what am I to myself?" Strether had risen with this, giving his attention

now to an encounter that, in the middle of the garden, was in the act of taking place between their host and

the lady at whose side Madame de Vionnet had quitted him. This lady, who appeared within a few minutes to

have left her friends, awaited Gloriani's eager approach with words on her lips that Strether couldn't catch,

but of which her interesting witty face seemed to give him the echo. He was sure she was prompt and fine,

but also that she had met her match, and he likedin the light of what he was quite sure was the Duchess's

latent insolencethe good humour with which the great artist asserted equal resources. Were they, this pair,

of the "great world"?and was he himself, for the moment and thus related to them by his observation, IN

it? Then there was something in the great world covertly tigerish, which came to him across the lawn and in

the charming air as a waft from the jungle. Yet it made him admire most of the two, made him envy, the

glossy male tiger, magnificently marked. These absurdities of the stirred sense, fruits of suggestion ripening

on the instant, were all reflected in his next words to little Bilham. "I knowif we talk of thatwhom I

Little Bilham followed his eyes; but then as with a shade of knowing surprise: "Gloriani?"

Our friend had in fact already hesitated, though not on the hint of his companion's doubt, in which there were

depths of critical reserve. He had just made out, in the now full picture, something and somebody else;

another impression had been superimposed. A young girl in a white dress and a softly plumed white hat had

suddenly come into view, and what was presently clear was that her course was toward them. What was

clearer still was that the handsome young man at her side was Chad Newsome, and what was clearest of all

was that she was therefore Mademoiselle de Vionnet, that she was unmistakeably prettybright gentle shy

happy wonderfuland that Chad now, with a consummate calculation of effect, was about to present her to

his old friend's vision. What was clearest of all indeed was something much more than this, something at the

single stroke of whichand wasn't it simply juxtaposition?all vagueness vanished. It was the click of a

springhe saw the truth. He had by this time also met Chad's look; there was more of it in that; and the

truth, accordingly, so far as Bilham's enquiry was concerned, had thrust in the answer. "Oh Chad!"it was

that rare youth he should have enjoyed being "like." The virtuous attachment would be all there before him;

the virtuous attachment would be in the very act of appeal for his blessing; Jeanne de Vionnet, this charming

creature, would be exquisitely, intensely nowthe object of it. Chad brought her straight up to him, and

Chad was, oh yes, at this momentfor the glory of Woollett or whateverbetter still even than Gloriani. He

had plucked this blossom; he had kept it overnight in water; and at last as he held it up to wonder he did

enjoy his effect. That was why Strether had felt at first the breath of calculationand why moreover, as he

now knew, his look at the girl would be, for the young man, a sign of the latter's success. What young man

had ever paraded about that way, without a reason, a maiden in her flower? And there was nothing in his

reason at present obscure. Her type sufficiently told of itthey wouldn't, they couldn't, want her to go to

Woollett. Poor Woollett, and what it might miss!though brave Chad indeed too, and what it might gain!

Brave Chad however had just excellently spoken. "This is a good little friend of mine who knows all about

you and has moreover a message for you. And this, my dear"he had turned to the child herself"is the

best man in the world, who has it in his power to do a great deal for us and whom I want you to like and

She stood there quite pink, a little frightened, prettier and prettier and not a bit like her mother. There was in

this last particular no resemblance but that of youth to youth; and here was in fact suddenly Strether's sharpest

impression. It went wondering, dazed, embarrassed, back to the woman he had just been talking with; it was a

revelation in the light of which he already saw she would become more interesting. So slim and fresh and

fair, she had yet put forth this perfection; so that for really believing it of her, for seeing her to any such

developed degree as a mother, comparison would be urgent. Well, what was it now but fairly thrust upon

him? "Mamma wishes me to tell you before we go," the girl said, "that she hopes very much you'll come to

"She quite reproaches herself," Chad helpfully explained: "you were interesting her so much when she

"Ah don't mention it!" Strether murmured, looking kindly from one to the other and wondering at many

"And I'm to ask you for myself," Jeanne continued with her hands clasped together as if in some small learnt

"Leave it to me, dearI'll take care of it!" Chad genially declared in answer to this, while Strether himself

almost held his breath. What was in the girl was indeed too soft, too unknown for direct dealing; so that one

could only gaze at it as at a picture, quite staying one's own hand. But with Chad he was now on ground

Chad he could meet; so pleasant a confidence in that and in everything did the young man freely exhale.

There was the whole of a story in his tone to his companion, and he spoke indeed as if already of the family.

It made Strether guess the more quickly what it might be about which Madame de Vionnet was so urgent.

Having seen him then she had found him easy; she wished to have it out with him that some way for the

young people must be discovered, some way that would not impose as a condition the transplantation of her

daughter. He already saw himself discussing with this lady the attractions of Woollett as a residence for

Chad's companion. Was that youth going now to trust her with the affairso that it would be after all with

one of his "ladyfriends" that his mother's missionary should be condemned to deal? It was quite as if for an

instant the two men looked at each other on this question. But there was no mistaking at last Chad's pride in

the display of such a connexion. This was what had made him so carry himself while, three minutes before,

he was bringing it into view; what had caused his friend, first catching sight of him, to be so struck with his

air. It was, in a word, just when he thus finally felt Chad putting things straight off on him that he envied him,

as he had mentioned to little Bilham, most. The whole exhibition however was but a matter of three or four

minutes, and the author of it had soon explained that, as Madame de Vionnet was immediately going "on,"

this could be for Jeanne but a snatch. They would all meet again soon, and Strether was meanwhile to stay

and amuse himself"I'll pick you up again in plenty of time." He took the girl off as he had brought her, and

Strether, with the faint sweet foreignness of her "Au revoir, monsieur!" in his ears as a note almost

unprecedented, watched them recede side by side and felt how, once more, her companion's relation to her

got an accent from it. They disappeared among the others and apparently into the house; whereupon our

friend turned round to give out to little Bilham the conviction of which he was full. But there was no little

Bilham any more; little Bilham had within the few moments, for reasons of his own, proceeded further: a

Chad was not in fact on this occasion to keep his promise of coming back; but Miss Gostrey had soon

presented herself with an explanation of his failure. There had been reasons at the last for his going off with

ces dames; and he had asked her with much instance to come out and take charge of their friend. She did so,

Strether felt as she took her place beside him, in a manner that left nothing to desire. He had dropped back on

his bench, alone again for a time, and the more conscious for little Bilham's defection of his unexpressed

thought; in respect to which however this next converser was a still more capacious vessel. "It's the child!" he

had exclaimed to her almost as soon as she appeared; and though her direct response was for some time

delayed he could feel in her meanwhile the working of this truth. It might have been simply, as she waited,

that they were now in presence altogether of truth spreading like a flood and not for the moment to be offered

her in the mere cupful; inasmuch as who should ces dames prove to be but persons about whomonce thus

face to face with themshe found she might from the first have told him almost everything? This would

have freely come had he taken the simple precaution of giving her their name. There could be no better

exampleand she appeared to note it with high amusementthan the way, making things out already so

much for himself, he was at last throwing precautions to the winds. They were neither more nor less, she and

the child's mother, than old schoolfriendsfriends who had scarcely met for years but whom this

unlookedfor chance had brought together with a rush. It was a relief, Miss Gostrey hinted, to feel herself no

longer groping; she was unaccustomed to grope and as a general thing, he might well have seen, made

straight enough for her clue. With the one she had now picked up in her hands there need be at least no waste

of wonder. "She's coming to see methat's for YOU," Strether's counsellor continued; "but I don't require it

The waste of wonder might be proscribed; but Strether, characteristically, was even by this time in the

She just hesitated. "I mean that if she comes to see me I shall now that I've pulled myself round a bit after

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

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

He looked at her an instant. "I see where you're coming out. Everything's possible." Their eyes had on it in

fact an exchange of some duration; after which he pursued: "Isn't it that beautiful child?" Then as she still

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

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

"You'll only help me with her? Well then!" Most of the persons previously gathered had, in the interest of

tea, passed into the house, and they had the gardens mainly to themselves. The shadows were long, the last

call of the birds, who had made a home of their own in the noble interspaced quarter, sounded from the high

trees in the other gardens as well, those of the old convent and of the old hotels; it was as if our friends had

waited for the full charm to come out. Strether's impressions were still present; it was as if something had

happened that "nailed" them, made them more intense; but he was to ask himself soon afterwards, that

evening, what really HAD happenedconscious as he could after all remain that for a gentleman taken, and

taken the first time, into the "great world," the world of ambassadors and duchesses, the items made a meagre

total. It was nothing new to him, however, as we know, that a man might haveat all events such a man as

hean amount of experience out of any proportion to his adventures; so that, though it was doubtless no

great adventure to sit on there with Miss Gostrey and hear about Madame de Vionnet, the hour, the picture,

the immediate, the recent, the possibleas well as the communication itself, not a note of which failed to

It was history, to begin with, that Jeanne's mother had been threeandtwenty years before, at Geneva,

schoolmate and good girlfriend to Maria Gostrey, who had moreover enjoyed since then, though interruptedly

and above all with a long recent drop, other glimpses of her. Twentythree years put them both on, no doubt;

and Madame de Vionnetthough she had married straight after schoolcouldn't be today an hour less than

thirtyeight. This made her ten years older than Chadthough ten years, also, if Strether liked, older than

she looked; the least, at any rate, that a prospective motherinlaw could be expected to do with. She would

be of all mothersinlaw the most charming; unless indeed, through some perversity as yet insupposeable,

she should utterly belie herself in that relation. There was none surely in which, as Maria remembered her,

she mustn't be charming; and this frankly in spite of the stigma of failure in the tie where failure always most

showed. It was no test therewhen indeed WAS it a test there?for Monsieur de Vionnet had been a brute.

She had lived for years apart from himwhich was of course always a horrid position; but Miss Gostrey's

impression of the matter had been that she could scarce have made a better thing of it had she done it on

purpose to show she was amiable. She was so amiable that nobody had had a word to say; which was luckily

not the case for her husband. He was so impossible that she had the advantage of all her merits.

It was still history for Strether that the Comte de Vionnetit being also history that the lady in question was

a Countessshould now, under Miss Gostrey's sharp touch, rise before him as a high distinguished polished

impertinent reprobate, the product of a mysterious order; it was history, further, that the charming girl so

freely sketched by his companion should have been married out of hand by a mother, another figure of

striking outline, full of dark personal motive; it was perhaps history most of all that this company was, as a

matter of course, governed by such considerations as put divorce out of the question. "Ces gensla don't

divorce, you know, any more than they emigrate or abjurethey think it impious and vulgar"; a fact in the

light of which they seemed but the more richly special. It was all special; it was all, for Strether's imagination,

more or less rich. The girl at the Genevese school, an isolated interesting attaching creature, then both

sensitive and violent, audacious but always forgiven, was the daughter of a French father and an English

mother who, early left a widow, had married againtried afresh with a foreigner; in her career with whom

she had apparently given her child no example of comfort. All these peoplethe people of the English

mother's sidehad been of condition more or less eminent; yet with oddities and disparities that had often

since made Maria, thinking them over, wonder what they really quite rhymed to. It was in any case her belief

that the mother, interested and prone to adventure, had been without conscience, had only thought of ridding

herself most quickly of a possible, an actual encumbrance. The father, by her impression, a Frenchman with a

name one knew, had been a different matter, leaving his child, she clearly recalled, a memory all fondness, as

well as an assured little fortune which was unluckily to make her more or less of a prey later on. She had been

in particular, at school, dazzlingly, though quite booklessly, clever; as polyglot as a little Jewess (which she

wasn't, oh no!) and chattering French, English, German, Italian, anything one would, in a way that made a

clean sweep, if not of prizes and parchments, at least of every "part," whether memorised or improvised, in

the curtained costumed school repertory, and in especial of all mysteries of race and vagueness of reference,

It would doubtless be difficult today, as between French and English, to name her and place her; she would

certainly show, on knowledge, Miss Gostrey felt, as one of those convenient types who don't keep you

explainingminds with doors as numerous as the manytongued cluster of confessionals at Saint Peter's.

You might confess to her with confidence in Roumelian, and even Roumelian sins. Therefore! But

Strether's narrator covered her implication with a laugh; a laugh by which his betrayal of a sense of the lurid

in the picture was also perhaps sufficiently protected. He had a moment of wondering, while his friend went

on, what sins might be especially Roumelian. She went on at all events to the mention of her having met the

young thingagain by some Swiss lakein her first married state, which had appeared for the few

intermediate years not at least violently disturbed. She had been lovely at that moment, delightful to HER,

full of responsive emotion, of amused recognitions and amusing reminders, and then once more, much later,

after a long interval, equally but differently charmingtouching and rather mystifying for the five minutes of

an encounter at a railwaystation en province, during which it had come out that her life was all changed.

Miss Gostrey had understood enough to see, essentially, what had happened, and yet had beautifully dreamed

that she was herself faultless. There were doubtless depths in her, but she was all right; Strether would see if

she wasn't. She was another person howeverthat had been promptly markedfrom the small child of

nature at the Geneva school, a little person quite made over (as foreign women WERE, compared with

American) by marriage. Her situation too had evidently cleared itself up; there would have beenall that

was possiblea judicial separation. She had settled in Paris, brought up her daughter, steered her boat. It was

no very pleasant boatespecially thereto be in; but Marie de Vionnet would have headed straight. She

would have friends, certainlyand very good ones. There she was at all eventsand it was very interesting.

Her knowing Mr. Chad didn't in the least prove she hadn't friends; what it proved was what good ones HE

had. "I saw that," said Miss Gostrey, "that night at the Francais; it came out for me in three minutes. I saw

"Oh nonot anybody like her!" Strether laughed. "But you mean," he as promptly went on, "that she has had

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

Their eyes, as so often, in candid conference, through their settled glasses, met over it long; after which

Strether's again took in the whole place. They were quite alone there now. "Mustn't she ratherin the time

"Ah she won't of course have lost an hour. But that's just the good motherthe good French one. You must

remember that of herthat as a mother she's French, and that for them there's a special providence. It

precisely howeverthat she mayn't have been able to begin as far back as she'd have likedmakes her

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

"Yesshe counts on you. Oh and first of all of course," Miss Gostrey added, "on herwell, convincing

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

She had laughed the words out, but they brought her companion, the next thing, to a stand. "Is what you mean

"Ah you must go to see her"Miss Gostrey was a trifle evasive. "You can't not do that. You'd have gone to

see the other woman. I mean if there had been onea different sort. It's what you came out for."

He for a moment entertained the question, then found for it the frankest of answers. "Yes. If she were worse

"Ah you know," he promptly replied, "I didn't come outwasn't that just what you originally reproached me

"Precisely. Therefore I say again what I said at first. You must take things as they come. Besides," Miss

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

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

There was something in it at which she flushed. "Yesthere we are. We're abysses." At last she smiled. "But

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

This was the next day the more easily effected that the young man, as it happened, even before he was down,

turned up at his hotel. Strether took his coffee, by habit, in the public room; but on his descending for this

purpose Chad instantly proposed an adjournment to what he called greater privacy. He had himself as yet had

nothingthey would sit down somewhere together; and when after a few steps and a turn into the Boulevard

they had, for their greater privacy, sat down among twenty others, our friend saw in his companion's move a

fear of the advent of Waymarsh. It was the first time Chad had to that extent given this personage "away";

and Strether found himself wondering of what it was symptomatic. He made out in a moment that the youth

was in earnest as he hadn't yet seen him; which in its turn threw a ray perhaps a trifle startling on what they

had each up to that time been treating as earnestness. It was sufficiently flattering however that the real

thingif this WAS at last the real thingshould have been determined, as appeared, precisely by an

accretion of Strether's importance. For this was what it quickly enough came tothat Chad, rising with the

lark, had rushed down to let him know while his morning consciousness was yet young that he had literally

made the afternoon before a tremendous impression. Madame de Vionnet wouldn't, couldn't rest till she

should have some assurance from him that he WOULD consent again to see her. The announcement was

made, across their marbletopped table, while the foam of the hot milk was in their cups and its plash still in

the air, with the smile of Chad's easiest urbanity; and this expression of his face caused our friend's doubts to

gather on the spot into a challenge of the lips. "See here"that was all; he only for the moment said again

"See here." Chad met it with all his air of straight intelligence, while Strether remembered again that fancy of

the first impression of him, the happy young Pagan, handsome and hard but oddly indulgent, whose

mysterious measure he had under the streetlamp tried mentally to take. The young Pagan, while a long look

passed between them, sufficiently understood. Strether scarce needed at last to say the rest"I want to know

where I am." But he said it, adding before any answer something more. "Are you engaged to be marriedis

Chad shook his head with the slow amenity that was one of his ways of conveying that there was time for

everything. "I have no secret though I may have secrets! I haven't at any rate that one. We're not engaged.

"Do you mean why I haven't already started with you?" Chad, beginning his coffee and buttering his roll, was

quite ready to explain. "Nothing would have induced menothing will still induce menot to try to keep

you here as long as you can be made to stay. It's too visibly good for you." Strether had himself plenty to say

about this, but it was amusing also to measure the march of Chad's tone. He had never been more a man of

the world, and it was always in his company present to our friend that one was seeing how in successive

connexions a man of the world acquitted himself. Chad kept it up beautifully. "My ideavoyons!is

simply that you should let Madame de Vionnet know you, simply that you should consent to know HER. I

don't in the least mind telling you that, clever and charming as she is, she's ever so much in my confidence.

All I ask of you is to let her talk to you. You've asked me about what you call my hitch, and so far as it goes

she'll explain it to you. She's herself my hitch, hang itif you must really have it all out. But in a sense," he

hastened in the most wonderful manner to add, "that you'll quite make out for yourself. She's too good a

friend, confound her. Too good, I mean, for me to leave without without" It was his first hesitation.

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

It was beautiful, the way Chad said these things, and his plea was now confessedlyoh quite flagrantly and

publiclyinteresting. The moment really took on for Strether an intensity. Chad owed Madame de Vionnet

so much? What DID that do then but clear up the whole mystery? He was indebted for alterations, and she

was thereby in a position to have sent in her bill for expenses incurred in reconstruction. What was this at

bottom but what had been to be arrived at? Strether sat there arriving at it while he munched toast and stirred

his second cup. To do this with the aid of Chad's pleasant earnest face was also to do more besides. No, never

before had he been so ready to take him as he was. What was it that had suddenly so cleared up? It was just

everybody's character; that is everybody's butin a measurehis own. Strether felt HIS character receive

for the instant a smutch from all the wrong things he had suspected or believed. The person to whom Chad

owed it that he could positively turn out such a comfort to other personssuch a person was sufficiently

raised above any "breath" by the nature of her work and the young man's steady light. All of which was vivid

enough to come and go quickly; though indeed in the midst of it Strether could utter a question. "Have I your

word of honour that if I surrender myself to Madame de Vionnet you'll surrender yourself to me?"

There was finally something in his felicity almost embarrassing and oppressiveStrether had begun to fidget

under it for the open air and the erect posture. He had signed to the waiter that he wished to pay, and this

transaction took some moments, during which he thoroughly felt, while he put down money and

pretendedit was quite hollowto estimate change, that Chad's higher spirit, his youth, his practice, his

paganism, his felicity, his assurance, his impudence, whatever it might be, had consciously scored a success.

Well, that was all right so far as it went; his sense of the thing in question covered our friend for a minute like

a veil through whichas if he had been muffledhe heard his interlocutor ask him if he mightn't take him

over about five. "Over" was over the river, and over the river was where Madame de Vionnet lived, and five

was that very afternoon. They got at last out of the placegot out before he answered. He lighted, in the

street, a cigarette, which again gave him more time. But it was already sharp for him that there was no use in

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

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

Strether stared at him with a little of the wanness, no doubt, that the vision of more to "make out" could

Again Strether had faltered, but it was brief. It was all very well, but there was nothing now he wouldn't risk.

"Excuse me, but I must reallyas I began by telling youknow where I am. Is she bad?"

"When relations are good?" Strether felt a little silly, and was even conscious of a foolish laugh, at having it

imposed on him to have appeared to speak so. What indeed was he talking about? His stare had relaxed; he

looked now all round him. But something in him brought him back, though he still didn't know quite how to

turn it. The two or three ways he thought of, and one of them in particular, were, even with scruples

dismissed, too ugly. He none the less at last found something. "Is her life without reproach?"

It struck him, directly he had found it, as pompous and priggish; so much so that he was thankful to Chad for

taking it only in the right spirit. The young man spoke so immensely to the point that the effect was

practically of positive blandness. "Absolutely without reproach. A beautiful life. Allez donc voir!"

These last words were, in the liberality of their confidence, so imperative that Strether went through no form

of assent; but before they separated it had been confirmed that he should be picked up at a quarter to five.

It was quite by halfpast fiveafter the two men had been together in Madame de Vionnet's drawingroom

not more than a dozen minutes that Chad, with a look at his watch and then another at their hostess, said

genially, gaily: "I've an engagement, and I know you won't complain if I leave him with you. He'll interest

you immensely; and as for her," he declared to Strether, "I assure you, if you're at all nervous, she's perfectly

He had left them to be embarrassed or not by this guarantee, as they could best manage, and embarrassment

was a thing that Strether wasn't at first sure Madame de Vionnet escaped. He escaped it himself, to his

surprise; but he had grown used by this time to thinking of himself as brazen. She occupied, his hostess, in

the Rue de Bellechasse, the first floor of an old house to which our visitors had had access from an old clean

court. The court was large and open, full of revelations, for our friend, of the habit of privacy, the peace of

intervals, the dignity of distances and approaches; the house, to his restless sense, was in the high homely

style of an elder day, and the ancient Paris that he was always looking forsometimes intensely felt,

sometimes more acutely missedwas in the immemorial polish of the wide waxed staircase and in the fine

boiseries, the medallions, mouldings, mirrors, great clear spaces, of the greyishwhite salon into which he

had been shown. He seemed at the very outset to see her in the midst of possessions not vulgarly numerous,

but hereditary cherished charming. While his eyes turned after a little from those of his hostess and Chad

freely talkednot in the least about HIM, but about other people, people he didn't know, and quite as if he

did know themhe found himself making out, as a background of the occupant, some glory, some prosperity

of the First Empire, some Napoleonic glamour, some dim lustre of the great legend; elements clinging still to

all the consular chairs and mythological brasses and sphinxes' heads and faded surfaces of satin striped with

The place itself went further backthat he guessed, and how old Paris continued in a manner to echo there;

but the postrevolutionary period, the world he vaguely thought of as the world of Chateaubriand, of

Madame de Stael, even of the young Lamartine, had left its stamp of harps and urns and torches, a stamp

impressed on sundry small objects, ornaments and relics. He had never before, to his knowledge, had present

to him relics, of any special dignity, of a private order little old miniatures, medallions, pictures, books;

books in leather bindings, pinkish and greenish, with gilt garlands on the back, ranged, together with other

promiscuous properties, under the glass of brassmounted cabinets. His attention took them all tenderly into

account. They were among the matters that marked Madame de Vionnet's apartment as something quite

different from Miss Gostrey's little museum of bargains and from Chad's lovely home; he recognised it as

founded much more on old accumulations that had possibly from time to time shrunken than on any

contemporary method of acquisition or form of curiosity. Chad and Miss Gostrey had rummaged and

purchased and picked up and exchanged, sifting, selecting, comparing; whereas the mistress of the scene

before him, beautifully passive under the spell of transmissiontransmission from her father's line, he quite

made up his mindhad only received, accepted and been quiet. When she hadn't been quiet she had been

moved at the most to some occult charity for some fallen fortune. There had been objects she or her

predecessors might even conceivably have parted with under need, but Strether couldn't suspect them of

having sold old pieces to get "better" ones. They would have felt no difference as to better or worse. He could

but imagine their having feltperhaps in emigration, in proscription, for his sketch was slight and

The pressure of wantwhatever might be the case with the other forcewas, however, presumably not

active now, for the tokens of a chastened ease still abounded after all, many marks of a taste whose

discriminations might perhaps have been called eccentric. He guessed at intense little preferences and sharp

little exclusions, a deep suspicion of the vulgar and a personal view of the right. The general result of this was

something for which he had no name on the spot quite ready, but something he would have come nearest to

naming in speaking of it as the air of supreme respectability, the consciousness, small, still, reserved, but

none the less distinct and diffused, of private honour. The air of supreme respectabilitythat was a strange

blank wall for his adventure to have brought him to break his nose against. It had in fact, as he was now

aware, filled all the approaches, hovered in the court as he passed, hung on the staircase as he mounted,

sounded in the grave rumble of the old bell, as little electric as possible, of which Chad, at the door, had

pulled the ancient but neatlykept tassel; it formed in short the clearest medium of its particular kind that he

had ever breathed. He would have answered for it at the end of a quarter of an hour that some of the glass

cases contained swords and epaulettes of ancient colonels and generals; medals and orders once pinned over

hearts that had long since ceased to beat; snuffboxes bestowed on ministers and envoys; copies of works

presented, with inscriptions, by authors now classic. At bottom of it all for him was the sense of her rare

unlikeness to the women he had known. This sense had grown, since the day before, the more he recalled her,

and had been above all singularly fed by his talk with Chad in the morning. Everything in fine made her

immeasurably new, and nothing so new as the old house and the old objects. There were books, two or three,

on a small table near his chair, but they hadn't the lemoncoloured covers with which his eye had begun to

dally from the hour of his arrival and to the opportunity of a further acquaintance with which he had for a

fortnight now altogether succumbed. On another table, across the room, he made out the great _Revue_; but

even that familiar face, conspicuous in Mrs. Newsome's parlours, scarce counted here as a modern note. He

was sure on the spotand he afterwards knew he was rightthat this was a touch of Chad's own hand.

What would Mrs. Newsome say to the circumstance that Chad's interested "influence" kept her paperknife

in the _Revue_? The interested influence at any rate had, as we say, gone straight to the pointhad in fact

She was seated, near the fire, on a small stuffed and fringed chair one of the few modern articles in the room,

and she leaned back in it with her hands clasped in her lap and no movement, in all her person, but the fine

prompt play of her deep young face. The fire, under the low white marble, undraped and academic, had burnt

down to the silver ashes of light wood, one of the windows, at a distance, stood open to the mildness and

stillness, out of which, in the short pauses, came the faint sound, pleasant and homely, almost rustic, of a

plash and a clatter of sabots from some coachhouse on the other side of the court. Madame de Vionnet,

while Strether sat there, wasn't to shift her posture by an inch. "I don't think you seriously believe in what

you're doing," she said; "but all the same, you know, I'm going to treat you quite as if I did."

"By which you mean," Strether directly replied, "quite as if you didn't! I assure you it won't make the least

"Well," she said, taking that menace bravely and philosophically enough, "the only thing that really matters is

It gave her another pause; which, however, she happily enough shook off. "Will you consent to go on with

Then it was that he saw how she had decidedly come all the way; and there accompanied it an extraordinary

sense of her raising from somewhere below him her beautiful suppliant eyes. He might have been perched at

his doorstep or at his window and she standing in the road. For a moment he let her stand and couldn't

moreover have spoken. It had been sad, of a sudden, with a sadness that was like a cold breath in his face.

"Ah but what I'm asking you," she quickly said, "isn't what Mr. Newsome had in mind." She spoke at present,

he saw, as if to take courageously ALL her risk. "This is my own idea and a different thing."

It gave poor Strether in truthuneasy as it made him too something of the thrill of a bold perception

justified. "Well," he answered kindly enough, "I was sure a moment since that some idea of your own had

She seemed still to look up at him, but now more serenely. "I made out you were sureand that helped it to

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

"It isn't at all necessary you should understand; it will do quite well enough if you simply remember it. Only

feel I trust youand for nothing so tremendous after all. Just," she said with a wonderful smile, "for common

Strether had a long pause while they sat again face to face, as they had sat, scarce less conscious, before the

poor lady had crossed the stream. She was the poor lady for Strether now because clearly she had some

trouble, and her appeal to him could only mean that her trouble was deep. He couldn't help it; it wasn't his

fault; he had done nothing; but by a turn of the hand she had somehow made their encounter a relation. And

the relation profited by a mass of things that were not strictly in it or of it; by the very air in which they sat,

by the high cold delicate room, by the world outside and the little plash in the court, by the First Empire and

the relics in the stiff cabinets, by matters as far off as those and by others as near as the unbroken clasp of her

hands in her lap and the look her expression had of being most natural when her eyes were most fixed. "You

He found himself in time on the point of telling her that she was, as Miss Barrace called it, wonderful; but,

catching himself up, he said something else instead. "What was it Chad's idea then that you should say to

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

"The woman he likesand just in proportion as he likes her. In proportion toofor shifting the troubleas

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

"Just as much as THATto take all, with you, on myself." But she got at once again away from this. "I've

been trembling as if we were to stand or fall by what you may think of me; and I'm even now," she went on

wonderfully, "drawing a long breathand, yes, truly taking a great couragefrom the hope that I don't in

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

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

"You draw splendid conclusions? Perfectly. But I don't understand them," Strether pursued. "You seem to me

to ask for much more than you need. What, at the worst for you, what at the best for myself, can I after all

do? I can use no pressure that I haven't used. You come really late with your request. I've already done all

"Yes, here you are, fortunately!" Madame de Vionnet laughed. "Mrs. Newsome," she added in another tone,

She still rather faltered. "Pardon me if I touch on it, but if I'm saying extraordinary things, why, perhaps,

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

He was amazed afterwards to think how simply and quietly he had met it. "Not yet." It was almost as if he

were a trifle disappointed had expected still more of her freedom. But he went straight on. "Is that what

She was evidently charmed with the way he took it. "If you mean if we've talked of itmost certainly. And

"Precisely," she exclaimed"you wonderful gentleman! I do judgeI HAVE judged. A woman can't.

You're safewith every right to be. You'd be much happier if you'd only believe it."

Strether was silent a little; then he found himself speaking with a cynicism of confidence of which even at the

moment the sources were strange to him. "I try to believe it. But it's a marvel," he exclaimed, "how YOU

Oh she was able to say. "Remember how much I was on the way to it through Mr. Newsomebefore I saw

"Well, I can bear almost anything!" our friend briskly interrupted. Deep and beautiful on this her smile came

back, and with the effect of making him hear what he had said just as she had heard it. He easily enough felt

that it gave him away, but what in truth had everything done but that? It had been all very well to think at

moments that he was holding her nose down and that he had coerced her: what had he by this time done but

let her practically see that he accepted their relation? What was their relation moreover though light and

brief enough in form as yetbut whatever she might choose to make it? Nothing could prevent

hercertainly he couldn'tfrom making it pleasant. At the back of his head, behind everything, was the

sense that she wasthere, before him, close to him, in vivid imperative formone of the rare women he had

so often heard of, read of, thought of, but never met, whose very presence, look, voice, the mere

contemporaneous FACT of whom, from the moment it was at all presented, made a relation of mere

recognition. That was not the kind of woman he had ever found Mrs. Newsome, a contemporaneous fact who

had been distinctly slow to establish herself; and at present, confronted with Madame de Vionnet, he felt the

simplicity of his original impression of Miss Gostrey. She certainly had been a fact of rapid growth; but the

world was wide, each day was more and more a new lesson. There were at any rate even among the stranger

ones relations and relations. "Of course I suit Chad's grand way," he quickly added. "He hasn't had much

She seemed to deny a little, on the young man's behalf, by the rise of her eyebrows, an intention of any

process at all inconsiderate. "You must know how grieved he'd be if you were to lose anything. He believes

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

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

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

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

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

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

He admitted after an instant that there was something in that. "But how can I face them till I know what they

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

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

"To be willing to do anything with her but be immensely kind and nicereally tender of her. We watch over

The mother's eagerness with which Madame de Vionnet jumped at this was to come back to him later as

beautiful in its grace. "The dear thing DID please you?" Then as he met it with the largest "Oh!" of

He wondered the more. "What good will that do you?" As she appeared unable at once to say, however, he

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

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

"Ah little girls and their mothers today!" she rather inconsequently broke in. But she checked herself with

something she seemed to give out as after all more to the point. "Tell her I've been good for him. Don't you

It had its effect on himmore than at the moment he quite measured. Yet he was consciously enough

"Well, it may not be 'all,'" she interrupted, "but it's to a great extent. Really and truly," she added in a tone

"Then it's very wonderful." He smiled at her from a face that he felt as strained, and her own face for a

moment kept him so. At last she also got up. "Well, don't you think that for that"

"I ought to save you?" So it was that the way to meet herand the way, as well, in a manner, to get

offcame over him. He heard himself use the exorbitant word, the very sound of which helped to determine

In Chad's lovely home, however, one evening ten days later, he felt himself present at the collapse of the

question of Jeanne de Vionnet's shy secret. He had been dining there in the company of that young lady and

her mother, as well as of other persons, and he had gone into the petit salon, at Chad's request, on purpose to

talk with her. The young man had put this to him as a favour"I should like so awfully to know what you

think of her. It will really be a chance for you," he had said, "to see the jeune filleI mean the typeas she

actually is, and I don't think that, as an observer of manners, it's a thing you ought to miss. It will be an

impression that whatever else you takeyou can carry home with you, where you'll find again so much to

Strether knew well enough with what Chad wished him to compare it, and though he entirely assented he

hadn't yet somehow been so deeply reminded that he was being, as he constantly though mutely expressed it,

used. He was as far as ever from making out exactly to what end; but he was none the less constantly

accompanied by a sense of the service he rendered. He conceived only that this service was highly agreeable

to those who profited by it; and he was indeed still waiting for the moment at which he should catch it in the

act of proving disagreeable, proving in some degree intolerable, to himself. He failed quite to see how his

situation could clear up at all logically except by some turn of events that would give him the pretext of

disgust. He was building from day to day on the possibility of disgust, but each day brought forth meanwhile

a new and more engaging bend of the road. That possibility was now ever so much further from sight than on

the eve of his arrival, and he perfectly felt that, should it come at all, it would have to be at best inconsequent

and violent. He struck himself as a little nearer to it only when he asked himself what service, in such a life of

utility, he was after all rendering Mrs. Newsome. When he wished to help himself to believe that he was still

all right he reflectedand in fact with wonderon the unimpaired frequency of their correspondence; in

relation to which what was after all more natural than that it should become more frequent just in proportion

Certain it is at any rate that he now often brought himself balm by the question, with the rich consciousness

of yesterday's letter, "Well, what can I do more than thatwhat can I do more than tell her everything?" To

persuade himself that he did tell her, had told her, everything, he used to try to think of particular things he

hadn't told her. When at rare moments and in the watches of the night he pounced on one it generally showed

itself to beto a deeper scrutinynot quite truly of the essence. When anything new struck him as coming

up, or anything already noted as reappearing, he always immediately wrote, as if for fear that if he didn't he

would miss something; and also that he might be able to say to himself from time to time "She knows it

NOWeven while I worry." It was a great comfort to him in general not to have left past things to be

dragged to light and explained; not to have to produce at so late a stage anything not produced, or anything

even veiled and attenuated, at the moment. She knew it now: that was what he said to himself tonight in

relation to the fresh fact of Chad's acquaintance with the two ladiesnot to speak of the fresher one of his

own. Mrs. Newsome knew in other words that very night at Woollett that he himself knew Madame de

Vionnet and that he had conscientiously been to see her; also that he had found her remarkably attractive and

that there would probably be a good deal more to tell. But she further knew, or would know very soon, that,

again conscientiously, he hadn't repeated his visit; and that when Chad had asked him on the Countess's

behalfStrether made her out vividly, with a thought at the back of his head, a Countessif he wouldn't

name a day for dining with her, he had replied lucidly: "Thank you very muchimpossible." He had begged

the young man would present his excuses and had trusted him to understand that it couldn't really strike one

as quite the straight thing. He hadn't reported to Mrs. Newsome that he had promised to "save" Madame de

Vionnet; but, so far as he was concerned with that reminiscence, he hadn't at any rate promised to haunt her

house. What Chad had understood could only, in truth, be inferred from Chad's behaviour, which had been in

this connexion as easy as in every other. He was easy, always, when he understood; he was easier still, if

possible, when he didn't; he had replied that he would make it all right; and he had proceeded to do this by

substituting the present occasion as he was ready to substitute othersfor any, for every occasion as to

"Oh but I'm not a little foreign girl; I'm just as English as I can be," Jeanne de Vionnet had said to him as

soon as, in the petit salon, he sank, shyly enough on his own side, into the place near her vacated by Madame

Gloriani at his approach. Madame Gloriani, who was in black velvet, with white lace and powdered hair, and

whose somewhat massive majesty melted, at any contact, into the graciousness of some incomprehensible

tongue, moved away to make room for the vague gentleman, after benevolent greetings to him which

embodied, as he believed, in baffling accents, some recognition of his face from a couple of Sundays before.

Then he had remarkedmaking the most of the advantage of his yearsthat it frightened him quite enough

to find himself dedicated to the entertainment of a little foreign girl. There were girls he wasn't afraid ofhe

was quite bold with little Americans. Thus it was that she had defended herself to the end"Oh but I'm

almost American too. That's what mamma has wanted me to beI mean LIKE that; for she has wanted me

She was fairly beautiful to hima faint pastel in an oval frame: he thought of her already as of some lurking

image in a long gallery, the portrait of a small oldtime princess of whom nothing was known but that she

had died young. Little Jeanne wasn't, doubtless, to die young, but one couldn't, all the same, bear on her

lightly enough. It was bearing hard, it was bearing as HE, in any case, wouldn't bear, to concern himself, in

relation to her, with the question of a young man. Odious really the question of a young man; one didn't treat

such a person as a maidservant suspected of a "follower." And then young men, young menwell, the

thing was their business simply, or was at all events hers. She was fluttered, fairly feveredto the point of a

little glitter that came and went in her eyes and a pair of pink spots that stayed in her cheekswith the great

adventure of dining out and with the greater one still, possibly, of finding a gentleman whom she must think

of as very, very old, a gentleman with eyeglasses, wrinkles, a long grizzled moustache. She spoke the

prettiest English, our friend thought, that he had ever heard spoken, just as he had believed her a few minutes

before to be speaking the prettiest French. He wondered almost wistfully if such a sweep of the lyre didn't

react on the spirit itself; and his fancy had in fact, before he knew it, begun so to stray and embroider that he

finally found himself, absent and extravagant, sitting with the child in a friendly silence. Only by this time he

felt her flutter to have fortunately dropped and that she was more at her ease. She trusted him, liked him, and

it was to come back to him afterwards that she had told him things. She had dipped into the waiting medium

at last and found neither surge nor chillnothing but the small splash she could herself make in the pleasant

warmth, nothing but the safety of dipping and dipping again. At the end of the ten minutes he was to spend

with her his impressionwith all it had thrown off and all it had taken inwas complete. She had been free,

as she knew freedom, partly to show him that, unlike other little persons she knew, she had imbibed that

ideal. She was delightfully quaint about herself, but the vision of what she had imbibed was what most held

him. It really consisted, he was soon enough to feel, in just one great little matter, the fact that, whatever her

nature, she was thoroughlyhe had to cast about for the word, but it camebred. He couldn't of course on

so short an acquaintance speak for her nature, but the idea of breeding was what she had meanwhile dropped

into his mind. He had never yet known it so sharply presented. Her mother gave it, no doubt; but her mother,

to make that less sensible, gave so much else besides, and on neither of the two previous occasions,

extraordinary woman, Strether felt, anything like what she was giving tonight. Little Jeanne was a case, an

exquisite case of education; whereas the Countess, whom it so amused him to think of by that denomination,

"He has wonderful taste, notre jeune homme": this was what Gloriani said to him on turning away from the

inspection of a small picture suspended near the door of the room. The high celebrity in question had just

come in, apparently in search of Mademoiselle de Vionnet, but while Strether had got up from beside her

their fellow guest, with his eye sharply caught, had paused for a long look. The thing was a landscape, of no

size, but of the French school, as our friend was glad to feel he knew, and also of a qualitywhich he liked

to think he should also have guessed; its frame was large out of proportion to the canvas, and he had never

seen a person look at anything, he thought, just as Gloriani, with his nose very near and quick movements of

the head from side to side and bottom to top, examined this feature of Chad's collection. The artist used that

word the next moment smiling courteously, wiping his nippers and looking round him furtherpaying the

place in short by the very manner of his presence and by something Strether fancied he could make out in this

particular glance, such a tribute as, to the latter's sense, settled many things once for all. Strether was

conscious at this instant, for that matter, as he hadn't yet been, of how, round about him, quite without him,

they WERE consistently settled. Gloriani's smile, deeply Italian, he considered, and finely inscrutable, had

had for him, during dinner, at which they were not neighbours, an indefinite greeting; but the quality in it was

gone that had appeared on the other occasion to turn him inside out; it was as if even the momentary link

supplied by the doubt between them had snapped. He was conscious now of the final reality, which was that

there wasn't so much a doubt as a difference altogether; all the more that over the difference the famous

sculptor seemed to signal almost condolingly, yet oh how vacantly! as across some great flat sheet of water.

He threw out the bridge of a charming hollow civility on which Strether wouldn't have trusted his own full

weight a moment. That idea, even though but transient and perhaps belated, had performed the office of

putting Strether more at his ease, and the blurred picture had already droppeddropped with the sound of

something else said and with his becoming aware, by another quick turn, that Gloriani was now on the sofa

talking with Jeanne, while he himself had in his ears again the familiar friendliness and the elusive meaning

of the "Oh, oh, oh!" that had made him, a fortnight before, challenge Miss Barrace in vain. She had always

the air, this picturesque and original lady, who struck him, so oddly, as both antique and modernshe had

always the air of taking up some joke that one had already had out with her. The point itself, no doubt, was

what was antique, and the use she made of it what was modern. He felt just now that her goodnatured irony

did bear on something, and it troubled him a little that she wouldn't be more explicit only assuring him, with

the pleasure of observation so visible in her, that she wouldn't tell him more for the world. He could take

refuge but in asking her what she had done with Waymarsh, though it must be added that he felt himself a

little on the way to a clue after she had answered that this personage was, in the other room, engaged in

conversation with Madame de Vionnet. He stared a moment at the image of such a conjunction; then, for

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

"Of course notwonderful as she is. Besides, he makes nothing of HER. She won't take him from

methough she wouldn't, no doubt, having other affairs in hand, even if she could. I've never," said Miss

Barrace, "seen her fail with any one before. And tonight, when she's so magnificent, it would seem to her

Strether understood, so far as that went; but he was feeling for his clue. "She strikes you tonight as

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

"She's gay!" Miss Barrace laughed. "And she has beautiful shouldersthough there's nothing different in

His companion, with renewed mirth and the finest sense, between the puffs of her cigarette, of the drollery of

things, appeared to find their conversation highly delightful. "Yes, it isn't her shoulders ."

"Of course it's her charm, but we're speaking of the difference." "Well," Miss Barrace explained, "she's just

"Oh we shan't come to that," our friend declared; and the next moment he had moved in another direction.

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

"Well then, how could she do more? Marrying a man, or woman either," Miss Barrace sagely went on, "is

never the wonder for any Jack and Jill can bring THAT off. The wonder is their doing such things without

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

She was now, however, suddenly tired of the question. "Yes then call it that. Besides, she'll never divorce.

"Oh for all I know, to her tooto any, to every woman. I hope you at any rate," she pursued with a quick

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

"I mean our friend's hereto the lady we've been speaking of." That was what he had settled to as an indirect

but none the less closely involved consequence of his impression of Jeanne. That was where he meant to stay.

Mystified by his abrupt declaration, she had glanced over at Gloriani as at the unnamed subject of his

allusion, but the next moment she had understood; though indeed not before Strether had noticed her

momentary mistake and wondered what might possibly be behind that too. He already knew that the sculptor

admired Madame de Vionnet; but did this admiration also represent an attachment of which the innocence

was discussable? He was moving verily in a strange air and on ground not of the firmest. He looked hard for

an instant at Miss Barrace, but she had already gone on. "All right with Mr. Newsome? Why of course she

is!"and she got gaily back to the question of her own good friend. "I dare say you're surprised that I'm not

worn out with all I seeit being so much! of Sitting Bull. But I'm not, you knowI don't mind him; I

bear up, and we get on beautifully. I'm very strange; I'm like that; and often I can't explain. There are people

who are supposed interesting or remarkable or whatever, and who bore me to death; and then there are others

as to whom nobody can understand what anybody sees in themin whom I see no end of things." Then after

"You ought to then, for the worst sign of allas I must have it for youis that you can't help me. That's

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

"That's his only fault," she returned"that everything, with him, is too deep. He has depths of

silencewhich he breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark. And when the remark comes it's always

something he has seen or felt for himselfnever a bit banal THAT would be what one might have feared and

what would kill me But never." She smoked again as she thus, with amused complacency, appreciated her

acquisition. "And never about you. We keep clear of you. We're wonderful. But I'll tell you what he does do,"

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

"Why you see," she explained, "he's as fine as ever in the victoria; so that when I leave him, as I often do

almost for hours he likes it soat the doors of shops, the sight of him there helps me, when I come out, to

know my carriage away off in the rank. But sometimes, for a change, he goes with me into the shops, and

"He wants to 'treat' you?" Strether almost gasped at all he himself hadn't thought of. He had a sense of

admiration. "Oh he's much more in the real tradition than I. Yes," he mused, "it's the sacred rage."

"The sacred rage, exactly!"and Miss Barrace, who hadn't before heard this term applied, recognised its

bearing with a clap of her gemmed hands. "Now I do know why he's not banal. But I do prevent him all the

sameand if you saw what he sometimes selectsfrom buying. I save him hundreds and hundreds. I only

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

"Innocent flowers," she pursued, "as much as he likes. And he sends me splendours; he knows all the best

"He hasn't told them to me," her friend smiled, "he has a life of his own." But Strether had swung back to the

consciousness that for himself after all it never would have done. Waymarsh hadn't Mrs. Waymarsh in the

least to consider, whereas Lambert Strether had constantly, in the inmost honour of his thoughts, to consider

Mrs. Newsome. He liked moreover to feel how much his friend was in the real tradition. Yet he had his

His tone had the effect of making her hesitate and even, as he guessed, speak with a difference. "Say with

Miss Gostrey. What do you do for HER?" It really made him wonder. "Nothing at all!"

Madame de Vionnet, having meanwhile come in, was at present close to them, and Miss Barrace hereupon,

instead of risking a rejoinder, became again with a look that measured her from top to toe all mere

longhandled appreciative tortoiseshell. She had struck our friend, from the first of her appearing, as

dressed for a great occasion, and she met still more than on either of the others the conception reawakened in

him at their gardenparty, the idea of the femme du monde in her habit as she lived. Her bare shoulders and

arms were white and beautiful; the materials of her dress, a mixture, as he supposed, of silk and crape, were

of a silvery grey so artfully composed as to give an impression of warm splendour; and round her neck she

wore a collar of large old emeralds, the green note of which was more dimly repeated, at other points of her

apparel, in embroidery, in enamel, in satin, in substances and textures vaguely rich. Her head, extremely fair

and exquisitely festal, was like a happy fancy, a notion of the antique, on an old precious medal, some silver

coin of the Renaissance; while her slim lightness and brightness, her gaiety, her expression, her decision,

contributed to an effect that might have been felt by a poet as half mythological and half conventional. He

could have compared her to a goddess still partly engaged in a morning cloud, or to a seanymph waisthigh

in the summer surge. Above all she suggested to him the reflexion that the femme du monde in these finest

developments of the typewas, like Cleopatra in the play, indeed various and multifold. She had aspects,

characters, days, nightsor had them at least, showed them by a mysterious law of her own, when in

addition to everything she happened also to be a woman of genius. She was an obscure person, a muffled

person one day, and a showy person, an uncovered person the next. He thought of Madame de Vionnet

tonight as showy and uncovered, though he felt the formula rough, because, thanks to one of the shortcuts

of genius she had taken all his categories by surprise. Twice during dinner he had met Chad's eyes in a

longish look; but these communications had in truth only stirred up again old ambiguitiesso little was it

clear from them whether they were an appeal or an admonition. "You see how I'm fixed," was what they

appeared to convey; yet how he was fixed was exactly what Strether didn't see. However, perhaps he should

"Are you capable of the very great kindness of going to relieve Newsome, for a few minutes, of the rather

crushing responsibility of Madame Gloriani, while I say a word, if he'll allow me, to Mr. Strether, of whom

I've a question to ask? Our host ought to talk a bit to those other ladies, and I'll come back in a minute to your

rescue." She made this proposal to Miss Barrace as if her consciousness of a special duty had just

flickeredup, but that lady's recognition of Strether's little start at itas at a betrayal on the speaker's part of

a domesticated statewas as mute as his own comment; and after an instant, when their fellow guest had

goodnaturedly left them, he had been given something else to think of. "Why has Maria so suddenly gone?

"I'm afraid I've no reason to give you but the simple reason I've had from her in a notethe sudden

"Not since she wentI had only a brief explanatory word before she started. I went to see her," Strether

explained"it was the day after I called on youbut she was already on her way, and her concierge told me

that in case of my coming I was to be informed she had written to me. I found her note when I got home."

Madame de Vionnet listened with interest and with her eyes on Strether's face; then her delicately decorated

head had a small melancholy motion. "She didn't write to ME. I went to see her," she added, "almost

immediately after I had seen you, and as I assured her I would do when I met her at Gloriani's. She hadn't

then told me she was to be absent, and I felt at her door as if I understood. She's absentwith all respect to

her sick friend, though I know indeed she has plentyso that I may not see her. She doesn't want to meet me

again. Well," she continued with a beautiful conscious mildness, "I liked and admired her beyond every one

in the old time, and she knew itperhaps that's precisely what has made her go and I dare say I haven't

lost her for ever." Strether still said nothing; he had a horror, as he now thought of himself, of being in

question between womenwas in fact already quite enough on his way to that, and there was moreover, as it

came to him, perceptibly, something behind these allusions and professions that, should he take it in, would

square but ill with his present resolve to simplify. It was as if, for him, all the same, her softness and sadness

were sincere. He felt that not less when she soon went on: "I'm extremely glad of her happiness." But it also

left him mute sharp and fine though the imputation it conveyed. What it conveyed was that HE was Maria

Gostrey's happiness, and for the least little instant he had the impulse to challenge the thought. He could have

done so however only by saying "What then do you suppose to be between us?" and he was wonderfully glad

a moment later not to have spoken. He would rather seem stupid any day than fatuous, and he drew back as

well, with a smothered inward shudder, from the consideration of what womenof highlydeveloped type in

particular might think of each other. Whatever he had come out for he hadn't come to go into that; so that

he absolutely took up nothing his interlocutress had now let drop. Yet, though he had kept away from her for

days, had laid wholly on herself the burden of their meeting again, she hadn't a gleam of irritation to show

him. "Well, about Jeanne now?" she smiledit had the gaiety with which she had originally come in. He felt

it on the instant to represent her motive and real errand. But he had been schooling her of a truth to say much

in proportion to his little. "Do you make out that she has a sentiment? I mean for Mr. Newsome."

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

She remained perfectly goodnatured. "Ah but they're beautiful little things, and you make outdon't

pretendeverything in the world. Haven't you," she asked, "been talking with her?"

"Oh you don't require 'much'!" she reassuringly declared. But she immediately changed her ground. "I hope

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

"It seems to me much more a question of how long you give ME. Doesn't our friend here himself, at any

She considered, and, if the fact was disconcerting to her, effectually concealed it. The next minute indeed she

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

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

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

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

"Ah that's another question!" she smiled. "The point is of what use is your declining to know me when to

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

She raised and dropped her linked hands. "It doesn't matter. If I trust you why can't you a little trust me too?

And why can't you also," she asked in another tone, "trust yourself?" But she gave him no time to reply. "Oh

"That's precisely the reason. Leave her alone. Don't try to find out. I mean," he explained, "about what you

"Well, because I ask you, as a favour to myself, not to. She's the most charming creature I've ever seen.

Therefore don't touch her. Don't knowdon't want to know. And moreoveryesyou won't."

"Anything, everything you ask," she smiled. "I shan't know thennever. Thank you," she added with

The sound of it lingered with him, making him fairly feel as if he had been tripped up and had a fall. In the

very act of arranging with her for his independence he had, under pressure from a particular perception,

inconsistently, quite stupidly, committed himself, and, with her subtlety sensitive on the spot to an advantage,

she had driven in by a single word a little golden nail, the sharp intention of which he signally felt. He hadn't

detached, he had more closely connected himself, and his eyes, as he considered with some intensity this

circumstance, met another pair which had just come within their range and which struck him as reflecting his

sense of what he had done. He recognised them at the same moment as those of little Bilham, who had

apparently drawn near on purpose to speak to him, and little Bilham wasn't, in the conditions, the person to

whom his heart would be most closed. They were seated together a minute later at the angle of the room

obliquely opposite the corner in which Gloriani was still engaged with Jeanne de Vionnet, to whom at first

and in silence their attention had been benevolently given. "I can't see for my life," Strether had then

observed, "how a young fellow of any spiritsuch a one as you for instancecan be admitted to the sight of

that young lady without being hard hit. Why don't you go in, little Bilham?" He remembered the tone into

which he had been betrayed on the gardenbench at the sculptor's reception, and this might make up for that

by being much more the right sort of thing to say to a young man worthy of any advice at all. "There

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

"She's certainly immense. I mean she's the real thing. I believe the pale pink petals are folded up there for

some wondrous efflorescence in time; to open, that is, to some great golden sun. I'M unfortunately but a

small farthing candle. What chance in such a field for a poor little painterman?"

"Certainly I'm good enough. We're good enough, I consider, nous autres, for anything. But she's TOO good.

Strether, lounging on his divan and still charmed by the young girl, whose eyes had consciously strayed to

him, he fancied, with a vague smileStrether, enjoying the whole occasion as with dormant pulses at last

awake and in spite of new material thrust upon him, thought over his companion's words. "Whom do you

"She and her mother. And she has a father too, who, whatever else he may be, certainly can't be indifferent to

Strether was silent a little. "Ah but he doesn't care for hernot, I mean, it appears, after all, in the sense I'm

"Nobut he's her best friend; after her mother. He's very fond of her. He has his ideas about what can be

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

"Very strange indeed. That's just the beauty of it. Isn't it very much the kind of beauty you had in mind," little

Bilham went on, "when you were so wonderful and so inspiring to me the other day? Didn't you adjure me, in

accents I shall never forget, to see, while I've a chance, everything I can?and REALLY to see, for it must

have been that only you meant. Well, you did me no end of good, and I'm doing my best. I DO make it out a

"So do I!" Strether went on after a moment. But he had the next minute an inconsequent question. "How

It reminded our friend of Miss Barrace, and he felt again the brush of his sense of moving in a maze of mystic

closed allusions. Yet he kept hold of his thread. "Of course I understand really; only the general

transformation makes me occasionally gasp. Chad with such a voice in the settlement of the future of a little

countessno," he declared, "it takes more time! You say moreover," he resumed, "that we're inevitably,

people like you and me, out of the running. The curious fact remains that Chad himself isn't. The situation

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

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

"NoI don't say much to her. Of course, however," Strether continued, "he can make sacrifices if he likes."

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

It kept Strether himself silent a little. "I've made it out for myself," he then went on; "I've really, within the

last halfhour, got hold of it. I understand it in short at last; which at first when you originally spoke to

"YesI did; and I believed Chad too. It would have been odious and unmannerlyas well as quite

It might, on repetition, as a mystification, have irritated our friend a little, but he knew, once more, as we

have seen, where he was, and his being proof against everything was only another attestation that he meant to

stay there. "I couldn't, without my own impression, realise. She's a tremendously clever brilliant capable

woman, and with an extraordinary charm on top of it all the charm we surely all of us this evening know

what to think of. It isn't every clever brilliant capable woman that has it. In fact it's rare with any woman. So

there you are," Strether proceeded as if not for little Bilham's benefit alone. "I understand what a relation with

such a womanwhat such a high fine friendship may be. It can't be vulgar or coarse, anywayand that's

"Yes, that's the point," said little Bilham. "It can't be vulgar or coarse. And, bless us and save us, it ISn't! It's,

upon my word, the very finest thing I ever saw in my life, and the most distinguished."

Strether, from beside him and leaning back with him as he leaned, dropped on him a momentary look which

filled a short interval and of which he took no notice. He only gazed before him with intent participation. "Of

course what it has done for him," Strether at all events presently pursued, "of course what it has done for

him that is as to HOW it has so wonderfully workedisn't a thing I pretend to understand. I've to take it

"There he is!" little Bilham echoed. "And it's really and truly she. I don't understand either, even with my

longer and closer opportunity. But I'm like you," he added; "I can admire and rejoice even when I'm a little in

the dark. You see I've watched it for some three years, and especially for this last. He wasn't so bad before it

"Oh I don't think anything now!" Strether impatiently broke in: "that is but what I DO think! I mean that

"There must have been stuff in him? Oh yes, there was stuff indeed, and much more of it than ever showed, I

dare say, at home. Still, you know," the young man in all fairness developed, "there was room for her, and

that's where she came in. She saw her chance and took it. That's what strikes me as having been so fine. But

"I mean that they first met somehow and somewhereI believe in some American houseand she, without

in the least then intending it, made her impression. Then with time and opportunity he made his; and after

"She began, that is, to careto care very much. Alone, and in her horrid position, she found it, when once

she had started, an interest. It was, it is, an interest, and it didit continues to doa lot for herself as well.

Strether's theory that it was none of his business was somehow not damaged by the way he took this. "More,

you mean, than he?" On which his companion looked round at him, and now for an instant their eyes met.

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

"It's at any rate none of my business. I mean," Strether explained, "nothing else than getting hold of him is."

It appeared, however, to strike him as his business to add: "The fact remains nevertheless that she has saved

But Strether had his answer ready. "I'm speakingin connexion with herof his manners and morals, his

character and life. I'm speaking of him as a person to deal with and talk with and live withspeaking of him

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

"Oh for us 'all'!" Strether could but laugh at that. It brought him back, however, to the point he had really

wished to make. "They've accepted their situationhard as it is. They're not free at least she's not; but

they take what's left to them. It's a friendship, of a beautiful sort; and that's what makes them so strong.

They're straight, they feel; and they keep each other up. It's doubtless she, however, who, as you yourself

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

"Well, feels that SHE is, and the strength that comes from it. She keeps HIM upshe keeps the whole thing

up. When people are able to it's fine. She's wonderful, wonderful, as Miss Barrace says; and he is, in his way,

too; however, as a mere man, he may sometimes rebel and not feel that he finds his account in it. She has

simply given him an immense moral lift, and what that can explain is prodigious. That's why I speak of it as a

situation. It IS one, if there ever was." And Strether, with his head back and his eyes on the ceiling, seemed to

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

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

"Well, it doesn't a bit as Madame de Vionnet's affair. But as we were again saying just now, what did I come

"To save him by removal; to win him over to HIMSELF thinking it best he shall take up businessthinking

"Well," said little Bilham after a moment, "you HAVE won him over. He does think it best. He has within a

"Cares less for her than she for him? Yes, that's one of the reasons. But other things too have given me the

impression. A man, don't you think?" little Bilham presently pursued, "CAN'T, in such conditions, care so

much as a woman. It takes different conditions to make him, and then perhaps he cares more. Chad," he

"Noon the contrary; of the other, the future of what you so justly call their situation. M. de Vionnet may

The young man waited a moment. "Not being able to marry is all they've with any confidence to look forward

to. A womana particular womanmay stand that strain. But can a man?" he propounded.

Strether's answer was as prompt as if he had already, for himself, worked it out. "Not without a very high

ideal of conduct. But that's just what we're attributing to Chad. And how, for that matter," he mused, "does

his going to America diminish the particular strain? Wouldn't it seem rather to add to it?"

"Out of sight out of mind!" his companion laughed. Then more bravely: "Wouldn't distance lessen the

torment?" But before Strether could reply, "The thing is, you see, Chad ought to marry!" he wound up.

Strether, for a little, appeared to think of it. "If you talk of torments you don't diminish mine!" he then broke

out. The next moment he was on his feet with a question. "He ought to marry whom?"

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

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

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

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

"Oh that I admit. But being in love isn't, you know, here"little Bilham spoke in friendly

"And what tormentto call a tormentcan there ever possibly be with a woman like that?" As if from the

interest of his own question Strether had gone on without hearing. "Is it for her to have turned a man out so

wonderfully, too, only for somebody else?" He appeared to make a point of this, and little Bilham looked at

him now. "When it's for each other that people give things up they don't miss them." Then he threw off as

with an extravagance of which he was conscious: "Let them face the future together!"

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

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

It wasn't the first time Strether had sat alone in the great dim churchstill 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 goodstill 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 himselfhad quite stolen off, taking an unnoticed chance and making no point of speaking of

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

inconsequentperhaps 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

complicatedmore complicated than he could have guessed; she had moreover made certain of him

certain of not wholly missing him on her returnbefore 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 himselfit being at present just from himself he was trying to

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 plainthat 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 museumwhich 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,

probablyto 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 prostratenot 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

friendsince it was the way of nine tenths of his current impressions to act as recalls of things imaginedof

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

splendidlyprotected 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

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

redandgold 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

redandgold 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 minuteheld 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

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 walkhe believed her to have come on foot; the way her slightly

thicker veil was drawna mere touch, but everything; the composed gravity of her dress, in which, here and

there, a dull winecolour seemed to gleam faintly through black; the charming discretion of her small

compact head; the quiet note, as she sat, of her folded, greygloved 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

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 peacesublime 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 beautyall 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

"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 supportshe 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

thatthough it was her own affairhe understood; the sign would be thatthough it was her own

affairshe was free to clutch. Since she took him for a firm objectmuch as he might to his own sense

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 banka 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 timesfirst 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

prideso 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 chancesnot

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 itthough, frankly, if he asked whether she had time she

hadn't a single minute. That however made no differenceshe'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 bargeburdened 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 pinkshaded candles, had struck him as

requiring so many explanations. He had at that time gathered them in, the explanationshe had stored them

up; but it was at present as if he had either soared above or sunk below themhe 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 waterside life came in at the open window? the mere

way Madame de Vionnet, opposite him over their intensely white tablelinen, their omelette aux tomates,

their bottle of strawcoloured 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 donemany 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

sideand by the actual showing they loomed largehe 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 itto 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

"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

"Ah because that's the way you strike me." She spoke ever so gently and as if with all fear of wounding him

He felt himself colour at the question, and then hated thathated 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

indifferencewas 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

"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'sthat 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 murmuredshe was full of attenuation. But she had another thought. "If it does sound ridiculous

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

"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."

"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

"Yes; I see that, practically, I've done for youhad done for you when you put me your questionall 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

Patient and beautiful was her interest. "I seethe consequences of your speaking for me." And she waited as

He acknowledged it by immediately going on. "The question, you understand, was HOW I should save you.

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

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."

"Ah and you might have added all it seems to ME!" She laughed again, while she took up her knife and fork,

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

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

This was a proposition Strether couldn't contradict. "And yet what other way could I have expressed to her

"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 thatsince there's

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

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

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

"Yes, I doto the extent that I don't take for granted vulgar ones. You're perfectly capable of seeing that

"Ah it's perfectly simple," Strether goodhumouredly pleaded. "I've had but one thing to doto put our case

before him. To put it as it could only be put here on the spotby 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 youin 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

She shook her head with a finer deeper wisdom. "You're not ready. If you're ready why did you write to Mrs.

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 thatbelieve

"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

She measured the depth of this suggestion. "Do you give me your word of honour that if she once has him

It made her companion, this enquiry, look again a while out at the view; after which he spoke without

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

"It will be easy if he remains thereand he'll remain for the money. The money appears to be, as a

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

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

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

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

"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,

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."

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

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 deepeneda faroff 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 Waymarshthey had settled to that for thrift and simplicity; and he now hung about

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 metmet for a moment during which neither moved. But Strether then got up, folding

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 tonight 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,

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 reascent to his room by the aid of the

glimmering candleend 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 sacrificethe 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 walkingstick 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 morningas I would have done yesterday, but it was

"Back, at last, as I promised. I'm readyI've really been ready this month. I've only been waiting for

youas was perfectly right. But you're better now; you're safeI see that for myself; you've got all your

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, apparentlysince it shone in him as a lightthan

he had flattered himself. His firmness indeed was slightly compromised, as he faced about to his friend, by

the way this very personage lookedthough 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 itstrong 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 againhe was always

taking him in and yet finding that parts of him still remained out; though even thus his image showed through

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

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.

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

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

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."

"I beg your pardonit IS me." Strether was mild and melancholy, but firm. He saw it far away and over his

"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

"NoI'm to see her today." 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."

Strether had a pause. "I don't think I understand you. Why was it that, more than a month ago, you put it to

"'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 herand you see the good that

"Well," said Strether, "the way she has spoken for you, all the sameso far as I've given her a chancehas

only made me feel how much she wishes to keep you. If you make nothing of that I don't see why you wanted

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

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,

"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

At this Chad rose. "Ah HER wanting me not to go has nothing to do with it! It's only because she's

afraidafraid 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

It had immediately, on Strether's imagination, so deep and soft an effect that our friend could only for the

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

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

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

Chad listened, but with all his own knowledge of the world. "She has had it, the pretext, these several years,

"Oh I mean ME. I'm her pretext. That isfor it comes to the same thingI'm your mother's."

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

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

"WellI see what you mean. I'm sure you'd behave beautifully but you DON'T want to see her. So I won't

"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

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

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

Strether, who uttered this with serenity, had urged a plea for their now getting into the air; but the young man

"Nonot even Miss Gostrey. I wasn't waiting to see any one. I had only waited, till now, to make up my

mindin 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

"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

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

"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

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 itwhich made Strether also laugh. "Well, to my having a certitude that has been

testedthat has passed through the fire. But oh," he couldn't help breaking out, "if within my first month

"I should have had a month of it; and I'm having now, if you want to know," Strether continued, "enough to

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?"

"Only for a month or twotime to go and come. Madame de Vionnet," Chad smiled, "would look after you

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

"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

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

"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

Strether thought a minute. "Well then if those things are really your motive catch the French steamer and sail

tomorrow. Of course, when it comes to that, you're absolutely free to do as you choose. From the moment

"Certainlyit's the only thing to call it. The only way to keep me here, accordingly," Strether explained, "is

"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

Strether decided after a moment that he did know what, and in consonance with this he spoke. "You see then

"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

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 absorbedand 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

"Noa 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

She shook her head as if this were not worth taking up. "My absence has helped youas 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,

She took him all in again. "Well, I promise you not again to leave you, but it will only be to follow you.

He intelligently accepted it. "YesI 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 goingno 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."

"I've not had time," Strether said; "I made it out but last night, putting various things together, and I've not

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

"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 againbridge the dark stream

that has kept us so thoroughly apart. We shall have at last, in the consequences of his act, something we can

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

"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.

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

"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

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

"Perfectly, I think; so that he was amazed to find the hand I had laid on him to pull him over suddenly

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

"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

"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."

"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

Miss Gostrey but desired to help his lucidity. She had however to be light and tactful. "Up, you meanato

"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 himimpressions of

Miss Gostrey had a smile of the most genial criticism. "So your idea ismore or lessto stay out of

"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."

"That, I mean, is what will happenand happen as quickly as possiblein consequence of Chad's cable.

They'll simply embark. Sarah will come to speak for her motherwith an effect different from MY muddle."

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

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 fairand 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 factsfacts that have kept striking me as less and

less met by our old reasons. The matter's perfectly simple. New reasonsreasons as new as the facts

themselvesare wanted; and of this our friends at WoollettChad's and minewere 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 Mamieso far as I've had it from

youwho'll be their great card." And then as his contemplative silence wasn't a denial she significantly

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

He explained after another turn what he meant. "The only way for her not to come is for me to go homeas 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

Strether had no laugh; he had only a quiet comparatively placid look that might have shown him as proof

They had, in the matter that so much interested them, come so far as this without sounding another nameto

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

"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."

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,

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 reenforcements." 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 makebelieve.

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 sayit shouldn't be in any one's anywhere to saythat 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

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 proofthough he was, in time, to have plentythat 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 facetoface with hera 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

adventuresa circumstance capable of playing such a part only for Lambert Stretherthat 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 truththough not too

disconcertinglyhad 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 sweetnessa

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 sidewindit 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 alonethe opposite of the shopas 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

totalthough 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

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

"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

His answer too was always the same. "Of course I'm youthyouth 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 timewhich 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 likeit's my surrender, it's my tribute, to

youth. One puts that in where one canit 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 gogo 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?"

It regularly gave her none the less the last word. "Don't you remember how in those first days of our meeting

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

"YOU won't, ever, ever, ever?"he thus took her up. "Oh I beg your pardon; you necessarily, you inevitably

"Let aloneI see what you meanthat I'm drearily dreadfully old. I AM, but there's a servicepossible for

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

He came round, for publicityit was the easiest thingto 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

Strether rambled alone during these few days, the effect of the incident of the previous week having been to

simplify in a marked fashion his mixed relations with Waymarsh. Nothing had passed between them in

reference to Mrs. Newsome's summons but that our friend had mentioned to his own the departure of the

deputation actually at seagiving him thus an opportunity to confess to the occult intervention he imputed to

him. Waymarsh however in the event confessed to nothing; and though this falsified in some degree

Strether's forecast the latter amusedly saw in it the same depth of good conscience out of which the dear

man's impertinence had originally sprung. He was patient with the dear man now and delighted to observe

how unmistakeably he had put on flesh; he felt his own holiday so successfully large and free that he was full

of allowances and charities in respect to those cabined and confined' his instinct toward a spirit so strapped

down as Waymarsh's was to walk round it on tiptoe for fear of waking it up to a sense of losses by this time

irretrievable. It was all very funny he knew, and but the difference, as he often said to himself, of tweedledum

and tweedledeean emancipation so purely comparative that it was like the advance of the doormat on the

scraper; yet the present crisis was happily to profit by it and the pilgrim from Milrose to know himself more

Strether felt that when he heard of the approach of the Pococks the impulse of pity quite sprang up in him

beside the impulse of triumph. That was exactly why Waymarsh had looked at him with eyes in which the

heat of justice was measured and shaded. He had looked very hard, as if affectionately sorry for the

friendthe friend of fiftyfivewhose frivolity had had thus to be recorded; becoming, however, but

obscurely sententious and leaving his companion to formulate a charge. It was in this general attitude that he

had of late altogether taken refuge; with the drop of discussion they were solemnly sadly superficial; Strether

recognised in him the mere portentous rumination to which Miss Barrace had so goodhumouredly described

herself as assigning a corner of her salon. It was quite as if he knew his surreptitious step had been divined,

and it was also as if he missed the chance to explain the purity of his motive; but this privation of relief

should be precisely his small penance: it was not amiss for Strether that he should find himself to that degree

uneasy. If he had been challenged or accused, rebuked for meddling or otherwise pulled up, he would

probably have shown, on his own system, all the height of his consistency, all the depth of his good faith.

Explicit resentment of his course would have made him take the floor, and the thump of his fist on the table

would have affirmed him as consciously incorruptible. Had what now really prevailed with Strether been but

a dread of that thumpa dread of wincing a little painfully at what it might invidiously demonstrate?

However this might be, at any rate, one of the marks of the crisis was a visible, a studied lapse, in Waymarsh,

of betrayed concern. As if to make up to his comrade for the stroke by which he had played providence he

now conspicuously ignored his movements, withdrew himself from the pretension to share them, stiffened up

his sensibility to neglect, and, clasping his large empty hands and swinging his large restless foot, clearly

This made for independence on Strether's part, and he had in truth at no moment of his stay been so free to go

and come. The early summer brushed the picture over and blurred everything but the near; it made a vast

warm fragrant medium in which the elements floated together on the best of terms, in which rewards were

immediate and reckonings postponed. Chad was out of town again, for the first time since his visitor's first

view of him; he had explained this necessitywithout detail, yet also without embarrassment, the

circumstance was one of those which, in the young man's life, testified to the variety of his ties. Strether

wasn't otherwise concerned with it than for its so testifyinga pleasant multitudinous image in which he

took comfort. He took comfort, by the same stroke, in the swing of Chad's pendulum back from that other

swing, the sharp jerk towards Woollett, so stayed by his own hand. He had the entertainment of thinking that

if he had for that moment stopped the clock it was to promote the next minute this still livelier motion. He

himself did what he hadn't done before; he took two or three times whole days off irrespective of others, of

two or three taken with Miss Gostrey, two or three taken with little Bilham: he went to Chartres and

cultivated, before the front of the cathedral, a general easy beatitude; he went to Fontainebleau and imagined

himself on the way to Italy; he went to Rouen with a little handbag and inordinately spent the night.

One afternoon he did something quite different; finding himself in the neighbourhood of a fine old house

across the river, he passed under the great arch of its doorway and asked at the porter's lodge for Madame de

Vionnet. He had already hovered more than once about that possibility, been aware of it, in the course of

ostensible strolls, as lurking but round the corner. Only it had perversely happened, after his morning at Notre

Dame, that his consistency, as he considered and intended it, had come back to him; whereby he had reflected

that the encounter in question had been none of his making; clinging again intensely to the strength of his

position, which was precisely that there was nothing in it for himself. From the moment he actively pursued

the charming associate of his adventure, from that moment his position weakened, for he was then acting in

an interested way. It was only within a few days that he had fixed himself a limit: he promised himself his

consistency should end with Sarah's arrival. It was arguing correctly to feel the title to a free hand conferred

on him by this event. If he wasn't to be let alone he should be merely a dupe to act with delicacy. If he wasn't

to be trusted he could at least take his ease. If he was to be placed under control he gained leave to try what

his position MIGHT agreeably give him. An ideal rigour would perhaps postpone the trial till after the

Pococks had shown their spirit; and it was to an ideal rigour that he had quite promised himself to conform.

Suddenly, however, on this particular day, he felt a particular fear under which everything collapsed. He

knew abruptly that he was afraid of himselfand yet not in relation to the effect on his sensibilities of

another hour of Madame de Vionnet. What he dreaded was the effect of a single hour of Sarah Pocock, as to

whom he was visited, in troubled nights, with fantastic waking dreams. She loomed at him larger than life;

she increased in volume as she drew nearer; she so met his eyes that, his imagination taking, after the first

step, all, and more than all, the strides, he already felt her come down on him, already burned, under her

reprobation, with the blush of guilt, already consented, by way of penance, to the instant forfeiture of

everything. He saw himself, under her direction, recommitted to Woollett as juvenile offenders are committed

to reformatories. It wasn't of course that Woollett was really a place of discipline; but he knew in advance

that Sarah's salon at the hotel would be. His danger, at any rate, in such moods of alarm, was some

concession, on this ground, that would involve a sharp rupture with the actual; therefore if he waited to take

leave of that actual he might wholly miss his chance. It was represented with supreme vividness by Madame

de Vionnet, and that is why, in a word, he waited no longer. He had seen in a flash that he must anticipate

Mrs. Pocock. He was accordingly much disappointed on now learning from the portress that the lady of his

quest was not in Paris. She had gone for some days to the country. There was nothing in this accident but

what was natural; yet it produced for poor Strether a drop of all confidence. It was suddenly as if he should

never see her again, and as if moreover he had brought it on himself by not having been quite kind to her.

It was the advantage of his having let his fancy lose itself for a little in the gloom that, as by reaction, the

prospect began really to brighten from the moment the deputation from Woollett alighted on the platform of

the station. They had come straight from Havre, having sailed from New York to that port, and having also,

thanks to a happy voyage, made land with a promptitude that left Chad Newsome, who had meant to meet

them at the dock, belated. He had received their telegram, with the announcement of their immediate further

advance, just as he was taking the train for Havre, so that nothing had remained for him but to await them in

Paris. He hastily picked up Strether, at the hotel, for this purpose, and he even, with easy pleasantry,

suggested the attendance of Waymarsh as well Waymarsh, at the moment his cab rattled up, being

engaged, under Strether's contemplative range, in a grave perambulation of the familiar court. Waymarsh had

learned from his companion, who had already had a note, delivered by hand, from Chad, that the Pococks

were due, and had ambiguously, though, as always, impressively, glowered at him over the circumstance;

carrying himself in a manner in which Strether was now expert enough to recognise his uncertainty, in the

premises, as to the best tone. The only tone he aimed at with confidence was a full tonewhich was

necessarily difficult in the absence of a full knowledge. The Pococks were a quantity as yet unmeasured, and,

as he had practically brought them over, so this witness had to that extent exposed himself. He wanted to feel

right about it, but could only, at the best, for the time, feel vague. "I shall look to you, you know, immensely,"

our friend had said, "to help me with them," and he had been quite conscious of the effect of the remark, and

of others of the same sort, on his comrade's sombre sensibility. He had insisted on the fact that Waymarsh

would quite like Mrs. Pocockone could be certain he would: he would be with her about everything, and

she would also be with HIM, and Miss Barrace's nose, in short, would find itself out of joint.

Strether had woven this web of cheerfulness while they waited in the court for Chad; he had sat smoking

cigarettes to keep himself quiet while, caged and leonine, his fellow traveller paced and turned before him.

Chad Newsome was doubtless to be struck, when he arrived, with the sharpness of their opposition at this

particular hour; he was to remember, as a part of it, how Waymarsh came with him and with Strether to the

street and stood there with a face halfwistful and halfrueful. They talked of him, the two others, as they

drove, and Strether put Chad in possession of much of his own strained sense of things. He had already, a few

days before, named to him the wire he was convinced their friend had pulleda confidence that had made on

the young man's part quite hugely for curiosity and diversion. The action of the matter, moreover, Strether

could see, was to penetrate; he saw that is, how Chad judged a system of influence in which Waymarsh had

served as a determinantan impression just now quickened again; with the whole bearing of such a fact on

the youth's view of his relatives. As it came up between them that they might now take their friend for a

feature of the control of these latter now sought to be exerted from Woollett, Strether felt indeed how it

would be stamped all over him, half an hour later for Sarah Pocock's eyes, that he was as much on Chad's

"side" as Waymarsh had probably described him. He was letting himself at present, go; there was no denying

it; it might be desperation, it might be confidence; he should offer himself to the arriving travellers bristling

He repeated to Chad what he had been saying in the court to Waymarsh; how there was no doubt whatever

that his sister would find the latter a kindred spirit, no doubt of the alliance, based on an exchange of views,

that the pair would successfully strike up. They would become as thick as thieveswhich moreover was but

a development of what Strether remembered to have said in one of his first discussions with his mate, struck

as he had then already been with the elements of affinity between that personage and Mrs. Newsome herself.

"I told him, one day, when he had questioned me on your mother, that she was a person who, when he should

know her, would rouse in him, I was sure, a special enthusiasm; and that hangs together with the conviction

we now feelthis certitude that Mrs. Pocock will take him into her boat. For it's your mother's own boat that

"A thousand; but when you presently meet her, all the same you'll be meeting your mother's

representativejust as I shall. I feel like the outgoing ambassador," said Strether, "doing honour to his

appointed successor." A moment after speaking as he had just done he felt he had inadvertently rather

cheapened Mrs. Newsome to her son; an impression audibly reflected, as at first seen, in Chad's prompt

protest. He had recently rather failed of apprehension of the young man's attitude and temperremaining

principally conscious of how little worry, at the worst, he wasted, and he studied him at this critical hour with

renewed interest. Chad had done exactly what he had promised him a fortnight previoushad accepted

without another question his plea for delay. He was waiting cheerfully and handsomely, but also inscrutably

and with a slight increase perhaps of the hardness originally involved in his acquired high polish. He was

neither excited nor depressed; was easy and acute and deliberateunhurried unflurried unworried, only at

most a little less amused than usual. Strether felt him more than ever a justification of the extraordinary

process of which his own absurd spirit had been the arena; he knew as their cab rolled along, knew as he

hadn't even yet known, that nothing else than what Chad had done and had been would have led to his present

showing. They had made him, these things, what he was, and the business hadn't been easy; it had taken time

and trouble, it had cost, above all, a price. The result at any rate was now to be offered to Sally; which

Strether, so far as that was concerned, was glad to be there to witness. Would she in the least make it out or

take it in, the result, or would she in the least care for it if she did? He scratched his chin as he asked himself

by what name, when challengedas he was sure he should behe could call it for her. Oh those were

determinations she must herself arrive at; since she wanted so much to see, let her see then and welcome. She

had come out in the pride of her competence, yet it hummed in Strether's inner sense that she practically

That this was moreover what Chad shrewdly suspected was clear from a word that next dropped from him.

"They're children; they play at life!"and the exclamation was significant and reassuring. It implied that he

hadn't then, for his companion's sensibility, appeared to give Mrs. Newsome away; and it facilitated our

friend's presently asking him if it were his idea that Mrs. Pocock and Madame de Vionnet should become

acquainted. Strether was still more sharply struck, hereupon, with Chad's lucidity. "Why, isn't that

Chad's quick rejoinder lighted his precipitation. "Why do you say you're afraid?"

"Well, because I feel a certain responsibility. It's my testimony, I imagine, that will have been at the bottom

of Mrs. Pocock's curiosity. My letters, as I've supposed you to understand from the beginning, have spoken

All that, for Chad, was beautifully obvious. "Yes, but you've only spoken handsomely."

"That tone," said Chad, "that has fetched her? I dare say; but I've no quarrel with you about it. And no more

"Oh!"and Strether had, with his groan, a real pang of melancholy. "For all I've done for her!"

Chad's urbanity fairly shamed him, and he was at this moment absolutely impatient to see the face Sarah

Pocock would present to a sort of thing, as he synthetically phrased it to himself, with no adequate forecast of

"No, I say that for you. She likes your liking her; it's so much, as it were," Chad laughed, "to the good.

However, she doesn't despair of Sarah either, and is prepared, on her own side, to go all lengths."

"Yes, and of everything else. In the way of general amiability, hospitality and welcome. She's under arms,"

Strether took it in; then as if an echo of Miss Barrace were in the air: "She's wonderful."

There was a depth in it, to Strether's ear, of confirmed luxury almost a kind of unconscious insolence of

proprietorship; but the effect of the glimpse was not at this moment to foster speculation: there was

something so conclusive in so much graceful and generous assurance. It was in fact a fresh evocation; and the

evocation had before many minutes another consequence. "Well, I shall see her oftener now. I shall see her as

"It has been," said Chad, but without reproach, "only your own fault. I tried to bring you together, and SHE,

my dear fellowI never saw her more charming to any man. But you've got your extraordinary ideas."

"Well, I DID have," Strether murmured, while he felt both how they had possessed him and how they had

now lost their authority. He couldn't have traced the sequence to the end, but it was all because of Mrs.

Pocock. Mrs. Pocock might be because of Mrs. Newsome, but that was still to be proved. What came over

him was the sense of having stupidly failed to profit where profit would have been precious. It had been open

to him to see so much more of her, and he had but let the good days pass. Fierce in him almost was the

resolve to lose no more of them, and he whimsically reflected, while at Chad's side he drew nearer to his

destination, that it was after all Sarah who would have quickened his chance. What her visit of inquisition

might achieve in other directions was as yet all obscureonly not obscure that it would do supremely much

to bring two earnest persons together. He had but to listen to Chad at this moment to feel it; for Chad was in

the act of remarking to him that they of course both counted on himhe himself and the other earnest

personfor cheer and support. It was brave to Strether to hear him talk as if the line of wisdom they had

struck out was to make things ravishing to the Pococks. No, if Madame de Vionnet compassed THAT,

compassed the ravishment of the Pococks, Madame de Vionnet would be prodigious. It would be a beautiful

plan if it succeeded, and it all came to the question of Sarah's being really bribeable. The precedent of his

own case helped Strether perhaps but little to consider she might prove so; it being distinct that her character

would rather make for every possible difference. This idea of his own bribeability set him apart for himself;

with the further mark in fact that his case was absolutely proved. He liked always, where Lambert Strether

was concerned, to know the worst, and what he now seemed to know was not only that he was bribeable, but

that he had been effectually bribed. The only difficulty was that he couldn't quite have said with what. It was

as if he had sold himself, but hadn't somehow got the cash. That, however, was what, characteristically,

WOULD happen to him. It would naturally be his kind of traffic. While he thought of these things he

reminded Chad of the truth they mustn't lose sight ofthe truth that, with all deference to her susceptibility

to new interests, Sarah would have come out with a high firm definite purpose. "She hasn't come out, you

know, to be bamboozled. We may all be ravishingnothing perhaps can be more easy for us; but she hasn't

"Oh well, with HER I'll go," said Chad goodhumouredly. "I suppose you'll allow THAT." And then as for a

minute Strether said nothing: "Or is your idea that when I've seen her I shan't want to go?" As this question,

however, again left his friend silent he presently went on: "My own idea at any rate is that they shall have

It was at this that Strether spoke. "Ah there you are! I think if you really wanted to go!"

"Well, you wouldn't trouble about our good time. You wouldn't care what sort of a time we have."

Chad could always take in the easiest way in the world any ingenious suggestion. "I see. But can I help it? I'm

"Yes, you're too decent!" Strether heavily sighed. And he felt for the moment as if it were the preposterous

It ministered for the time to this temporary effect that Chad made no rejoinder. But he spoke again as they

"Yes," said Chad with his pleasant promptness: "to show her there's nothing in it."

Strether hesitated. "I don't know that I care very much what she may think there's in it."

But they were just driving up, and help, of a sort, might after all be quite at hand. "Isn't that, my dear man,

Strether quitted the station half an hour later in different company. Chad had taken charge, for the journey to

the hotel, of Sarah, Mamie, the maid and the luggage, all spaciously installed and conveyed; and it was only

after the four had rolled away that his companion got into a cab with Jim. A strange new feeling had come

over Strether, in consequence of which his spirits had risen; it was as if what had occurred on the alighting of

his critics had been something other than his fear, though his fear had vet not been of an instant scene of

violence. His impression had been nothing but what was inevitablehe said that to himself; yet relief and

reassurance had softly dropped upon him. Nothing could be so odd as to be indebted for these things to the

look of faces and the sound of voices that had been with him to satiety, as he might have said, for years; but

he now knew, all the same, how uneasy he had felt; that was brought home to him by his present sense of a

respite. It had come moreover in the flash of an eye, it had come in the smile with which Sarah, whom, at the

window of her compartment, they had effusively greeted from the platform, rustled down to them a moment

later, fresh and handsome from her cool June progress through the charming land. It was only a sign, but

enough: she was going to be gracious and unallusive, she was going to play the larger gamewhich was still

more apparent, after she had emerged from Chad's arms, in her direct greeting to the valued friend of her

Strether WAS then as much as ever the valued friend of her family, it was something he could at all events go

on with; and the manner of his response to it expressed even for himself how little he had enjoyed the

prospect of ceasing to figure in that likeness. He had always seen Sarah gracioushad in fact rarely seen her

shy or dry, her marked thinlipped smile, intense without brightness and as prompt to act as the scrape of a

safetymatch; the protrusion of her rather remarkably long chin, which in her case represented invitation and

urbanity, and not, as in most others, pugnacity and defiance; the penetration of her voice to a distance, the

general encouragement and approval of her manner, were all elements with which intercourse had made him

familiar, but which he noted today almost as if she had been a new acquaintance. This first glimpse of her had

given a brief but vivid accent to her resemblance to her mother; he could have taken her for Mrs. Newsome

while she met his eyes as the train rolled into the station. It was an impression that quickly dropped; Mrs.

Newsome was much handsomer, and while Sarah inclined to the massive her mother had, at an age, still the

girdle of a maid; also the latter's chin was rather short, than long, and her smile, by good fortune, much more,

oh ever so much more, mercifully vague. Strether had seen Mrs. Newsome reserved; he had literally heard

her silent, though he had never known her unpleasant. It was the case with Mrs. Pocock that he had known

HER unpleasant, even though he had never known her not affable. She had forms of affability that were in a

high degree assertive; nothing for instance had ever been more striking than that she was affable to Jim.

What had told in any case at the window of the train was her high clear forehead, that forehead which her

friends, for some reason, always thought of as a "brow"; the long reach of her eyesit came out at this

juncture in such a manner as to remind him, oddly enough, also of that of Waymarsh's; and the unusual gloss

of her dark hair, dressed and hatted, after her mother's refined example, with such an avoidance of extremes

that it was always spoken of at Woollett as "their own." Though this analogy dropped as soon as she was on

the platform it had lasted long enough to make him feel all the advantage, as it were, of his relief. The woman

at home, the woman to whom he was attached, was before him just long enough to give him again the

measure of the wretchedness, in fact really of the shame, of their having to recognise the formation, between

them, of a "split." He had taken this measure in solitude and meditation: but the catastrophe, as Sarah steamed

up, looked for its seconds unprecedentedly dreadfulor proved, more exactly, altogether unthinkable; so that

his finding something free and familiar to respond to brought with it an instant renewal of his loyalty. He had

Well, he could now, for the quarter of an hour of their detention hover about the travellers as soothingly as if

their direct message to him was that he had lost nothing. He wasn't going to have Sarah write to her mother

that night that he was in any way altered or strange. There had been times enough for a month when it had

seemed to him that he was strange, that he was altered, in every way; but that was a matter for himself; he

knew at least whose business it was not; it was not at all events such a circumstance as Sarah's own unaided

lights would help her to. Even if she had come out to flash those lights more than yet appeared she wouldn't

make much headway against mere pleasantness. He counted on being able to be merely pleasant to the end,

and if only from incapacity moreover to formulate anything different. He couldn't even formulate to himself

his being changed and queer; it had taken place, the process, somewhere deep down; Maria Gostrey had

caught glimpses of it; but how was he to fish it up, even if he desired, for Mrs. Pocock? This was then the

spirit in which he hovered, and with the easier throb in it much indebted furthermore to the impression of

high and established adequacy as a pretty girl promptly produced in him by Mamie. He had wondered

vaguelyturning over many things in the fidget of his thoughtsif Mamie WERE as pretty as Woollett

published her; as to which issue seeing her now again was to be so swept away by Woollett's opinion that this

consequence really let loose for the imagination an avalanche of others. There were positively five minutes in

which the last word seemed of necessity to abide with a Woollett represented by a Mamie. This was the sort

of truth the place itself would feel; it would send her forth in confidence; it would point to her with triumph;

it would take its stand on her with assurance; it would be conscious of no requirements she didn't meet, of no

Well, it was right, Strether slipped smoothly enough into the cheerfulness of saying: granted that a

community MIGHT be best represented by a young lady of twentytwo, Mamie perfectly played the part,

played it as if she were used to it, and looked and spoke and dressed the character. He wondered if she

mightn't, in the high light of Paris, a cool full studiolight, becoming yet treacherous, show as too conscious

of these matters; but the next moment he felt satisfied that her consciousness was after all empty for its size,

rather too simple than too mixed, and that the kind way with her would be not to take many things out of it,

but to put as many as possible in. She was robust and conveniently tall; just a trifle too bloodlessly fair

perhaps, but with a pleasant public familiar radiance that affirmed her vitality. She might have been

"receiving" for Woollett, wherever she found herself, and there was something in her manner, her tone, her

motion, her pretty blue eyes, her pretty perfect teeth and her very small, too small, nose, that immediately

placed her, to the fancy, between the windows of a hot bright room in which voices were highup at that

end to which people were brought to be "presented." They were there to congratulate, these images, and

Strether's renewed vision, on this hint, completed the idea. What Mamie was like was the happy bride, the

bride after the church and just before going away. She wasn't the mere maiden, and yet was only as much

married as that quantity came to. She was in the brilliant acclaimed festal stage. Well, might it last her long!

Strether rejoiced in these things for Chad, who was all genial attention to the needs of his friends, besides

having arranged that his servant should reinforce him; the ladies were certainly pleasant to see, and Mamie

would be at any time and anywhere pleasant to exhibit. She would look extraordinarily like his young

wifethe wife of a honeymoon, should he go about with her; but that was his own affairor perhaps it was

hers; it was at any rate something she couldn't help. Strether remembered how he had seen him come up with

Jeanne de Vionnet in Gloriani's garden, and the fancy he had had about thatthe fancy obscured now,

thickly overlaid with others; the recollection was during these minutes his only note of trouble. He had often,

in spite of himself, wondered if Chad but too probably were not with Jeanne the object of a still and shaded

flame. It was on the cards that the child MIGHT be tremulously in love, and this conviction now flickered up

not a bit the less for his disliking to think of it, for its being, in a complicated situation, a complication the

more, and for something indescribable in Mamie, something at all events straightway lent her by his own

mind, something that gave her value, gave her intensity and purpose, as the symbol of an opposition. Little

Jeanne wasn't really at all in questionhow COULD she be?yet from the moment Miss Pocock had

shaken her skirts on the platform, touched up the immense bows of her hat and settled properly over her

shoulder the strap of her moroccoandgilt travellingsatchel, from that moment little Jeanne was opposed.

It was in the cab with Jim that impressions really crowded on Strether, giving him the strangest sense of

length of absence from people among whom he had lived for years. Having them thus come out to him was as

if he had returned to find them: and the droll promptitude of Jim's mental reaction threw his own initiation far

back into the past. Whoever might or mightn't be suited by what was going on among them, Jim, for one,

would certainly be: his instant recognitionfrank and whimsicalof what the affair was for HIM gave

Strether a glow of pleasure. "I say, you know, this IS about my shape, and if it hadn't been for YOU!" so

he broke out as the charming streets met his healthy appetite; and he wound up, after an expressive nudge,

with a clap of his companion's knee and an "Oh you, youyou ARE doing it!" that was charged with rich

meaning. Strether felt in it the intention of homage, but, with a curiosity otherwise occupied, postponed

taking it up. What he was asking himself for the time was how Sarah Pocock, in the opportunity already

given her, had judged her brotherfrom whom he himself, as they finally, at the station, separated for their

different conveyances, had had a look into which he could read more than one message. However Sarah was

judging her brother, Chad's conclusion about his sister, and about her husband and her husband's sister, was at

the least on the way not to fail of confidence. Strether felt the confidence, and that, as the look between them

was an exchange, what he himself gave back was relatively vague. This comparison of notes however could

wait; everything struck him as depending on the effect produced by Chad. Neither Sarah nor Mamie had in

any way, at the stationwhere they had had after all ample timebroken out about it; which, to make up for

this, was what our friend had expected of Jim as soon as they should find themselves together.

It was queer to him that he had that noiseless brush with Chad; an ironic intelligence with this youth on the

subject of his relatives, an intelligence carried on under their nose and, as might be said, at their

expensesuch a matter marked again for him strongly the number of stages he had come; albeit that if the

number seemed great the time taken for the final one was but the turn of a hand. He had before this had many

moments of wondering if he himself weren't perhaps changed even as Chad was changed. Only what in Chad

was conspicuous improvementwell, he had no name ready for the working, in his own organism, of his

own more timid dose. He should have to see first what this action would amount to. And for his occult

passage with the young man, after all, the directness of it had no greater oddity than the fact that the young

man's way with the three travellers should have been so happy a manifestation. Strether liked him for it, on

the spot, as he hadn't yet liked him; it affected him while it lasted as he might have been affected by some

light pleasant perfect work of art: to that degree that he wondered if they were really worthy of it, took it in

and did it justice; to that degree that it would have been scarce a miracle if, there in the luggageroom, while

they waited for their things, Sarah had pulled his sleeve and drawn him aside. "You're right; we haven't quite

known what you mean, Mother and I, but now we see. Chad's magnificent; what can one want more? If THIS

is the kind of thing!" On which they might, as it were, have embraced and begun to work together.

Ah how much, as it was, for all her bridling brightnesswhich was merely general and noticed

nothingWOULD they work together? Strether knew he was unreasonable; he set it down to his being

nervous: people couldn't notice everything and speak of everything in a quarter of an hour. Possibly, no

doubt, also, he made too much of Chad's display. Yet, none the less, when, at the end of five minutes, in the

cab, Jim Pocock had said nothing eitherhadn't said, that is, what Strether wanted, though he had said much

else it all suddenly bounced back to their being either stupid or wilful. It was more probably on the whole

the former; so that that would be the drawback of the bridling brightness. Yes, they would bridle and be

bright; they would make the best of what was before them, but their observation would fail; it would be

beyond them; they simply wouldn't understand. Of what use would it be then that they had come?if they

weren't to be intelligent up to THAT point: unless indeed he himself were utterly deluded and extravagant?

Was he, on this question of Chad's improvement, fantastic and away from the truth? Did he live in a false

world, a world that had grown simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritationin the face now of

Jim's silence in particularbut the alarm of the vain thing menaced by the touch of the real? Was this

contribution of the real possibly the mission of the Pococks?had they come to make the work of

observation, as HE had practised observation, crack and crumble, and to reduce Chad to the plain terms in

which honest minds could deal with him? Had they come in short to be sane where Strether was destined to

He glanced at such a contingency, but it failed to hold him long when once he had reflected that he would

have been silly, in this case, with Maria Gostrey and little Bilham, with Madame de Vionnet and little Jeanne,

with Lambert Strether, in fine, and above all with Chad Newsome himself. Wouldn't it be found to have made

more for reality to be silly with these persons than sane with Sarah and Jim? Jim in fact, he presently made up

his mind, was individually out of it; Jim didn't care; Jim hadn't come out either for Chad or for him; Jim in

short left the moral side to Sally and indeed simply availed himself now, for the sense of recreation, of the

fact that he left almost everything to Sally. He was nothing compared to Sally, and not so much by reason of

Sally's temper and will as by that of her more developed type and greater acquaintance with the world. He

quite frankly and serenely confessed, as he sat there with Strether, that he felt his type hang far in the rear of

his wife's and still further, if possible, in the rear of his sister's. Their types, he well knew, were recognised

and acclaimed; whereas the most a leading Woollett businessman could hope to achieve socially, and for

that matter industrially, was a certain freedom to play into this general glamour.

The impression he made on our friend was another of the things that marked our friend's road. It was a

strange impression, especially as so soon produced; Strether had received it, he judged, all in the twenty

minutes; it struck him at least as but in a minor degree the work of the long Woollett years. Pocock was

normally and consentingly though not quite wittingly out of the question. It was despite his being normal; it

was despite his being cheerful; it was despite his being a leading Woollett businessman; and the

determination of his fate left him thus perfectly usualas everything else about it was clearly, to his sense,

not less so. He seemed to say that there was a whole side of life on which the perfectly usual WAS for

leading Woollett businessmen to be out of the question. He made no more of it than that, and Strether, so far

as Jim was concerned, desired to make no more. Only Strether's imagination, as always, worked, and he

asked himself if this side of life were not somehow connected, for those who figured on it with the fact of

marriage. Would HIS relation to it, had he married ten years before, have become now the same as Pocock's?

Might it even become the same should he marry in a few months? Should he ever know himself as much out

To turn his eyes in that direction was to be personally reassured; he was different from Pocock; he had

affirmed himself differently and was held after all in higher esteem. What none the less came home to him,

however, at this hour, was that the society over there, that of which Sarah and Mamieand, in a more

eminent way, Mrs. Newsome herselfwere specimens, was essentially a society of women, and that poor

Jim wasn't in it. He himself Lambert Strether, WAS as yet in some degreewhich was an odd situation for a

man; but it kept coming back to him in a whimsical way that he should perhaps find his marriage had cost

him his place. This occasion indeed, whatever that fancy represented, was not a time of sensible exclusion for

Jim, who was in a state of manifest response to the charm of his adventure. Small and fat and constantly

facetious, strawcoloured and destitute of marks, he would have been practically indistinguishable hadn't his

constant preference for lightgrey clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and very little stories, done what

it could for his identity. There were signs in him, though none of them plaintive, of always paying for others;

and the principal one perhaps was just this failure of type. It was with this that he paid, rather than with

fatigue or waste; and also doubtless a little with the effort of humournever irrelevant to the conditions, to

He gurgled his joy as they rolled through the happy streets; he declared that his trip was a regular windfall,

and that he wasn't there, he was eager to remark, to hang back from anything: he didn't know quite what Sally

had come for, but HE had come for a good time. Strether indulged him even while wondering if what Sally

wanted her brother to go back for was to become like her husband. He trusted that a good time was to be, out

and out, the programme for all of them; and he assented liberally to Jim's proposal that, disencumbered and

irresponsiblehis things were in the omnibus with those of the othersthey should take a further turn round

before going to the hotel. It wasn't for HIM to tackle Chadit was Sally's job; and as it would be like her, he

felt, to open fire on the spot, it wouldn't be amiss of them to hold off and give her time. Strether, on his side,

only asked to give her time; so he jogged with his companion along boulevards and avenues, trying to extract

from meagre material some forecast of his catastrophe. He was quick enough to see that Jim Pocock declined

judgement, had hovered quite round the outer edge of discussion and anxiety, leaving all analysis of their

question to the ladies alone and now only feeling his way toward some small droll cynicism. It broke out

afresh, the cynicismit had already shown a flickerin a but slightly deferred: "Well, hanged if I would if I

"Give up this to go back and boss the advertising!" Poor Jim, with his arms folded and his little legs out in the

open fiacre, drank in the sparkling Paris noon and carried his eyes from one side of their vista to the other.

"Why I want to come right out and live here myself. And I want to live while I AM here too. I feel with

YOUoh you've been grand, old man, and I've twiggedthat it ain't right to worry Chad. I don't mean to

persecute him; I couldn't in conscience. It's thanks to you at any rate that I'm here, and I'm sure I'm much

There were things in this speech that Strether let pass for the time. "Don't you then think it important the

advertising should be thoroughly taken in hand? Chad WILL be, so far as capacity is concerned," he went on,

"He didn't get it over here, and the wonderful thing is that over here he hasn't inevitably lost it. He has a

natural turn for business, an extraordinary head. He comes by that," Strether explained, "honestly enough.

He's in that respect his father's son, and alsofor she's wonderful in her way toohis mother's. He has other

tastes and other tendencies; but Mrs. Newsome and your wife are quite right about his having that. He's very

"Well, I guess he is!" Jim Pocock comfortably sighed. "But if you've believed so in his making us hum, why

have you so prolonged the discussion? Don't you know we've been quite anxious about you?"

These questions were not informed with earnestness, but Strether saw he must none the less make a choice

and take a line. "Because, you see, I've greatly liked it. I've liked my Paris, I dare say I've liked it too much."

"But nothing's concluded," Strether went on. "The case is more complex than it looks from Woollett."

Jim bethought himself. "Isn't it what you've written that has made Mrs. Newsome pack us off? That at least

Strether made a reflexion of his own. "I see. That she should do something was, no doubt, inevitable, and

"Oh yes," Jim concurred"to act. But Sally comes out to act, you know," he lucidly added, "every time she

leaves the house. She never comes out but she DOES act. She's acting moreover now for her mother, and that

fixes the scale." Then he wound up, opening all his senses to it, with a renewed embrace of pleasant Paris.

Strether continued to consider. "I'm bound to say for you all that you strike me as having arrived in a very

mild and reasonable frame of mind. You don't show your claws. I felt just now in Mrs. Pocock no symptom

of that. She isn't fierce," he went on. "I'm such a nervous idiot that I thought she might be."

"Oh don't you know her well enough," Pocock asked, "to have noticed that she never gives herself away, any

more than her mother ever does? They ain't fierce, either of 'em; they let you come quite close. They wear

their fur the smooth side outthe warm side in. Do you know what they are?" Jim pursued as he looked

about him, giving the question, as Strether felt, but half his care"do you know what they are? They're about

"Yes"and Strether's concurrence had a positive precipitation; "they're about as intense as they can live."

"They don't lash about and shake the cage," said Jim, who seemed pleased with his analogy; "and it's at

"They do indeedthey always get there!" Strether replied with a laugh that justified his confession of

nervousness. He disliked to be talking sincerely of Mrs. Newsome with Pocock; he could have talked

insincerely. But there was something he wanted to know, a need created in him by her recent intermission, by

his having given from the first so much, as now more than ever appeared to him, and got so little. It was as if

a queer truth in his companion's metaphor had rolled over him with a rush. She HAD been quiet at

feedingtime; she had fed, and Sarah had fed with her, out of the big bowl of all his recent free

communication, his vividness and pleasantness, his ingenuity and even his eloquence, while the current of her

response had steadily run thin. Jim meanwhile however, it was true, slipped characteristically into

shallowness from the moment he ceased to speak out of the experience of a husband.

"But of course Chad has now the advantage of being there before her. If he doesn't work that for all it's

worth!" He sighed with contingent pity at his brotherinlaw's possible want of resource. "He has worked

it on YOU, pretty well, eh?" and he asked the next moment if there were anything new at the Varieties, which

he pronounced in the American manner. They talked about the VarietiesStrether confessing to a

knowledge which produced again on Pocock's part a play of innuendo as vague as a nurseryrhyme, yet as

aggressive as an elbow in his side; and they finished their drive under the protection of easy themes. Strether

waited to the end, but still in vain, for any show that Jim had seen Chad as different; and he could scarce have

explained the discouragement he drew from the absence of this testimony. It was what he had taken his own

stand on, so far as he had taken a stand; and if they were all only going to see nothing he had only wasted his

time. He gave his friend till the very last moment, till they had come into sight of the hotel; and when poor

Pocock only continued cheerful and envious and funny he fairly grew to dislike him, to feel him

extravagantly common. If they were ALL going to see nothing!Strether knew, as this came back to him,

that he was also letting Pocock represent for him what Mrs. Newsome wouldn't see. He went on disliking, in

the light of Jim's commonness, to talk to him about that lady; yet just before the cab pulled up he knew the

"'Given way'?"Jim echoed it with the practical derision of his sense of a long past.

"Under the strain, I mean, of hope deferred, of disappointment repeated and thereby intensified."

"Oh is she prostrate, you mean?"he had his categories in hand. "Why yes, she's prostratejust as Sally is.

"All night, my boyfor YOU!" And Jim fetched him, with a vulgar little guffaw, a thrust that gave relief to

the picture. But he had got what he wanted. He felt on the spot that this WAS the real word from Woollett.

"So don't you go home!" Jim added while he alighted and while his friend, letting him profusely pay the

cabman, sat on in a momentary muse. Strether wondered if that were the real word too.

As the door of Mrs. Pocock's salon was pushed open for him, the next day, well before noon, he was reached

by a voice with a charming sound that made him just falter before crossing the threshold. Madame de Vionnet

was already on the field, and this gave the drama a quicker pace than he felt it as yetthough his suspense

had increasedin the power of any act of his own to do. He had spent the previous evening with all his old

friends together yet he would still have described himself as quite in the dark in respect to a forecast of their

influence on his situation. It was strange now, none the less, that in the light of this unexpected note of her

presence he felt Madame de Vionnet a part of that situation as she hadn't even yet been. She was alone, he

found himself assuming, with Sarah, and there was a bearing in thatsomehow beyond his controlon his

personal fate. Yet she was only saying something quite easy and independentthe thing she had come, as a

good friend of Chad's, on purpose to say. "There isn't anything at all? I should be so delighted."

It was clear enough, when they were there before him, how she had been received. He saw this, as Sarah got

up to greet him, from something fairly hectic in Sarah's face. He saw furthermore that they weren't, as had

first come to him, alone together; he was at no loss as to the identity of the broad high back presented to him

in the embrasure of the window furthest from the door. Waymarsh, whom he had today not yet seen, whom

he only knew to have left the hotel before him, and who had taken part, the night previous, on Mrs. Pocock's

kind invitation, conveyed by Chad, in the entertainment, informal but cordial, promptly offered by that

ladyWaymarsh had anticipated him even as Madame de Vionnet had done, and, with his hands in his

pockets and his attitude unaffected by Strether's entrance, was looking out, in marked detachment, at the Rue

de Rivoli. The latter felt it in the air it was immense how Waymarsh could mark thingsthat he had

remained deeply dissociated from the overture to their hostess that we have recorded on Madame de

Vionnet's side. He had, conspicuously, tact, besides a stiff general view; and this was why he had left Mrs.

Pocock to struggle alone. He would outstay the visitor; he would unmistakeably wait; to what had he been

doomed for months past but waiting? Therefore she was to feel that she had him in reserve. What support she

drew from this was still to be seen, for, although Sarah was vividly bright, she had given herself up for the

moment to an ambiguous flushed formalism. She had had to reckon more quickly than she expected; but it

concerned her first of all to signify that she was not to be taken unawares. Strether arrived precisely in time

for her showing it. "Oh you're too good; but I don't think I feel quite helpless. I have my brotherand these

American friends. And then you know I've been to Paris. I KNOW Paris," said Sally Pocock in a tone that

"Ah but a woman, in this tiresome place where everything's always changing, a woman of good will,"

Madame de Vionnet threw off, "can always help a woman. I'm sure you 'know'but we know perhaps

different things." She too, visibly, wished to make no mistake; but it was a fear of a different order and more

kept out of sight. She smiled in welcome at Strether; she greeted him more familiarly than Mrs. Pocock; she

put out her hand to him without moving from her place; and it came to him in the course of a minute and in

the oddest way thatyes, positivelyshe was giving him over to ruin. She was all kindness and ease, but

she couldn't help so giving him; she was exquisite, and her being just as she was poured for Sarah a sudden

rush of meaning into his own equivocations. How could she know how she was hurting him? She wanted to

show as simple and humblein the degree compatible with operative charm; but it was just this that seemed

to put him on her side. She struck him as dressed, as arranged, as prepared infinitely to conciliatewith the

very poetry of good taste in her view of the conditions of her early call. She was ready to advise about

dressmakers and shops; she held herself wholly at the disposition of Chad's family. Strether noticed her card

on the tableher coronet and her "Comtesse"and the imagination was sharp in him of certain private

adjustments in Sarah's mind. She had never, he was sure, sat with a "Comtesse" before, and such was the

specimen of that class he had been keeping to play on her. She had crossed the sea very particularly for a look

at her; but he read in Madame de Vionnet's own eyes that this curiosity hadn't been so successfully met as

that she herself wouldn't now have more than ever need of him. She looked much as she had looked to him

that morning at Notre Dame; he noted in fact the suggestive sameness of her discreet and delicate dress. It

seemed to speakperhaps a little prematurely or too finelyof the sense in which she would help Mrs.

Pocock with the shops. The way that lady took her in, moreover, added depth to his impression of what Miss

Gostrey, by their common wisdom, had escaped. He winced as he saw himself but for that timely prudence

ushering in Maria as a guide and an example. There was however a touch of relief for him in his glimpse, so

far as he had got it, of Sarah's line. She "knew Paris." Madame de Vionnet had, for that matter, lightly taken

this up. "Ah then you've a turn for that, an affinity that belongs to your family. Your brother, though his long

experience makes a difference, I admit, has become one of us in a marvellous way." And she appealed to

Strether in the manner of a woman who could always glide off with smoothness into another subject. Wasn't

HE struck with the way Mr. Newsome had made the place his own, and hadn't he been in a position to profit

Strether felt the bravery, at the least, of her presenting herself so promptly to sound that note, and yet asked

himself what other note, after all, she COULD strike from the moment she presented herself at all. She could

meet Mrs. Pocock only on the ground of the obvious, and what feature of Chad's situation was more eminent

than the fact that he had created for himself a new set of circumstances? Unless she hid herself altogether she

could show but as one of these, an illustration of his domiciled and indeed of his confirmed condition. And

the consciousness of all this in her charming eyes was so clear and fine that as she thus publicly drew him

into her boat she produced in him such a silent agitation as he was not to fail afterwards to denounce as

pusillanimous. "Ah don't be so charming to me!for it makes us intimate, and after all what IS between us

when I've been so tremendously on my guard and have seen you but half a dozen times?" He recognised once

more the perverse law that so inveterately governed his poor personal aspects: it would be exactly LIKE the

way things always turned out for him that he should affect Mrs. Pocock and Waymarsh as launched in a

relation in which he had really never been launched at all. They were at this very momentthey could only

beattributing to him the full licence of it, and all by the operation of her own tone with him; whereas his

sole licence had been to cling with intensity to the brink, not to dip so much as a toe into the flood. But the

flicker of his fear on this occasion was not, as may be added, to repeat itself; it sprang up, for its moment,

only to die down and then go out for ever. To meet his fellow visitor's invocation and, with Sarah's brilliant

eyes on him, answer, WAS quite sufficiently to step into her boat. During the rest of the time her visit lasted

he felt himself proceed to each of the proper offices, successively, for helping to keep the adventurous skiff

afloat. It rocked beneath him, but he settled himself in his place. He took up an oar and, since he was to have

"That will make it all the pleasanter if it so happens that we DO meet," Madame de Vionnet had further

observed in reference to Mrs. Pocock's mention of her initiated state; and she had immediately added that,

after all, her hostess couldn't be in need with the good offices of Mr. Strether so close at hand. "It's he, I

gather, who has learnt to know his Paris, and to love it, better than any one ever before in so short a time; so

that between him and your brother, when it comes to the point, how can you possibly want for good

guidance? The great thing, Mr. Strether will show you," she smiled, "is just to let one's self go."

"Oh I've not let myself go very far," Strether answered, feeling quite as if he had been called upon to hint to

Mrs. Pocock how Parisians could talk. "I'm only afraid of showing I haven't let myself go far enough. I've

taken a good deal of time, but I must quite have had the air of not budging from one spot." He looked at

Sarah in a manner that he thought she might take as engaging, and he made, under Madame de Vionnet's

protection, as it were, his first personal point. "What has really happened has been that, all the while, I've

Yet it only at first gave Madame de Vionnet a chance immediately to take him up. "You've renewed

acquaintance with your friendyou've learnt to know him again." She spoke with such cheerful helpfulness

that they might, in a common cause, have been calling together and pledged to mutual aid.

Waymarsh, at this, as if he had been in question, straightway turned from the window. "Oh yes,

Countesshe has renewed acquaintance with ME, and he HAS, I guess, learnt something about me, though I

don't know how much he has liked it. It's for Strether himself to say whether he has felt it justifies his

"Oh but YOU," said the Countess gaily, "are not in the least what he came out foris he really, Strether? and

I hadn't you at all in my mind. I was thinking of Mr. Newsome, of whom we think so much and with whom,

precisely, Mrs. Pocock has given herself the opportunity to take up threads. What a pleasure for you both!"

Mrs. Pocock met her handsomely, but Strether quickly saw she meant to accept no version of her movements

or plans from any other lips. She required no patronage and no support, which were but other names for a

false position; she would show in her own way what she chose to show, and this she expressed with a dry

glitter that recalled to him a fine Woollett winter morning. "I've never wanted for opportunities to see my

brother. We've many things to think of at home, and great responsibilities and occupations, and our home's

not an impossible place. We've plenty of reasons," Sarah continued a little piercingly, "for everything we

do"and in short she wouldn't give herself the least little scrap away. But she added as one who was always

bland and who could afford a concession: "I've come becausewell, because we do come."

"Ah then fortunately!"Madame de Vionnet breathed it to the air. Five minutes later they were on their feet

for her to take leave, standing together in an affability that had succeeded in surviving a further exchange of

remarks; only with the emphasised appearance on Waymarsh's part of a tendency to revert, in a ruminating

manner and as with an instinctive or a precautionary lightening of his tread, to an open window and his point

of vantage. The glazed and gilded room, all red damask, ormolu, mirrors, clocks, looked south, and the

shutters were bowed upon the summer morning; but the Tuileries garden and what was beyond it, over which

the whole place hung, were things visible through gaps; so that the farspreading presence of Paris came up

in coolness, dimness and invitation, in the twinkle of gilttipped palings, the crunch of gravel, the click of

hoofs, the crack of whips, things that suggested some parade of the circus. "I think it probable," said Mrs.

Pocock, "that I shall have the opportunity of going to my brother's I've no doubt it's very pleasant indeed."

She spoke as to Strether, but her face was turned with an intensity of brightness to Madame de Vionnet, and

there was a moment during which, while she thus fronted her, our friend expected to hear her add: "I'm much

obliged to you, I'm sure, for inviting me there." He guessed that for five seconds these words were on the

point of coming; he heard them as clearly as if they had been spoken; but he presently knew they had just

failedknew it by a glance, quick and fine, from Madame de Vionnet, which told him that she too had felt

them in the air, but that the point had luckily not been made in any manner requiring notice. This left her free

"That the Boulevard Malesherbes may be common ground for us offers me the best prospect I see for the

"Oh I shall come to see you, since you've been so good": and Mrs. Pocock looked her invader well in the

eyes. The flush in Sarah's cheeks had by this time settled to a small definite crimson spot that was not without

its own bravery; she held her head a good deal up, and it came to Strether that of the two, at this moment, she

was the one who most carried out the idea of a Countess. He quite took in, however, that she would really

return her visitor's civility: she wouldn't report again at Woollett without at least so much producible history

"I want extremely to be able to show you my little daughter." Madame de Vionnet went on; "and I should

have brought her with me if I hadn't wished first to ask your leave. I was in hopes I should perhaps find Miss

Pocock, of whose being with you I've heard from Mr. Newsome and whose acquaintance I should so much

like my child to make. If I have the pleasure of seeing her and you do permit it I shall venture to ask her to be

kind to Jeanne. Mr. Strether will tell you"she beautifully kept it up"that my poor girl is gentle and good

and rather lonely. They've made friends, he and she, ever so happily, and he doesn't, I believe, think ill of her.

As for Jeanne herself he has had the same success with her that I know he has had here wherever he has

turned." She seemed to ask him for permission to say these things, or seemed rather to take it, softly and

happily, with the ease of intimacy, for granted, and he had quite the consciousness now that not to meet her at

any point more than halfway would be odiously, basely to abandon her. Yes, he was WITH her, and, opposed

even in this covert, this semisafe fashion to those who were not, he felt, strangely and confusedly, but

excitedly, inspiringly, how much and how far. It was as if he had positively waited in suspense for something

from her that would let him in deeper, so that he might show her how he could take it. And what did in fact

come as she drew out a little her farewell served sufficiently the purpose. "As his success is a matter that I'm

sure he'll never mention for himself, I feel, you see, the less scruple; which it's very good of me to say, you

know, by the way," she added as she addressed herself to him; "considering how little direct advantage I've

gained from your triumphs with ME. When does one ever see you? I wait at home and I languish. You'll have

rendered me the service, Mrs. Pocock, at least," she wound up, "of giving me one of my muchtoorare

"I certainly should be sorry to deprive you of anything that seems so much, as you describe it, your natural

due. Mr. Strether and I are very old friends," Sarah allowed, "but the privilege of his society isn't a thing I

"And yet, dear Sarah," he freely broke in, "I feel, when I hear you say that, that you don't quite do justice to

the important truth of the extent to whichas you're also mineI'm your natural due. I should like much

She met him, Mrs. Pocock, on this, with an arrest of speechwith a certain breathlessness, as he

immediately fancied, on the score of a freedom for which she wasn't quite prepared. It had flared up for all

the harm he had intended by itbecause, confoundedly, he didn't want any more to be afraid about her than

he wanted to be afraid about Madame de Vionnet. He had never, naturally, called her anything but Sarah at

home, and though he had perhaps never quite so markedly invoked her as his "dear," that was somehow

partly because no occasion had hitherto laid so effective a trap for it. But something admonished him now

that it was too lateunless indeed it were possibly too early; and that he at any rate shouldn't have pleased

Mrs. Pocock the more by it. "Well, Mr. Strether!" she murmured with vagueness, yet with sharpness, while

her crimson spot burned a trifle brighter and he was aware that this must be for the present the limit of her

response. Madame de Vionnet had already, however, come to his aid, and Waymarsh, as if for further

participation, moved again back to them. It was true that the aid rendered by Madame de Vionnet was

questionable; it was a sign that, for all one might confess to with her, and for all she might complain of not

enjoying, she could still insidiously show how much of the material of conversation had accumulated

"The real truth is, you know, that you sacrifice one without mercy to dear old Maria. She leaves no room in

your life for anybody else. Do you know," she enquired of Mrs. Pocock, "about dear old Maria? The worst is

"Oh yes indeed," Strether answered for her, "Mrs. Pocock knows about Miss Gostrey. Your mother, Sarah,

must have told you about her; your mother knows everything," he sturdily pursued. "And I cordially admit,"

he added with his conscious gaiety of courage, "that she's as wonderful a woman as you like."

"Ah it isn't I who 'like,' dear Mr. Strether, anything to do with the matter!" Sarah Pocock promptly protested;

"and I'm by no means sure I havefrom my mother or from any one elsea notion of whom you're talking

"Well, he won't let you see her, you know," Madame de Vionnet sympathetically threw in. "He never lets

meold friends as we are: I mean as I am with Maria. He reserves her for his best hours; keeps her

"Well, Countess, I'VE had some of the crumbs," Waymarsh observed with weight and covering her with his

"Comment donc, he shares her with YOU?" she exclaimed in droll stupefaction. "Take care you don't have,

before you go much further, rather more of all ces dames than you may know what to do with!"

But he only continued in his massive way. "I can post you about the lady, Mrs. Pocock, so far as you may

care to hear. I've seen her quite a number of times, and I was practically present when they made

acquaintance. I've kept my eye on her right along, but I don't know as there's any real harm in her."

"'Harm'?" Madame de Vionnet quickly echoed. "Why she's the dearest and cleverest of all the clever and

"Well, you run her pretty close, Countess," Waymarsh returned with spirit; "though there's no doubt she's

pretty well up in things. She knows her way round Europe. Above all there's no doubt she does love

"Ah but we all do thatwe all love Strether: it isn't a merit!" their fellow visitor laughed, keeping to her idea

with a good conscience at which our friend was aware that he marvelled, though he trusted also for it, as he

The prime effect of her tone, howeverand it was a truth which his own eyes gave back to her in sad ironic

playcould only be to make him feel that, to say such things to a man in public, a woman must practically

think of him as ninety years old. He had turned awkwardly, responsively red, he knew, at her mention of

Maria Gostrey; Sarah Pocock's presencethe particular quality of ithad made this inevitable; and then he

had grown still redder in proportion as he hated to have shown anything at all. He felt indeed that he was

showing much, as, uncomfortably and almost in pain, he offered up his redness to Waymarsh, who, strangely

enough, seemed now to be looking at him with a certain explanatory yearning. Something deepsomething

built on their old old relationpassed, in this complexity, between them; he got the sidewind of a loyalty

that stood behind all actual queer questions. Waymarsh's dry bare humouras it gave itself to be

takengloomed out to demand justice. "Well, if you talk of Miss Barrace I've MY chance too," it appeared

stiffly to nod, and it granted that it was giving him away, but struggled to add that it did so only to save him.

The sombre glow stared it at him till it fairly sounded out"to save you, poor old man, to save you; to save

you in spite of yourself." Yet it was somehow just this communication that showed him to himself as more

than ever lost. Still another result of it was to put before him as never yet that between his comrade and the

interest represented by Sarah there was already a basis. Beyond all question now, yes: Waymarsh had been in

occult relation with Mrs. Newsomeout, out it all came in the very effort of his face. "Yes, you're feeling

my hand"he as good as proclaimed it; "but only because this at least I SHALL have got out of the damned

Old World: that I shall have picked up the pieces into which it has caused you to crumble." It was as if in

short, after an instant, Strether had not only had it from him, but had recognised that so far as this went the

instant had cleared the air. Our friend understood and approved; he had the sense that they wouldn't otherwise

speak of it. This would be all, and it would mark in himself a kind of intelligent generosity. It was with grim

Sarah thenSarah grim for all her gracethat Waymarsh had begun at ten o'clock in the morning to save

him. Wellif he COULD, poor dear man, with his big bleak kindness! The upshot of which crowded

perception was that Strether, on his own side, still showed no more than he absolutely had to. He showed the

least possible by saying to Mrs. Pocock after an interval much briefer than our glance at the picture reflected

in him: "Oh it's as true as they please! There's no Miss Gostrey for any one but menot the least little

"Well, it's very good of you to notify me," Sarah replied without looking at him and thrown for a moment by

this discrimination, as the direction of her eyes showed, upon a dimly desperate little community with

Madame de Vionnet instantly rallied. "And you knowthough it might occur to oneit isn't in the least that

"Ah but extremely!" Strether laughed while he wondered at the odd part he found thus imposed on him.

It continued to be so by every touch from Madame de Vionnet. "Well, as I say, you know, I wish you would

keep ME a little more to yourself. Couldn't you name some day for me, some hourand better soon than

Strether thought a moment while Waymarsh and Mrs. Pocock affected him as standing attentive. "I did lately

"Yesand I was away, as it happened, too. You choose your moments well. But don't wait for my next

absence, for I shan't make another," Madame de Vionnet declared, "while Mrs. Pocock's here."

"That vow needn't keep you long, fortunately," Sarah observed with reasserted suavity. "I shall be at present

but a short time in Paris. I have my plans for other countries. I meet a number of charming friends"and her

"Ah then," her visitor cheerfully replied, "all the more reason! Tomorrow, for instance, or next day?" she

It was ridiculous, but Mrs. Pocock and Waymarsh struck him as fairly waiting for his answer. It was indeed

as if they were arranged, gathered for a performance, the performance of "Europe" by his confederate and

"Five fortyfivegood." And now at last Madame de Vionnet must leave them, though it carried, for

herself, the performance a little further. "I DID hope so much also to see Miss Pocock. Mayn't I still?"

Sarah hesitated, but she rose equal. "She'll return your visit with me. She's at present out with Mr. Pocock and

"I seeof course Mr. Newsome has everything to show them. He has told me so much about her. My great

desire's to give my daughter the opportunity of making her acquaintance. I'm always on the lookout for such

chances for her. If I didn't bring her today it was only to make sure first that you'd let me." After which the

charming woman risked a more intense appeal. "It wouldn't suit you also to mention some near time, so that

we shall be sure not to lose you?" Strether on his side waited, for Sarah likewise had, after all, to perform;

and it occupied him to have been thus reminded that she had stayed at homeand on her first morning of

Pariswhile Chad led the others forth. Oh she was up to her eyes; if she had stayed at home she had stayed

by an understanding, arrived at the evening before, that Waymarsh would come and find her alone. This was

beginning wellfor a first day in Paris; and the thing might be amusing yet. But Madame de Vionnet's

earnestness was meanwhile beautiful. "You may think me indiscreet, but I've SUCH a desire my Jeanne shall

know an American girl of the really delightful kind. You see I throw myself for it on your charity."

The manner of this speech gave Strether such a sense of depths below it and behind it as he hadn't yet

hadministered in a way that almost frightened him to his dim divinations of reasons; but if Sarah still, in

spite of it, faltered, this was why he had time for a sign of sympathy with her petitioner. "Let me say then,

dear lady, to back your plea, that Miss Mamie is of the most delightful kind of allis charming among the

Even Waymarsh, though with more to produce on the subject, could get into motion in time. "Yes, Countess,

the American girl's a thing that your country must at least allow ours the privilege to say we CAN show you.

"Ah then," smiled Madame de Vionnet, "that's exactly what I want to do. I'm sure she has much to teach us."

It was wonderful, but what was scarce less so was that Strether found himself, by the quick effect of it,

moved another way. "Oh that may be! But don't speak of your own exquisite daughter, you know, as if she

weren't pure perfection. I at least won't take that from you. Mademoiselle de Vionnet," he explained, in

considerable form, to Mrs. Pocock, "IS pure perfection. Mademoiselle de Vionnet IS exquisite."

Waymarsh himself, for that matter, apparently recognised, in respect to the facts, the need of a larger justice,

and he had with it an inclination to Sarah. "Miss Jane's strikingly handsome in the regular French style."

It somehow made both Strether and Madame de Vionnet laugh out, though at the very moment he caught in

Sarah's eyes, as glancing at the speaker, a vague but unmistakeable "You too?" It made Waymarsh in fact

look consciously over her head. Madame de Vionnet meanwhile, however, made her point in her own way. "I

wish indeed I could offer you my poor child as a dazzling attraction: it would make one's position simple

enough! She's as good as she can be, but of course she's different, and the question is nowin the light of the

way things seem to goif she isn't after all TOO different: too different I mean from the splendid type every

one is so agreed that your wonderful country produces. On the other hand of course Mr. Newsome, who

knows it so well, has, as a good friend, dear kind man that he is, done everything he canto keep us from

fatal benightednessfor my small shy creature. Well," she wound up after Mrs. Pocock had signified, in a

murmur still a little stiff, that she would speak to her own young charge on the question"well, we shall sit,

my child and I, and wait and wait and wait for you." But her last fine turn was for Strether. "Do speak of us in

"As that something can't but come of it? Oh something SHALL come of it! I take a great interest!" he further

declared; and in proof of it, the next moment, he had gone with her down to her carriage.

"The difficulty is," Strether said to Madame de Vionnet a couple of days later, "that I can't surprise them into

the smallest sign of his not being the same old Chad they've been for the last three years glowering at across

the sea. They simply won't give any, and as a policy, you knowwhat you call a parti pris, a deep game

It was so remarkable that our friend had pulled up before his hostess with the vision of it; he had risen from

his chair at the end of ten minutes and begun, as a help not to worry, to move about before her quite as he

moved before Maria. He had kept his appointment with her to the minute and had been intensely impatient,

though divided in truth between the sense of having everything to tell her and the sense of having nothing at

all. The short interval had, in the face of their complication, multiplied his impressionsit being meanwhile

to be noted, moreover, that he already frankly, already almost publicly, viewed the complication as common

to them. If Madame de Vionnet, under Sarah's eyes, had pulled him into her boat, there was by this time no

doubt whatever that he had remained in it and that what he had really most been conscious of for many hours

together was the movement of the vessel itself. They were in it together this moment as they hadn't yet been,

and he hadn't at present uttered the least of the words of alarm or remonstrance that had died on his lips at the

hotel. He had other things to say to her than that she had put him in a position; so quickly had his position

grown to affect him as quite excitingly, altogether richly, inevitable. That the outlook, howevergiven the

point of exposurehadn't cleared up half so much as he had reckoned was the first warning she received

from him on his arrival. She had replied with indulgence that he was in too great a hurry, and had remarked

soothingly that if she knew how to be patient surely HE might be. He felt her presence, on the spot, he felt her

tone and everything about her, as an aid to that effort; and it was perhaps one of the proofs of her success

with him that he seemed so much to take his ease while they talked. By the time he had explained to her why

his impressions, though multiplied, still baffled him, it was as if he had been familiarly talking for hours.

They baffled him because Sarahwell, Sarah was deep, deeper than she had ever yet had a chance to show

herself. He didn't say that this was partly the effect of her opening so straight down, as it were, into her

mother, and that, given Mrs. Newsome's profundity, the shaft thus sunk might well have a reach; but he

wasn't without a resigned apprehension that, at such a rate of confidence between the two women, he was

likely soon to be moved to show how already, at moments, it had been for him as if he were dealing directly

with Mrs. Newsome. Sarah, to a certainty, would have begun herself to feel it in himand this naturally put

it in her power to torment him the more. From the moment she knew he COULD be tormented!

"Ah one must never do that," she smiled. "One must think of as few things as possible."

"Then," he answered, "one must pick them out right. But all I mean isfor I express myself with

violencethat she's in a position to watch me. There's an element of suspense for me, and she can see me

wriggle. But my wriggling doesn't matter," he pursued. "I can bear it. Besides, I shall wriggle out."

The picture at any rate stirred in her an appreciation that he felt to be sincere. "I don't see how a man can be

Well, kind was what he wanted to be; yet even while her charming eyes rested on him with the truth of this he

none the less had his humour of honesty. "When I say suspense I mean, you know," he laughed, "suspense

"Oh yesabout your own case too!" It diminished his magnanimity, but she only looked at him the more

"Not, however," he went on, "that I want to talk to you about that. It's my own little affair, and I mentioned it

simply as part of Mrs. Pocock's advantage." No, no; though there was a queer present temptation in it, and his

suspense was so real that to fidget was a relief, he wouldn't talk to her about Mrs. Newsome, wouldn't work

off on her the anxiety produced in him by Sarah's calculated omissions of reference. The effect she produced

of representing her mother had been producedand that was just the immense, the uncanny part of

itwithout her having so much as mentioned that lady. She had brought no message, had alluded to no

question, had only answered his enquiries with hopeless limited propriety. She had invented a way of meeting

themas if he had been a polite perfunctory poor relation, of distant degreethat made them almost

ridiculous in him. He couldn't moreover on his own side ask much without appearing to publish how he had

lately lacked news; a circumstance of which it was Sarah's profound policy not to betray a suspicion. These

things, all the same, he wouldn't breathe to Madame de Vionnetmuch as they might make him walk up and

down. And what he didn't sayas well as what SHE didn't, for she had also her high decenciesenhanced

the effect of his being there with her at the end of ten minutes more intimately on the basis of saving her than

he had yet had occasion to be. It ended in fact by being quite beautiful between them, the number of things

they had a manifest consciousness of not saying. He would have liked to turn her, critically, to the subject of

Mrs. Pocock, but he so stuck to the line he felt to be the point of honour and of delicacy that he scarce even

asked her what her personal impression had been. He knew it, for that matter, without putting her to trouble:

that she wondered how, with such elements, Sarah could still have no charm, was one of the principal things

she held her tongue about. Strether would have been interested in her estimate of the elements indubitably

there, some of them, and to be appraised according to tastebut he denied himself even the luxury of this

diversion. The way Madame de Vionnet affected him today was in itself a kind of demonstration of the

happy employment of gifts. How could a woman think Sarah had charm who struck one as having arrived at

it herself by such different roads? On the other hand of course Sarah wasn't obliged to have it. He felt as if

somehow Madame de Vionnet WAS. The great question meanwhile was what Chad thought of his sister;

which was naturally ushered in by that of Sarah's apprehension of Chad. THAT they could talk of, and with a

freedom purchased by their discretion in other senses. The difficulty however was that they were reduced as

yet to conjecture. He had given them in the day or two as little of a lead as Sarah, and Madame de Vionnet

She met it in all honesty. "Oh I won't pretend I don't miss him. Sometimes I see him every day. Our

friendship's like that. Make what you will of it!" she whimsically smiled; a little flicker of the kind,

occasional in her, that had more than once moved him to wonder what he might best make of HER. "But he's

perfectly right," she hastened to add, "and I wouldn't have him fail in any way at present for the world. I'd

sooner not see him for three months. I begged him to be beautiful to them, and he fully feels it for himself."

Strether turned away under his quick perception; she was so odd a mixture of lucidity and mystery. She fell in

at moments with the theory about her he most cherished, and she seemed at others to blow it into air. She

spoke now as if her art were all an innocence, and then again as if her innocence were all an art. "Oh he's

giving himself up, and he'll do so to the end. How can he but want, now that it's within reach, his full

impression?which is much more important, you know, than either yours or mine. But he's just soaking,"

Strether said as he came back; "he's going in conscientiously for a saturation. I'm bound to say he IS very

"Ah," she quietly replied, "to whom do you say it?" And then more quietly still: "He's capable of anything."

Strether more than reaffirmed"Oh he's excellent. I more and more like," he insisted, "to see him with

them;" though the oddity of this tone between them grew sharper for him even while they spoke. It placed the

young man so before them as the result of her interest and the product of her genius, acknowledged so her

part in the phenomenon and made the phenomenon so rare, that more than ever yet he might have been on the

very point of asking her for some more detailed account of the whole business than he had yet received from

her. The occasion almost forced upon him some question as to how she had managed and as to the

appearance such miracles presented from her own singularly close place of survey. The moment in fact

however passed, giving way to more present history, and he continued simply to mark his appreciation of the

happy truth. "It's a tremendous comfort to feel how one can trust him." And then again while for a little she

said nothingas if after all to HER trust there might be a special limit: "I mean for making a good show to

"Oh 'do what they will'! They won't do much; especially if Sarah hasn't morewell, more than one has yet

Madame de Vionnet weighed it. "Ah she has all her grace!" It was a statement over which, for a little, they

could look at each other sufficiently straight, and though it produced no protest from Strether the effect was

somehow as if he had treated it as a joke. "She may be persuasive and caressing with him; she may be

eloquent beyond words. She may get hold of him," she wound up"well, as neither you nor I have."

"Yes, she MAY"and now Strether smiled. "But he has spent all his time each day with Jim. He's still

Strether took a turn before he answered. "Hasn't he given you Jim? Hasn't he before this 'done' him for you?"

She hesitated. "No"and their eyes once more gave and took. "Not as you do. You somehow make me see

themor at least feel them. And I haven't asked too much," she added; "I've of late wanted so not to worry

"Ah for that, so have I," he said with encouraging assent; so that as if she had answered everythingthey

were briefly sociable on it. It threw him back on his other thought, with which he took another turn; stopping

again, however, presently with something of a glow. "You see Jim's really immense. I think it will be Jim

"Nojust the other thing. Counteract Sarah's spell." And he showed now, our friend, how far he had worked

"Yes, literallydear Jim! He's awful. What HE wants, heaven forgive him, is to help us."

"Well, Chad and me in the first place. But he throws you in too, though without as yet seeing you much.

"A regular bad onethough of course of a tremendously superior kind. Dreadful, delightful, irresistible."

"Yes, naturally. But will it do? You may, you know," Strether suggested, "disappoint him."

She was droll and humble about it. "I can but try. But my wickedness then," she went on, "is my

"Your wickedness and the charms with which, in such a degree as yours, he associates it. He understands,

you see, that Chad and I have above all wanted to have a good time, and his view is simple and sharp.

Nothing will persuade himin the light, that is, of my behaviourthat I really didn't, quite as much as

Chad, come over to have one before it was too late. He wouldn't have expected it of me; but men of my age,

at Woollettand especially the least likely oneshave been noted as liable to strange outbreaks, belated

uncanny clutches at the unusual, the ideal. It's an effect that a lifetime of Woollett has quite been observed as

having; and I thus give it to you, in Jim's view, for what it's worth. Now his wife and his motherinlaw,"

Strether continued to explain, "have, as in honour bound, no patience with such phenomena, late or

earlywhich puts Jim, as against his relatives, on the other side. Besides," he added, "I don't think he really

"Nohe won't 'work' at all, and he won't do anything en dessous. He's very decent and won't be a traitor in

the camp. But he'll be amused with his own little view of our duplicity, he'll sniff up what he supposes to be

Paris from morning till night, and he'll be, as to the rest, for Chadwell, just what he is."

He met it almost with glee. "You ARE as wonderful as everybody says!" And then to explain all he meant: "I

drove him about for his first hour, and do you know whatall beautifully unconscioushe most put before

me? Why that something like THAT is at bottom, as an improvement to his present state, as in fact the real

redemption of it, what they think it may not be too late to make of our friend." With which, as, taking it in,

she seemed, in her recurrent alarm, bravely to gaze at the possibility, he completed his statement. "But it IS

He stood before her so exhilarated by his demonstration that he could fairly be jocular. "Everything's

"You"she could but answer him"are better than anything." But she had another thought. "WILL Mrs.

"Oh yesshe'll do that. As soon, that is, as my friend Waymarsh HER friend nowleaves her leisure."

"Oh"she was amused"'all' is a good deal to say. I don't know I forget. I lost myself in HER."

"You were splendid," Strether returned"but 'all' isn't a good deal to say: it's only a little. Yet it's charming

"Do you think she looked at meor even at youas if she had?" Strether easily dismissed that irony.

"Every one, you see, must strike her as having somebody. You've got Chadand Chad has got you."

Well, he on his side accepted that. "I've got Maria. And Maria has got me. So it goes."

He shook his head. "Miss Barrace is a raffinee, and her amusement won't lose by Mrs. Pocock. It will gain

"Noit seems to me it's we that I know. I know Sarahit's perhaps on that ground only that my feet are

firm. Waymarsh will take her round while Chad takes Jimand I shall be, I assure you delighted for both of

them. Sarah will have had what she requiresshe will have paid her tribute to the ideal; and he will have

done about the same. In Paris it's in the airso what can one do less? If there's a point that, beyond any

other, Sarah wants to make, it's that she didn't come out to be narrow. We shall feel at least that."

"Oh," she sighed, "the quantity we seem likely to 'feel'! But what becomes, in these conditions, of the girl?"

"Of Mamieif we're all provided? Ah for that," said Strether, "you can trust Chad."

"To pay her every attention as soon as he has polished off Jim. He wants what Jim can give himand what

Jim really won'tthough he has had it all, and more than all, from me. He wants in short his own personal

impression, and he'll get itstrong. But as soon as he has got it Mamie won't suffer."

But Strether could reassure her. "Don't fear. As soon as he has done with Jim, Jim will fall to me. And then

It was as if in a moment she saw already; yet she still waited. Then "Is she really quite charming?" she asked.

He had got up with his last words and gathered in his hat and gloves. "I don't know; I'm watching. I'm

"Yes," he smiled"but somehow at home she wasn't a case. She has become one since." It was as if he made

Her intelligent eyes showed her thought of it. "Ah but the day you arrived you met Maria. Whom has Miss

"Certainlybut not for the first time. He's an old friend." At which Strether had a slow amused significant

headshake that made her go on: "You mean that for HER at least he's a new person that she sees him as

Strether gave it up. "How can one tell how a deep little girl sees a deep young man?"

"So it strikes me deeper than I thought. But wait a littlebetween us we'll make it out. You'll judge for that

Madame de Vionnet looked for the moment fairly bent on the chance. "Then she WILL come with her?I

"Certainly. Her curiosity, if nothing else, will in any case work that. But leave it all to Chad."

"Ah," wailed Madame de Vionnet, turning away a little wearily, "the things I leave to Chad!"

The tone of it made him look at her with a kindness that showed his vision of her suspense. But he fell back

on his confidence. "Oh welltrust him. Trust him all the way." He had indeed no sooner so spoken than the

queer displacement of his point of view appeared again to come up for him in the very sound, which drew

from him a short laugh, immediately checked. He became still more advisory. "When they do come give

She looked for a moment as if she placed them face to face. "For Mamie to hate her?"

She looked at him hard, and then as if it were what she must always come back to: "It's you I trust. But I was

"Well?"Strether waited with deference while she appeared to hesitate as to how to put it.

Strether for a little met her eyes on it; after which something that might have been unexpected to her came

Not more expected for himself indeed might well have been her echo of it. "Poor little duck! But she

And now at last he took leave of her, as he had been intending for five minutes. But she went part of the way

with him, accompanying him out of the room and into the next and the next. Her noble old apartment offered

a succession of three, the first two of which indeed, on entering, smaller than the last, but each with its faded

and formal air, enlarged the office of the antechamber and enriched the sense of approach. Strether fancied

them, liked them, and, passing through them with her more slowly now, met a sharp renewal of his original

impression. He stopped, he looked back; the whole thing made a vista, which he found high melancholy and

sweetfull, once more, of dim historic shades, of the faint faraway cannonroar of the great Empire. It was

doubtless half the projection of his mind, but his mind was a thing that, among old waxed parquets, pale

shades of pink and green, pseudoclassic candelabra, he had always needfully to reckon with. They could

easily make him irrelevant. The oddity, the originality, the poetryhe didn't know what to call itof Chad's

connexion reaffirmed for him its romantic side. "They ought to see this, you know. They MUST."

"The Pococks?"she looked about in deprecation; she seemed to see gaps he didn't.

"So that it strikes you," she broke in, "that my poor place may? Oh," she ruefully mused, "that WOULD be

"Do you know what I wish?" he went on. "I wish Mrs. Newsome herself could have a look."

Her tone was so earnest that as he continued to look about he laughed. "It might!"

"All about you? Yes, a wonderful story. But there's all the indescribablewhat one gets only on the spot."

But she seemed doomed always to come back to doubt. "No one feels so much as YOU. Nonot any one."

They were by this time in the antechamber, still alone together, as she hadn't rung for a servant. The

antechamber was high and square, grave and suggestive too, a little cold and slippery even in summer, and

with a few old prints that were precious, Strether divined, on the walls. He stood in the middle, slightly

lingering, vaguely directing his glasses, while, leaning against the doorpost of the room, she gently pressed

"For the reason you say. You're not stupid." And then abruptly, as if bringing it out were somehow founded

It affected him on the spot as a move in a game, and he was even then not without the sense that that wasn't

the way Jeanne should be married. But he quickly showed his interest, thoughas quickly afterwards struck

himwith an absurd confusion of mind. "'You'? You andanot Chad?" Of course it was the child's

father who made the 'we,' but to the child's father it would have cost him an effort to allude. Yet didn't it seem

the next minute that Monsieur de Vionnet was after all not in question?since she had gone on to say that it

was indeed to Chad she referred and that he had been in the whole matter kindness itself.

"If I must tell you all, it is he himself who has put us in the way. I mean in the way of an opportunity that, so

far as I can yet see, is all I could possibly have dreamed of. For all the trouble Monsieur de Vionnet will ever

take!" It was the first time she had spoken to him of her husband, and he couldn't have expressed how much

more intimate with her it suddenly made him feel. It wasn't much, in truththere were other things in what

she was saying that were far more; but it was as if, while they stood there together so easily in these cold

chambers of the past, the single touch had shown the reach of her confidence. "But our friend," she asked,

"Well, it has come with rather a rushall in a very few days; and hasn't moreover yet taken a form that

permits an announcement. It's only for youabsolutely you alonethat I speak; I so want you to know."

The sense he had so often had, since the first hour of his disembarkment, of being further and further "in,"

treated him again at this moment to another twinge; but in this wonderful way of her putting him in there

continued to be something exquisitely remorseless. "Monsieur de Vionnet will accept what he MUST accept.

He has proposed half a dozen thingseach one more impossible than the other; and he wouldn't have found

this if he lives to a hundred. Chad found it," she continued with her lighted, faintly flushed, her conscious

confidential face, "in the quietest way in the world. Or rather it found HIMfor everything finds him; I

mean finds him right. You'll think we do such things strangelybut at my age," she smiled, "one has to

accept one's conditions. Our young man's people had seen her; one of his sisters, a charming womanwe

know all about themhad observed her somewhere with me. She had spoken to her brotherturned him on;

and we were again observed, poor Jeanne and I, without our in the least knowing it. It was at the beginning of

the winter; it went on for some time; it outlasted our absence; it began again on our return; and it luckily

seems all right. The young man had met Chad, and he got a friend to approach himas having a decent

interest in us. Mr. Newsome looked well before he leaped; he kept beautifully quiet and satisfied himself

fully; then only he spoke. It's what has for some time past occupied us. It seems as if it were what would do;

really, really all one could wish. There are only two or three points to be settledthey depend on her father.

Strether, consciously gaping a little, had fairly hung upon her lips. "I hope so with all my heart." And then he

"Ah naturally; everything did. But she's pleased comme tout. She has been perfectly free; and heour young

"Ah well," said Strether decorously, "I heartily hope you may." There seemed little else for him to say,

though her communication had the oddest effect on him. Vaguely and confusedly he was troubled by it;

feeling as if he had even himself been concerned in something deep and dim. He had allowed for depths, but

these were greater: and it was as if, oppressivelyindeed absurdlyhe was responsible for what they had

now thrown up to the surface. It was through something ancient and cold in itwhat he would have called

the real thing. In short his hostess's news, though he couldn't have explained why, was a sensible shock, and

his oppression a weight he felt he must somehow or other immediately get rid of. There were too many

connexions missing to make it tolerable he should do anything else. He was prepared to suffer before his

own inner tribunalfor Chad; he was prepared to suffer even for Madame de Vionnet. But he wasn't

prepared to suffer for the little girl So now having said the proper thing, he wanted to get away. She held him

"Awful? Why so?" But he called it to himself, even as he spoke, his biggest insincerity yet.

"Then you must accept mine; all the more that they're excellent. They're founded on a vieille sagesse. There

will be much more, if all goes well, for you to hear and to know, and everything, believe me, for you to like.

Don't be afraid; you'll be satisfied." Thus she could talk to him of what, of her innermost lifefor that was

what it came tohe must "accept"; thus she could extraordinarily speak as if in such an affair his being

satisfied had an importance. It was all a wonder and made the whole case larger. He had struck himself at the

hotel, before Sarah and Waymarsh, as being in her boat; but where on earth was he now? This question was

in the air till her own lips quenched it with another. "And do you suppose HEwho loves her sowould do

"I mean yours. I mean Mr. Newsome." It flashed for Strether the next moment a finer light, and the light

deepened as she went on. "He takes, thank God, the truest tenderest interest in her."

"You were talking," she said, "about one's trusting him. You see then how I do."

"He wouldn't hurt her for the world, norassuming she marries at allrisk anything that might make

Her face, with what he had by this time grasped, told him more than her words; whether something had come

into it, or whether he only read clearer, her whole storywhat at least he then took for suchreached out to

him from it. With the initiative she now attributed to Chad it all made a sense, and this sensea light, a lead,

was what had abruptly risen before him. He wanted, once more, to get off with these things; which was at last

made easy, a servant having, for his assistance, on hearing voices in the hall, just come forward. All that

Strether had made out was, while the man opened the door and impersonally waited, summed up in his last

She had finally given him her hand, which he held a moment. "How MUCH I have to judge!"

"Everything," said Madame de Vionnet: a remark that was indeed with the refined disguised suppressed

So far as a direct approach was concerned Sarah had neglected him, for the week now about to end, with a

civil consistency of chill that, giving him a higher idea of her social resource, threw him back on the general

reflexion that a woman could always be amazing. It indeed helped a little to console him that he felt sure she

had for the same period also left Chad's curiosity hanging; though on the other hand, for his personal relief,

Chad could at least go through the various motionsand he made them extraordinarily numerousof seeing

she had a good time. There wasn't a motion on which, in her presence, poor Strether could so much as

venture, and all he could do when he was out of it was to walk over for a talk with Maria. He walked over of

course much less than usual, but he found a special compensation in a certain halfhour during which, toward

the close of a crowded empty expensive day, his several companions seemed to him so disposed of as to give

his forms and usages a rest. He had been with them in the morning and had nevertheless called on the

Pococks in the afternoon; but their whole group, he then found, had dispersed after a fashion of which it

would amuse Miss Gostrey to hear. He was sorry again, gratefully sorry she was so out of itshe who had

really put him in; but she had fortunately always her appetite for news. The pure flame of the disinterested

burned in her cave of treasures as a lamp in a Byzantine vault. It was just now, as happened, that for so fine a

sense as hers a near view would have begun to pay. Within three days, precisely, the situation on which he

was to report had shown signs of an equilibrium; the effect of his look in at the hotel was to confirm this

appearance. If the equilibrium might only prevail! Sarah was out with Waymarsh, Mamie was out with Chad,

and Jim was out alone. Later on indeed he himself was booked to Jim, was to take him that evening to the

"No, they can't come straight homeat least Sarah can't. It's their secret, but I think I've guessed it." Then as

It made her stare a moment longer, then laugh almost to extravagance. "There's no one like you!"

"Like all of you togetherlike all of us: Woollett, Milrose and their products. We're abysmalbut may we

"Preciselyto the Francais: to see what you took Waymarsh and me to, a familybill."

"Ah then may Mr. Chad enjoy it as I did!" But she saw so much in things. "Do they spend their evenings,

"Oh where they dine is their secret too. But I've my idea that it will be, very quietly, at Chad's own place."

They looked at each other a moment. "He has known her from a child. Besides," said Strether with emphasis,

"She doesn't want him enough?or doesn't believe in her power?" On which as he said nothing she

"NoI think she finds she does. But that's what I mean by so describing her. It's IF she does that she's

"You seem to show me sufficiently," Miss Gostrey laughed, "where she goes in! But is her childhood's

"Nonot that. Chad's also splendid. They're ALL splendid!" he declared with a sudden strange sound of

He had a laugh at his tribute to the ideal, but he explained after a moment his impression. "I mean they're

"And you help me to wait," she said. "However," she went on, "I've really something for you that will help

you to wait and which you shall have in a minute. Only there's something more I want from you first. I revel

"Well, you owe more to women than any man I ever saw. We do seem to keep you going. Yet Sarah, as I see

"She IS "Strether fully assented: "great! Whatever happens, she won't, with these unforgettable days, have

"Yesfor giving in. But I doubt if the ideaas an ideahas ever up to now answered so well for holding

out. That's HER tribute to the idealwe each have our own. It's her romanceand it seems to me better on

the whole than mine. To have it in Paris too," he explained"on this classic ground, in this charged

infectious air, with so sudden an intensity: well, it's more than she expected. She has had in short to recognise

the breaking out for her of a real affinityand with everything to enhance the drama."

"Jim. Jim hugely enhances. Jim was made to enhance. And then Mr. Waymarsh. It's the crowning touchit

"And she herself unfortunately isn'tthat supplies the colour too." Miss Gostrey was all there. But

Strether looked at her a long time; then looked all about the room; then came a little nearer. "Will you never

"Of HIS being. He likes it, but he knows she can hold out. He's helping her, he's floating her over, by

Maria rather funnily considered it. "Floating her over in champagne? The kindness of dining her, nose to

nose, at the hour when all Paris is crowding to profane delights, and in thewell, in the great temple, as one

"That's just IT, for both of them," Strether insisted"and all of a supreme innocence. The Parisian place, the

putting before her of a hundred francs' worth of food and drink, which they'll scarcely touchall that's the

dear man's own romance; the expensive kind, expensive in francs and centimes, in which he abounds. And

the circus afterwardswhich is cheaper, but which he'll find some means of making as dear as

possiblethat's also HIS tribute to the ideal. It does for him. He'll see her through. They won't talk of

"Well, we're bad enough perhaps, thank heaven," she laughed. "to upset them! Mr. Waymarsh at any rate is a

hideous old coquette." And the next moment she had dropped everything for a different pursuit. "What you

don't appear to know is that Jeanne de Vionnet has become engaged. She's to marryit has been definitely

"Don't I often know things that are NOT out? However," she said, "this will be out tomorrow. But I see I've

counted too much on your possible ignorance. You've been before me, and I don't make you jump as I

He gave a gasp at her insight. "You never fail! I've HAD my jump. I had it when I first heard."

"As a probabilitynot quite a certainty: a good cause in which Chad has been working. So I've waited."

"You need wait no longer," she returned. "It reached me yesterday roundabout and accidental, but by a

person who had had it from one of the young man's own peopleas a thing quite settled. I was only keeping

"He hasn't. And yet the thing appears to have been practically his doing. So there we are."

"That's why I jumped. I jumped," he continued to explain, "because it means, this disposition of the daughter,

"It simplifies"he fully concurred. "But that's precisely where we are. It marks a stage in his relation. The

At which Miss Gostrey's eyebrows went up. "You mean she has already dished herself?"

Strether took a turn about; he had thought it out again and again before this, to the end; but the vista seemed

each time longer. "He wants his good friend to know the best. I mean the measure of his attachment. She

Strether pulled up. "Yescall it that. Make it luridfor that makes my problem richer."

"Certainly, let us have it luridfor I quite agree with you that we want none of our problems poor. But let us

also have it clear. Can he, in the midst of such a preoccupation, or on the heels of it, have seriously cared for

Well, Strether had mastered it. "I think he can have thought it would be charming if he COULD care. It

"Yesthan the discomfort of an attachment to a person he can never hope, short of a catastrophe, to marry.

And he was quite right," said Strether. "It would certainly have been nicer. Even when a thing's already nice

there mostly is some other thing that would have been niceror as to which we wonder if it wouldn't. But

his question was all the same a dream. He COULDn't care in that way. He IS tied up to Marie. The relation is

too special and has gone too far. It's the very basis, and his recent lively contribution toward establishing

Jeanne in life has been his definite and final acknowledgement to Madame de Vionnet that he has ceased

squirming. I doubt meanwhile," he went on, "if Sarah has at all directly attacked him."

His companion brooded. "But won't he wish for his own satisfaction to make his ground good to her?"

"Nohe'll leave it to me, he'll leave everything to me. I 'sort of' feel"he worked it out"that the whole

thing will come upon me. Yes, I shall have every inch and every ounce of it. I shall be USED for it!" And

Strether lost himself in the prospect. Then he fancifully expressed the issue. "To the last drop of my blood."

Maria, however, roundly protested. "Ah you'll please keep a drop for ME. I shall have a use for it!"which

she didn't however follow up. She had come back the next moment to another matter. "Mrs. Pocock, with her

Well, Strether put it otherwise, "She's sounding the note of home which is the very best thing she can do."

But he had it all. "The note of the home for which Mrs. Newsome wants himthe home of the business. Jim

stands, with his little legs apart, at the door of THAT tent; and Jim is, frankly speaking, extremely awful."

"Oh he's all right for ME!" Strether laughed. "Any one's good enough for ME. But Sarah shouldn't, all the

His friend was amused with this statement of it. "Doesn't know, you mean, how bad he is?"

"Not at all. She rates him rather high." With which indeed, immediately, he took himself up. "Well, he IS

Miss Gostrey, however, wouldn't let it depend on anythingwouldn't have it, and wouldn't want him, at any

price. "It suits my book," she said, "that he should be impossible; and it suits it still better," she more

Strether, in consequence, had to take it from her, but he fell back on something else. "I'll tell you who does

"Never indeed. I'm not ALWAYS thinking of Mr. Waymarsh; in fact I find now I never am." Then he

There they were yet again, accordingly, for two days more; when Strether, on being, at Mrs. Pocock's hotel,

ushered into that lady's salon, found himself at first assuming a mistake on the part of the servant who had

introduced him and retired. The occupants hadn't come in, for the room looked empty as only a room can

look in Paris, of a fine afternoon when the faint murmur of the huge collective life, carried on out of doors,

strays among scattered objects even as a summer air idles in a lonely garden. Our friend looked about and

hesitated; observed, on the evidence of a table charged with purchases and other matters, that Sarah had

become possessedby no aid from HIMof the last number of the salmoncoloured Revue; noted further

that Mamie appeared to have received a present of Fromentin's "Maitres d'Autrefois" from Chad, who had

written her name on the cover; and pulled up at the sight of a heavy letter addressed in a hand he knew. This

letter, forwarded by a banker and arriving in Mrs. Pocock's absence, had been placed in evidence, and it drew

from the fact of its being unopened a sudden queer power to intensify the reach of its author. It brought home

to him the scale on which Mrs. Newsomefor she had been copious indeed this timewas writing to her

daughter while she kept HIM in durance; and it had altogether such an effect upon him as made him for a few

minutes stand still and breathe low. In his own room, at his own hotel, he had dozens of wellfilled envelopes

superscribed in that character; and there was actually something in the renewal of his interrupted vision of the

character that played straight into the so frequent question of whether he weren't already disinherited beyond

appeal. It was such an assurance as the sharp downstrokes of her pen hadn't yet had occasion to give him; but

they somehow at the present crisis stood for a probable absoluteness in any decree of the writer. He looked at

Sarah's name and address, in short, as if he had been looking hard into her mother's face, and then turned

from it as if the face had declined to relax. But since it was in a manner as if Mrs. Newsome were thereby all

the more, instead of the less, in the room, and were conscious, sharply and sorely conscious, of himself, so he

felt both held and hushed, summoned to stay at least and take his punishment. By staying, accordingly, he

took itcreeping softly and vaguely about and waiting for Sarah to come in. She WOULD come in if he

stayed long enough, and he had now more than ever the sense of her success in leaving him a prey to anxiety.

It wasn't to be denied that she had had a happy instinct, from the point of view of Woollett, in placing him

thus at the mercy of her own initiative. It was very well to try to say he didn't carethat she might break

ground when she would, might never break it at all if she wouldn't, and that he had no confession whatever to

wait upon her with: he breathed from day to day an air that damnably required clearing, and there were

moments when he quite ached to precipitate that process. He couldn't doubt that, should she only oblige him

by surprising him just as he then was, a clarifying scene of some sort would result from the concussion.

He humbly circulated in this spirit till he suddenly had a fresh arrest. Both the windows of the room stood

open to the balcony, but it was only now that, in the glass of the leaf of one of them, folded back, he caught a

reflexion quickly recognised as the colour of a lady's dress. Somebody had been then all the while on the

balcony, and the person, whoever it might be, was so placed between the windows as to be hidden from him;

while on the other hand the many sounds of the street had covered his own entrance and movements. If the

person were Sarah he might on the spot therefore be served to his taste. He might lead her by a move or two

up to the remedy for his vain tension; as to which, should he get nothing else from it, he would at least have

the relief of pulling down the roof on their heads. There was fortunately no one at hand to observein

respect to his valourthat even on this completed reasoning he still hung fire. He had been waiting for Mrs.

Pocock and the sound of the oracle; but he had to gird himself afresh which he did in the embrasure of the

window, neither advancing nor retreatingbefore provoking the revelation. It was apparently for Sarah to

come more into view; he was in that case there at her service. She did however, as meanwhile happened,

come more into view; only she luckily came at the last minute as a contradiction of Sarah. The occupant of

the balcony was after all quite another person, a person presented, on a second look, by a charming back and

a slight shift of her position, as beautiful brilliant unconscious MamieMamie alone at home, Mamie

passing her time in her own innocent way, Mamie in short rather shabbily used, but Mamie absorbed

interested and interesting. With her arms on the balustrade and her attention dropped to the street she allowed

But the oddity was that when he HAD so watched and considered he simply stepped back into the room

without following up his advantage. He revolved there again for several minutes, quite as with something

new to think of and as if the bearings of the possibility of Sarah had been superseded. For frankly, yes, it

HAD bearings thus to find the girl in solitary possession. There was something in it that touched him to a

point not to have been reckoned beforehand, something that softly but quite pressingly spoke to him, and that

spoke the more each time he paused again at the edge of the balcony and saw her still unaware. Her

companions were plainly scattered; Sarah would be off somewhere with Waymarsh and Chad off somewhere

with Jim. Strether didn't at all mentally impute to Chad that he was with his "good friend"; he gave him the

benefit of supposing him involved in appearances that, had he had to describe themfor instance to

Mariahe would have conveniently qualified as more subtle. It came to him indeed the next thing that there

was perhaps almost an excess of refinement in having left Mamie in such weather up there alone; however

she might in fact have extemporised, under the charm of the Rue de Rivoli, a little makeshift Paris of wonder

arid fancy. Our friend in any case now recognisedand it was as if at the recognition Mrs. Newsome's fixed

intensity had suddenly, with a deep audible gasp, grown thin and vaguethat day after day he had been

conscious in respect to his young lady of something odd and ambiguous, yet something into which he could

at last read a meaning. It had been at the most, this mystery, an obsessionoh an obsession agreeable; and it

had just now fallen into its place as at the touch of a spring. It had represented the possibility between them of

some communication baffled by accident and delaythe possibility even of some relation as yet

There was always their old relation, the fruit of the Woollett years; but thatand it was what was

strangesthad nothing whatever in common with what was now in the air. As a child, as a "bud," and then

again as a flower of expansion, Mamie had bloomed for him, freely, in the almost incessantly open doorways

of home; where he remembered her as first very forward, as then very backwardfor he had carried on at

one period, in Mrs. Newsome's parlours (oh Mrs. Newsome's phases and his own!) a course of English

Literature reenforced by exams and teasand once more, finally, as very much in advance. But he had kept

no great sense of points of contact; it not being in the nature of things at Woollett that the freshest of the buds

should find herself in the same basket with the most withered of the winter apples. The child had given

sharpness, above all, to his sense of the flight of time; it was but the day before yesterday that he had tripped

up on her hoop, yet his experience of remarkable womendestined, it would seem, remarkably to

growfelt itself ready this afternoon, quite braced itself, to include her. She had in fine more to say to him

than he had ever dreamed the pretty girl of the moment COULD have; and the proof of the circumstance was

that, visibly, unmistakeably, she had been able to say it to no one else. It was something she could mention

neither to her brother, to her sisterinlaw nor to Chad; though he could just imagine that had she still been at

home she might have brought it out, as a supreme tribute to age, authority and attitude, for Mrs. Newsome. It

was moreover something in which they all took an interest; the strength of their interest was in truth just the

reason of her prudence. All this then, for five minutes, was vivid to Strether, and it put before him that, poor

child, she had now but her prudence to amuse her. That, for a pretty girl in Paris, struck him, with a rush, as a

sorry state; so that under the impression he went out to her with a step as hypocritically alert, he was well

aware, as if he had just come into the room. She turned with a start at his voice; preoccupied with him though

she might be, she was just a scrap disappointed. "Oh I thought you were Mr. Bilham!"

The remark had been at first surprising and our friend's private thought, under the influence of it, temporarily

blighted; yet we are able to add that he presently recovered his inward tone and that many a fresh flower of

fancy was to bloom in the same air. Little Bilhamsince little Bilham was, somewhat incongruously,

expectedappeared behindhand; a circumstance by which Strether was to profit. They came back into the

room together after a little, the couple on the balcony, and amid its crimsonandgold elegance, with the

others still absent, Strether passed forty minutes that he appraised even at the time as far, in the whole queer

connexion, from his idlest. Yes indeed, since he had the other day so agreed with Maria about the inspiration

of the lurid, here was something for his problem that surely didn't make it shrink and that was floated in upon

him as part of a sudden flood. He was doubtless not to know till afterwards, on turning them over in thought,

of how many elements his impression was composed; but he none the less felt, as he sat with the charming

girl, the signal growth of a confidence. For she WAS charming, when all was saidand none the less so for

the visible habit and practice of freedom and fluency. She was charming, he was aware, in spite of the fact

that if he hadn't found her so he would have found her something he should have been in peril of expressing

as "funny." Yes, she was funny, wonderful Mamie, and without dreaming it; she was bland, she was

bridalwith never, that he could make out as yet, a bridegroom to support it; she was handsome and portly

and easy and chatty, soft and sweet and almost disconcertingly reassuring. She was dressed, if we might so

far discriminate, less as a young lady than as an old onehad an old one been supposable to Strether as so

committed to vanity; the complexities of her hair missed moreover also the looseness of youth; and she had a

mature manner of bending a little, as to encourage and reward, while she held neatly together in front of her a

pair of strikingly polished hands: the combination of all of which kept up about her the glamour of her

"receiving," placed her again perpetually between the windows and within sound of the icecream plates,

suggested the enumeration of all the names, all the Mr. Brookses and Mr. Snookses, gregarious specimens of

a single type. she was happy to "meet." But if all this was where she was funny, and if what was funnier than

the rest was the contrast between her beautiful benevolent patronagesuch a hint of the polysyllabic as

might make her something of a bore toward middle ageand her rather flat little voice, the voice, naturally,

unaffectedly yet, of a girl of fifteen; so Strether, none the less, at the end of ten minutes, felt in her a quiet

dignity that pulled things bravely together. If quiet dignity, almost more than matronly, with voluminous, too

voluminous clothes, was the effect she proposed to produce, that was an ideal one could like in her when

once one had got into relation. The great thing now for her visitor was that this was exactly what he had done;

it made so extraordinary a mixture of the brief and crowded hour. It was the mark of a relation that he had

begun so quickly to find himself sure she was, of all people, as might have been said, on the side and of the

party of Mrs. Newsome's original ambassador. She was in HIS interest and not in Sarah's, and some sign of

that was precisely what he had been feeling in her, these last days, as imminent. Finally placed, in Paris, in

immediate presence of the situation and of the hero of itby whom Strether was incapable of meaning any

one but Chadshe had accomplished, and really in a manner all unexpected to herself, a change of base;

deep still things had come to pass within her, and by the time she had grown sure of them Strether had

become aware of the little drama. When she knew where she was, in short, he had made it out; and he made it

out at present still better; though with never a direct word passing between them all the while on the subject

of his own predicament. There had been at first, as he sat there with her, a moment during which he wondered

if she meant to break ground in respect to his prime undertaking. That door stood so strangely ajar that he was

halfprepared to be conscious, at any juncture, of her having, of any one's having, quite bounced in. But,

friendly, familiar, light of touch and happy of tact, she exquisitely stayed out; so that it was for all the world

as if to show she could deal with him without being reduced towell, scarcely anything.

It fully came up for them then, by means of their talking of everything BUT Chad, that Mamie, unlike Sarah,

unlike Jim, knew perfectly what had become of him. It fully came up that she had taken to the last fraction of

an inch the measure of the change in him, and that she wanted Strether to know what a secret she proposed to

make of it. They talked most convenientlyas if they had had no chance yetabout Woollett; and that had

virtually the effect of their keeping the secret more close. The hour took on for Strether, little by little, a queer

sad sweetness of quality, he had such a revulsion in Mamie's favour and on behalf of her social value as

might have come from remorse at some early injustice. She made him, as under the breath of some vague

western whiff, homesick and freshly restless; he could really for the time have fancied himself stranded with

her on a far shore, during an ominous calm, in a quaint community of shipwreck. Their little interview was

like a picnic on a coral strand; they passed each other, with melancholy smiles and looks sufficiently allusive,

such cupfuls of water as they had saved. Especially sharp in Strether meanwhile was the conviction that his

companion really knew, as we have hinted, where she had come out. It was at a very particular placeonly

THAT she would never tell him; it would be above all what he should have to puzzle for himself. This was

what he hoped for, because his interest in the girl wouldn't be complete without it. No more would the

appreciation to which she was entitledso assured was he that the more he saw of her process the more he

should see of her pride. She saw, herself, everything; but she knew what she didn't want, and that it was that

had helped her. What didn't she want?there was a pleasure lost for her old friend in not yet knowing, as

there would doubtless be a thrill in getting a glimpse. Gently and sociably she kept that dark to him, and it

was as if she soothed and beguiled him in other ways to make up for it. She came out with her impression of

Madame de Vionnetof whom she had "heard so much"; she came out with her impression of Jeanne,

whom she had been "dying to see": she brought it out with a blandness by which her auditor was really stirred

that she had been with Sarah early that very afternoon, and after dreadful delays caused by all sorts of things,

mainly, eternally, by the purchase of clothesclothes that unfortunately wouldn't be themselves eternalto

At the sound of these names Strether almost blushed to feel that he couldn't have sounded them firstand

yet couldn't either have justified his squeamishness. Mamie made them easy as he couldn't have begun to do,

and yet it could only have cost her more than he should ever have had to spend. It was as friends of Chad's,

friends special, distinguished, desirable, enviable, that she spoke of them, and she beautifully carried it off

that much as she had heard of themthough she didn't say how or where, which was a touch of her

ownshe had found them beyond her supposition. She abounded in praise of them, and after the manner of

Woollettwhich made the manner of Woollett a loveable thing again to Strether. He had never so felt the

true inwardness of it as when his blooming companion pronounced the elder of the ladies of the Rue de

Bellechasse too fascinating for words and declared of the younger that she was perfectly ideal, a real little

monster of charm. "Nothing," she said of Jeanne, "ought ever to happen to hershe's so awfully right as she

"Ah but things, here in Paris," Strether observed, "do happen to little girls." And then for the joke's and the

"That things happen? Oh I'm not a little girl. I'm a big battered blowsy one. I don't care," Mamie laughed,

Strether had a pause while he wondered if it mightn't happen that he should give her the pleasure of learning

that he found her nicer than he had really dreameda pause that ended when he had said to himself that, so

far as it at all mattered for her, she had in fact perhaps already made this out. He risked accordingly a

different questionthough conscious, as soon as he had spoken, that he seemed to place it in relation to her

last speech. "But that Mademoiselle de Vionnet is to be marriedI suppose you've heard of THAT." For all,

he then found, he need fear! "Dear, yes; the gentleman was there: Monsieur de Montbron, whom Madame de

Mamie bloomed and bridled with her best reception manner. "Any man's nice when he's in love."

"Oh that's not necessaryit's so much better he should be so with HER: which, thank goodness, I lost no

time in discovering for myself. He's perfectly goneand I couldn't have borne it for her if he hadn't been.

On which with a smile that struck him as wonderful Mamie had a wonderful answer. "She doesn't know if

She was willing to take it that way. "Oh yes, I know everything." And as she sat there rubbing her polished

hands and making the best of itonly holding her elbows perhaps a little too much outthe momentary

effect for Strether was that every one else, in all their affair, seemed stupid.

It was as near as they came to saying that she was probably in love with Chad; but it was quite near enough

for what Strether wanted; which was to be confirmed in his certitude that, whether in love or not, she

appealed to something large and easy in the girl before him. Mamie would be fat, too fat, at thirty; but she

would always be the person who, at the present sharp hour, had been disinterestedly tender. "If I see a little

more of her, as I hope I shall, I think she'll like me enoughfor she seemed to like me todayto want me

"Perfectly. I shall tell her the matter with her is that she wants only too much to do right. To do right for her,

There was something really grand for him in the serenity of this reference. "And last only Monsieur de

She had one of her few hesitations, but it was a question only of a moment; and it was her nearest approach to

being explicit with him about what was between them. "I think I can speak for myself. I shall be."

It said indeed so much, told such a story of her being ready to help him, so committed to him that truth, in

short, for such use as he might make of it toward those ends of his own with which, patiently and trustfully,

she had nothing to doit so fully achieved all this that he appeared to himself simply to meet it in its own

spirit by the last frankness of admiration. Admiration was of itself almost accusatory, but nothing less would

serve to show her how nearly he understood. He put out his hand for goodbye with a "Splendid, splendid,

Strether occupied beside little Bilham, three evenings after his interview with Mamie Pocock, the same deep

divan they had enjoyed together on the first occasion of our friend's meeting Madame de Vionnet and her

daughter in the apartment of the Boulevard Malesherbes, where his position affirmed itself again as

ministering to an easy exchange of impressions. The present evening had a different stamp; if the company

was much more numerous, so, inevitably, were the ideas set in motion. It was on the other hand, however,

now strongly marked that the talkers moved, in respect to such matters, round an inner, a protected circle.

They knew at any rate what really concerned them tonight, and Strether had begun by keeping his

companion close to it. Only a few of Chad's guests had dinedthat is fifteen or twenty, a few compared with

the large concourse offered to sight by eleven o'clock; but number and mass, quantity and quality, light,

fragrance, sound, the overflow of hospitality meeting the high tide of response, had all from the first pressed

upon Strether's consciousness, and he felt himself somehow part and parcel of the most festive scene, as the

term was, in which he had ever in his life been engaged. He had perhaps seen, on Fourths of July and on dear

old domestic Commencements, more people assembled, but he had never seen so many in proportion to the

space, or had at all events never known so great a promiscuity to show so markedly as picked. Numerous as

was the company, it had still been made so by selection, and what was above all rare for Strether was that, by

no fault of his own, he was in the secret of the principle that had worked. He hadn't enquired, he had averted

his head, but Chad had put him a pair of questions that themselves smoothed the ground. He hadn't answered

the questions, he had replied that they were the young man's own affair; and he had then seen perfectly that

Chad had applied for counsel only by way of intimating that he knew what to do; and he had clearly never

known it better than in now presenting to his sister the whole circle of his society. This was all in the sense

and the spirit of the note struck by him on that lady's arrival; he had taken at the station itself a line that led

him without a break, and that enabled him to lead the Pococks though dazed a little, no doubt, breathless,

no doubt, and bewilderedto the uttermost end of the passage accepted by them perforce as pleasant. He had

made it for them violently pleasant and mercilessly full; the upshot of which was, to Strether's vision, that

they had come all the way without discovering it to be really no passage at all. It was a brave blind alley,

where to pass was impossible and where, unless they stuck fast, they would havewhich was always

awkwardpublicly to back out. They were touching bottom assuredly tonight; the whole scene represented

the terminus of the culdesac. So could things go when there was a hand to keep them consistenta hand

that pulled the wire with a skill at which the elder man more and more marvelled. The elder man felt

responsible, but he also felt successful, since what had taken place was simply the issue of his own

contention, six weeks before, that they properly should wait to see what their friends would have really to

say. He had determined Chad to wait, he had determined him to see; he was therefore not to quarrel with the

time given up to the business. As much as ever, accordingly, now that a fortnight had elapsed, the situation

created for Sarah, and against which she had raised no protest, was that of her having accommodated herself

to her adventure as to a pleasureparty surrendered perhaps even somewhat in excess to bustle and to "pace."

If her brother had been at any point the least bit open to criticism it might have been on the ground of his

spicing the draught too highly and pouring the cup too full. Frankly treating the whole occasion of the

presence of his relatives as an opportunity for amusement, he left it, no doubt, but scant margin as an

opportunity for anything else. He suggested, invented, aboundedyet all the while with the loosest easiest

rein. Strether, during his own weeks, had gained a sense of knowing Paris; but he saw it afresh, and with

A thousand unuttered thoughts hummed for him in the air of these observations; not the least frequent of

which was that Sarah might well of a truth not quite know whither she was drifting. She was in no position

not to appear to expect that Chad should treat her handsomely; yet she struck our friend as privately stiffening

a little each time she missed the chance of marking the great nuance. The great nuance was in brief that of

course her brother must treat her handsomelyshe should like to see him not; but that treating her

handsomely, none the less, wasn't all in alltreating her handsomely buttered no parsnips; and that in fine

there were moments when she felt the fixed eyes of their admirable absent mother fairly screw into the flat of

her back. Strether, watching, after his habit, and overscoring with thought, positively had moments of his

own in which he found himself sorry for her occasions on which she affected him as a person seated in a

runaway vehicle and turning over the question of a possible jump. WOULD she jump, could she, would

THAT be a safe placedthis question, at such instants, sat for him in her lapse into pallor, her tight lips, her

conscious eyes. It came back to the main point at issue: would she be, after all, to be squared? He believed on

the whole she would jump; yet his alternations on this subject were the more especial stuff of his suspense.

One thing remained well before hima conviction that was in fact to gain sharpness from the impressions of

this evening: that if she SHOULD gather in her skirts, close her eyes and quit the carriage while in motion, he

would promptly enough become aware. She would alight from her headlong course more or less directly

upon him; it would be appointed to him, unquestionably, to receive her entire weight. Signs and portents of

the experience thus in reserve for him had as it happened, multiplied even through the dazzle of Chad's party.

It was partly under the nervous consciousness of such a prospect that, leaving almost every one in the two

other rooms, leaving those of the guests already known to him as well as a mass of brilliant strangers of both

sexes and of several varieties of speech, he had desired five quiet minutes with little Bilham, whom he always

found soothing and even a little inspiring, and to whom he had actually moreover something distinct and

He had felt of oldfor it already seemed long agorather humiliated at discovering he could learn in talk

with a personage so much his junior the lesson of a certain moral ease; but he had now got used to

thatwhether or no the mixture of the fact with other humiliations had made it indistinct, whether or no

directly from little Bilham's example, the example of his being contentedly just the obscure and acute little

Bilham he was. It worked so for him, Strether seemed to see; and our friend had at private hours a wan smile

over the fact that he himself, after so many more years, was still in search of something that would work.

However, as we have said, it worked just now for them equally to have found a corner a little apart. What

particularly kept it apart was the circumstance that the music in the salon was admirable, with two or three

such singers as it was a privilege to hear in private. Their presence gave a distinction to Chad's entertainment,

and the interest of calculating their effect on Sarah was actually so sharp as to be almost painful.

Unmistakeably, in her single person, the motive of the composition and dressed in a splendour of crimson

which affected Strether as the sound of a fall through a skylight, she would now be in the forefront of the

listening circle and committed by it up to her eyes. Those eyes during the wonderful dinner itself he hadn't

once met; having confessedlyperhaps a little pusillanimouslyarranged with Chad that he should be on

the same side of the table. But there was no use in having arrived now with little Bilham at an unprecedented

point of intimacy unless he could pitch everything into the pot. "You who sat where you could see her, what

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

"On the contrary; she's pleased with it as with his capacity to do this kind of thingmore than she has been

pleased with anything for a long time. But she wants him to show it THERE. He has no right to waste it on

"The whole thingwith an important exception. Everything he has 'picked up'and the way he knows how.

She sees no difficulty in that. She'd run the show herself, and she'll make the handsome concession that

Woollett would be on the whole in some ways the better for it. Not that it wouldn't be also in some ways the

"Just as good as you and these others? Ah that may be. But such an occasion as this, whether or no," Strether

"Well then," his friend replied, "there you are; I give you my impression for what it's worth. Mrs. Pocock has

SEEN, and that's tonight how she sits there. If you were to have a glimpse of her face you'd understand me.

"You're not of the least!"and Strether laid an appreciative hand on him to say it. "No one's of the least."

With which, to mark how gaily he could take it, he patted his companion's knee. "I must meet my fate alone,

and I SHALLoh you'll see! And yet," he pursued the next moment, "you CAN help me too. You once said

to me"he followed this further"that you held Chad should marry. I didn't see then so well as I know now

that you meant he should marry Miss Pocock. Do you still consider that he should? Because if you do"he

kept it up"I want you immediately to change your mind. You can help me that way."

"Ah," Strether returned, "that I'm not obliged to say. But Madame de VionnetI suggestwhen he can.'

"Oh precisely! But he needn't marry at allI'm at any rate not obliged to provide for it. Whereas in your case

"Well," said Strether, thus challenged, "of course I must remember what you've also done to ME. We may

perhaps call it square. But all the same," he went on, "I wish awfully you'd marry Mamie Pocock yourself."

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

''Mademoiselle de Vionnet?" Well, Strether easily confessed it. "That, I admit, was a vain image. THIS is

practical politics. I want to do something good for both of youI wish you each so well; and you can see in

a moment the trouble it will save me to polish you off by the same stroke. She likes you, you know. You

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

"Why the fact that I found her three days ago stopping at home alone all the golden afternoon on the mere

chance that you'd come to her, and hanging over her balcony on that of seeing your cab drive up. I don't know

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

"Oh if what I've just mentioned isn't enough to make you do it, you're a stonyhearted little fiend.

Besides"Strether encouraged his fancy's flight"you showed your inclination in the way you kept her

His companion paid his ingenuity the deference of a pause. "I didn't keep her waiting. I came at the hour. I

wouldn't have kept her waiting for the world," the young man honourably declared.

"Better stillthen there you are!" And Strether, charmed, held him the faster. "Even if you didn't do her

justice, moreover," he continued, "I should insist on your immediately coming round to it. I want awfully to

have worked it. I want"and our friend spoke now with a yearning that was really earnest"at least to have

"Well, I shan't live long; and I give you my word, now and here, that I'll leave you every penny of my own. I

haven't many, unfortunately, but you shall have them all. And Miss Pocock, I think, has a few. I want,"

Strether went on, "to have been at least to that extent constructive even expiatory. I've been sacrificing so to

strange gods that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my fidelityfundamentally unchanged after

allto our own. I feel as if my hands were embrued with the blood of monstrous alien altarsof another

faith altogether. There it is it's done." And then he further explained. "It took hold of me because the idea

The young man, at this, bounced about, and it brought them face to face in admitted amusement. "You want

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

"'Simply'!"and little Bilham's concurrence was in itself a lively comment. "Thank you. But I thought," he

"Well then call it my plan for myselfwhich may be well, as you say, to have none. His situation, don't you

see? is reduced now to the bare facts one has to recognise. Mamie doesn't want him, and he doesn't want

Mamie: so much as that these days have made clear. It's a thread we can wind up and tuck in."

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

Poor Strether thought it over, but was obliged of course to admit that his demonstration did superficially fail.

"Seriously, there is no reason. It's my affairI must do it alone. I've only my fantastic need of making my

He had spoken in the tone of talk for talk's sake, and yet with an obscure truth lurking in the loose folds; a

circumstance presently not without its effect on his young friend. Little Bilham's eyes rested on him a

moment with some intensity; then suddenly, as if everything had cleared up, he gave a happy laugh. It

seemed to say that if pretending, or even trying, or still even hoping, to be able to care for Mamie would be of

"Well," Strether smiled, "anything in the world is all I want. I don't know anything that pleased me in her

more," he went on, "than the way that, on my finding her up there all alone, coming on her unawares and

feeling greatly for her being so out of it, she knocked down my tall house of cards with her instant and

cheerful allusion to the next young man. It was somehow so the note I neededher staying at home to

"It was Chad of course," said little Bilham, "who asked the next young manI like your name for me!to

"So I supposedall of which, thank God, is in our innocent and natural manners. But do you know," Strether

asked, "if Chad knows?" And then as this interlocutor seemed at a loss: "Why where she has come out."

Little Bilham, at this, met his face with a conscious lookit was as if, more than anything yet, the allusion

Strether lightly shook his head. "There I stop. Oh, odd as it may appear to you, there ARE things I don't

know. I only got the sense from her of something very sharp, and yet very deep down, that she was keeping

all to herself. That is I had begun with the belief that she HAD kept it to herself; but face to face with her

there I soon made out that there was a person with whom she would have shared it. I had thought she possibly

might with MEbut I saw then that I was only half in her confidence. When, turning to me to greet mefor

she was on the balcony and I had come in without her knowing itshe showed me she had been expecting

YOU and was proportionately disappointed, I got hold of the tail of my conviction. Half an hour later I was in

possession of all the rest of it. You know what has happened." He looked at his young friend hardthen he

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

"Of course she hasn't. For what do you suggest that I suppose her to take you? But you've been with her every

day, you've seen her freely, you've liked her greatlyI stick to thatand you've made your profit of it. You

know what she has been through as well as you know that she has dined here tonightwhich must have put

The young man faced this blast; after which he pulled round the rest of the way. "I haven't in the least said

"It's just her pride that has made her. Chad," little Bilham loyally went on, "has really been as kind to her as

Little Bilham sat staring before him; then he sprang up as if his friend's penetration, recurrent and insistent,

made him really after all too nervous. "Noshe isn't now. It isn't in the least," he went on, "Chad's fault. He's

really all right. I mean he would have been willing. But she came over with ideas. Those she had got at home.

They had been her motive and support in joining her brother and his wife. She was to SAVE our friend."

"Exactlyshe had a bad moment. It was very soon distinct to her, to pull her up, to let her down, that, alas,

Strether wondered "Of course one asks one's self what notion a little girl forms, where a young man's in

"Well, this little girl saw them, no doubt, as obscure, but she saw them practically as wrong. The wrong for

her WAS the obscure. Chad turns out at any rate right and good and disconcerting, while what she was all

prepared for, primed and girded and wound up for, was to deal with him as the general opposite."

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

Little Bilham fixed it all a moment, and then with a small headshake that diffused a tenderness: "She's too

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

"Oh she doesn't want to 'profit,' in that flat way. She doesn't want to profit by another woman's workshe

wants the miracle to have been her own miracle. THAT'S what she's too late for."

Strether quite felt how it all fitted, yet there seemed one loose piece. "I'm bound to say, you know, that she

Little Bilham tossed up his chin. "Of course she's difficileon any lines! What else in the world ARE our

"I see, I see," our friend repeated, charmed by the responsive wisdom he had ended by so richly extracting.

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

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

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

"With his actual influence?" Oh little Bilham had for this enquiry the sharpest of all his controls. "How can

Strether could only meet the question with his passive, his receptive pleasure. "Well, thank goodness,

YOU'RE not! You remain for her to save, and I come back, on so beautiful and full a demonstration, to my

contention of just nowthat of your showing distinct signs of her having already begun."

The most he could further say to himselfas his young friend turned awaywas that the charge

encountered for the moment no renewed denial. Little Bilham, taking his course back to the music, only

shook his goodnatured ears an instant, in the manner of a terrier who has got wet; while Strether relapsed

into the sensewhich had for him in these days most of comfortthat he was free to believe in anything

that from hour to hour kept him going. He had positively motions and flutters of this conscious hourtohour

kind, temporary surrenders to irony, to fancy, frequent instinctive snatches at the growing rose of observation,

constantly stronger for him, as he felt, in scent and colour, and in which he could bury his nose even to

wantonness. This last resource was offered him, for that matter, in the very form of his next clear

perceptionthe vision of a prompt meeting, in the doorway of the room, between little Bilham and brilliant

Miss Barrace, who was entering as Bilham withdrew. She had apparently put him a question, to which he had

replied by turning to indicate his late interlocutor; toward whom, after an interrogation further aided by a

resort to that optical machinery which seemed, like her other ornaments, curious and archaic, the genial lady,

suggesting more than ever for her fellow guest the old French print, the historic portrait, directed herself with

an intention that Strether instantly met. He knew in advance the first note she would sound, and took in as she

approached all her need of sounding it. Nothing yet had been so "wonderful" between them as the present

occasion; and it was her special sense of this quality in occasions that she was there, as she was in most

places, to feed. That sense had already been so well fed by the situation about them that she had quitted the

other room, forsaken the music, dropped out of the play, abandoned, in a word, the stage itself, that she might

stand a minute behind the scenes with Strether and so perhaps figure as one of the famous augurs replying,

behind the oracle, to the wink of the other. Seated near him presently where little Bilham had sat, she replied

in truth to many things; beginning as soon as he had said to herwhat he hoped he said without

She played her long handle, which shifted her observation; she saw in an instant all the absences that left

them free. "How can we be anything else? But isn't that exactly your plight? 'We ladies' oh we're nice, and

you must be having enough of us! As one of us, you know, I don't pretend I'm crazy about us. But Miss

Gostrey at least tonight has left you alone, hasn't she?" With which she again looked about as if Maria might

"Oh yes," said Strether; "she's only sitting up for me at home." And then as this elicited from his companion

her gay "Oh, oh, oh!" he explained that he meant sitting up in suspense and prayer. "We thought it on the

whole better she shouldn't be present; and either way of course it's a terrible worry for her." He abounded in

the sense of his appeal to the ladies, and they might take their choice of his doing so from humility or from

"Oh I incline to believe too you'll come out!"Miss Barrace, with her laugh, was not to be behind. "Only the

question's about WHERE, isn't it? However," she happily continued, "if it's anywhere at all it must be very

far on, mustn't it? To do us justice, I think, you know," she laughed, "we do, among us all, want you rather far

on. Yes, yes," she repeated in her quick droll way; "we want you very, VERY far on!" After which she

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

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

"Luckily for me too"Strether came back to that. "My own isn't so firm, MY appetite for responsibility isn't

so sharp, as that I haven't felt the very principle of this occasion to be 'the more the merrier.' If we ARE so

"It's wonderful!" she, to meet it, intensified; so that, face to face over it, they largely and recklessly laughed.

But she presently added: "Oh I see the principle. If one didn't one would be lost. But when once one has got

"A crowd"she took him straight up"was the only thing? Rather, rather: a rumpus of sound," she laughed,

"or nothing. Mrs. Pocock's built in, or built outwhichever you call it; she's packed so tight she can't move.

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

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

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

His companion had a pause that might have been for pity. "No, I can't pretend I think she's finishedor that

it's for more than tonight." She remained pensive as if with the same compunction. "It's only up to her chin."

"She can breathe!"he echoed it in the same spirit. "And do you know," he went on, "what's really all this

time happening to me? through the beauty of music, the gaiety of voices, the uproar in short of our revel

and the felicity of your wit? The sound of Mrs. Pocock's respiration drowns for me, I assure you, every other.

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

"Then what would have been worse? For speaking or silent," she lightly wailed, "I somehow 'compromise.'

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

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

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

"Don't I compromise HIM as well? I do compromise him as well," Miss Barrace smiled. "I compromise him

as hard as I can. But for Mr. Waymarsh it isn't fatal. It'sso far as his wonderful relation with Mrs. Pocock is

concernedfavourable." And then, as he still seemed slightly at sea: "The man who had succeeded with ME,

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

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

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

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

"Well, I mean that I somehow feel tonighton her behalftoo good to be true. She has had her cake; that

is she's in the act now of having it, of swallowing the largest and sweetest piece. There won't be another left

for her. Certainly I haven't one. It can only, at the best, be Chad." He continued to make it out as for their

common entertainment. "He may have one, as it were. up his sleeve; yet it's borne in upon me that if he

"He wouldn't"she quite understood"have taken all THIS trouble? I dare say not, and, if I may be quite

free and dreadful, I very much hope he won't take any more. Of course I won't pretend now," she added, "not

"Oh every one must know now," poor Strether thoughtfully admitted; "and it's strange enough and funny

enough that one should feel everybody here at this very moment to be knowing and watching and waiting."

"Yesisn't it indeed funny?" Miss Barrace quite rose to it. "That's the way we ARE in Paris." She was

always pleased with a new contribution to that queerness. "It's wonderful! But, you know," she declared, "it

all depends on you. I don't want to turn the knife in your vitals, but that's naturally what you just now meant

by our all being on top of you. We know you as the hero of the drama, and we're gathered to see what you'll

Strether looked at her a moment with a light perhaps slightly obscured. "I think that must be why the hero has

taken refuge in this corner. He's scared at his heroismhe shrinks from his part."

"Ah but we nevertheless believe he'll play it. That's why," Miss Barrace kindly went on, "we take such an

interest in you. We feel you'll come up to the scratch." And then as he seemed perhaps not quite to take fire:

"Yes, keep hold of him. With all this"and she indicated the general tribute"he has done enough. We

He winced at it as at the very voice of prophecy, and it kept him a moment quiet. He detained her, however,

on her appearing about to leave him alone in the rather cold clearance their talk had made. "There positively

isn't a sign of a hero tonight; the hero's dodging and shirking, the hero's ashamed. Therefore, you know, I

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

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

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

Strether's face lighted again at the prospect. "It WILL be amusing to do so." Yet he continued to wonder.

"Of course she hasshe has twenty ideas. She has in the first place," said Miss Barrace, swinging a little her

It came out as nothing had come yet; links were missing and connexions unnamed, but it was suddenly as if

they were at the heart of their subject. "Yes; how much more she does it," Strether gravely reflected, "than I

help HER!" It all came over him as with the near presence of the beauty, the grace, the intense, dissimulated

spirit with which he had, as he said, been putting off contact. "SHE has courage."

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

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

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

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

"It's why everything!" she concurred. "It's why she might be tonightfor all she looks and shows, and for

all your friend 'Jim' doesabout twenty years old. That's another of her ideas; to be for him, and to be quite

"For Chad, in a manner, naturally, always. But in particular tonight for Mr. Pocock." And then as her friend

still stared: "Yes, it IS of a bravery But that's what she has: her high sense of duty." It was more than

sufficiently before them. "When Mr. Newsome has his hands so embarrassed with his sister"

"It's quite the least"Strether filled it out"that she should take his sister's husband? Certainlyquite the

But it brought them back. "How indeed then she must cared In answer to which Strether's entertainer dropped

a comprehensive "Ah!" expressive perhaps of some impatience for the time he took to get used to it. She

When one morning within the week he perceived the whole thing to be really at last upon him Strether's

immediate feeling was all relief. He had known this morning that something was about to happenknown it,

in a moment, by Waymarsh's manner when Waymarsh appeared before him during his brief consumption of

coffee and a roll in the small slippery salleamanger so associated with rich rumination. Strether had taken

there of late various lonely and absentminded meals; he communed there, even at the end of June, with a

suspected chill, the air of old shivers mixed with old savours, the air in which so many of his impressions had

perversely matured; the place meanwhile renewing its message to him by the very circumstance of his single

state. He now sat there, for the most part, to sigh softly, while he vaguely tilted his carafe, over the vision of

how much better Waymarsh was occupied. That was really his success by the common measureto have led

this companion so on and on. He remembered how at first there had been scarce a squattingplace he could

beguile him into passing; the actual outcome of which at last was that there was scarce one that could arrest

him in his rush. His rushas Strether vividly and amusedly figured itcontinued to be all with Sarah, and

contained perhaps moreover the word of the whole enigma, whipping up in its fine fullflavoured froth the

very principle, for good or for ill, of his own, of Strether's destiny. It might after all, to the end, only be that

they had united to save him, and indeed, so far as Waymarsh was concerned, that HAD to be the spring of

action. Strether was glad at all events, in connexion with the case, that the saving he required was not more

scant; so constituted a luxury was it in certain lights just to lurk there out of the full glare. He had moments of

quite seriously wondering whether Waymarsh wouldn't in fact, thanks to old friendship and a conceivable

indulgence, make about as good terms for him as he might make for himself. They wouldn't be the same

terms of course; but they might have the advantage that he himself probably should be able to make none at

He was never in the morning very late, but Waymarsh had already been out, and, after a peep into the dim

refectory, he presented himself with much less than usual of his large looseness. He had made sure, through

the expanse of glass exposed to the court, that they would be alone; and there was now in fact that about him

that pretty well took up the room. He was dressed in the garments of summer; and save that his white

waistcoat was redundant and bulging these things favoured, they determined, his expression. He wore a straw

hat such as his friend hadn't yet seen in Paris, and he showed a buttonhole freshly adorned with a magnificent

rose. Strether read on the instant his storyhow, astir for the previous hour, the sprinkled newness of the

day, so pleasant at that season in Paris, he was fairly panting with the pulse of adventure and had been with

Mrs. Pocock, unmistakeably, to the Marche aux Fleurs. Strether really knew in this vision of him a joy that

was akin to envy; so reversed as he stood there did their old positions seem; so comparatively doleful now

showed, by the sharp turn of the wheel, the posture of the pilgrim from Woollett. He wondered, this pilgrim,

if he had originally looked to Waymarsh so brave and well, so remarkably launched, as it was at present the

latter's privilege to appear. He recalled that his friend had remarked to him even at Chester that his aspect

belied his plea of prostration; but there certainly couldn't have been, for an issue, an aspect less concerned

than Waymarsh's with the menace of decay. Strether had at any rate never resembled a Southern planter of

the great days which was the image picturesquely suggested by the happy relation between the fuliginous

face and the wide panama of his visitor. This type, it further amused him to guess, had been, on Waymarsh's

part, the object of Sarah's care; he was convinced that her taste had not been a stranger to the conception and

purchase of the hat, any more than her fine fingers had been guiltless of the bestowal of the rose. It came to

him in the current of thought, as things so oddly did come, that HE had never risen with the lark to attend a

brilliant woman to the Marche aux Fleurs; this could be fastened on him in connexion neither with Miss

Gostrey nor with Madame de Vionnet; the practice of getting up early for adventures could indeed in no

manner be fastened on him. It came to him in fact that just here was his usual case: he was for ever missing

things through his general genius for missing them, while others were for ever picking them up through a

contrary bent. And it was others who looked abstemious and he who looked greedy; it was he somehow who

finally paid, and it was others who mainly partook. Yes, he should go to the scaffold yet for he wouldn't

know quite whom. He almost, for that matter, felt on the scaffold now and really quite enjoying it. It worked

out as BECAUSE he was anxious thereit worked out as for this reason that Waymarsh was so blooming. It

was HIS trip for health, for a change, that proved the success which was just what Strether, planning and

exerting himself, had desired it should be. That truth already sat fullblown on his companion's lips;

benevolence breathed from them as with the warmth of active exercise, and also a little as with the bustle of

"Mrs. Pocock, whom I left a quarter of an hour ago at her hotel, has asked me to mention to you that she

would like to find you at home here in about another hour. She wants to see you; she has something to

sayor considers, I believe, that you may have: so that I asked her myself why she shouldn't come right

round. She hasn't BEEN round yetto see our place; and I took upon myself to say that I was sure you'd be

glad to have her. The thing's therefore, you see, to keep right here till she comes."

The announcement was sociably, even though, after Waymarsh's wont, somewhat solemnly made; but

Strether quickly felt other things in it than these light features. It was the first approach, from that quarter, to

admitted consciousness; it quickened his pulse; it simply meant at last that he should have but himself to

thank if he didn't know where he was. He had finished his breakfast; he pushed it away and was on his feet.

There were plenty of elements of surprise, but only one of doubt. "The thing's for YOU to keep here too?"

He wasn't ambiguous, however, after this enquiry; and Strether's understanding had probably never before

opened so wide and effective a mouth as it was to open during the next five minutes. It was no part of his

friend's wish, as appeared, to help to receive Mrs. Pocock; he quite understood the spirit in which she was to

present herself, but his connexion with her visit was limited to his havingwell, as he might sayperhaps a

little promoted it. He had thought, and had let her know it, that Strether possibly would think she might have

been round before. At any rate, as turned out, she had been wanting herself, quite a while, to come. "I told

her," said Waymarsh, "that it would have been a bright idea if she had only carried it out before."

Strether pronounced it so bright as to be almost dazzling. "But why HASn't she carried it out before? She has

seen me every day she had only to name her hour. I've been waiting and waiting."

"Well, I told her you had. And she has been waiting too." It was, in the oddest way in the world, on the

showing of this tone, a genial new pressing coaxing Waymarsh; a Waymarsh conscious with a different

consciousness from any he had yet betrayed, and actually rendered by it almost insinuating. He lacked only

time for full persuasion, and Strether was to see in a moment why. Meantime, however, our friend perceived,

he was announcing a step of some magnanimity on Mrs. Pocock's part, so that he could deprecate a sharp

question. It was his own high purpose in fact to have smoothed sharp questions to rest. He looked his old

comrade very straight in the eyes, and he had never conveyed to him in so mute a manner so much kind

confidence and so much good advice. Everything that was between them was again in his face, but matured

and shelved and finally disposed of. "At any rate," he added, "she's coming now."

Considering how many pieces had to fit themselves, it all fell, in Strether's brain, into a close rapid order. He

saw on the spot what had happened, and what probably would yet; and it was all funny enough. It was

perhaps just this freedom of appreciation that wound him up to his flare of high spirits. "What is she coming

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

This was spoken by Waymarsh with much gravity of admonition, and as Strether stood there he knew he had

but to make a movement to take the attitude of a man gracefully receiving a present. The present was that of

the opportunity dear old Waymarsh had flattered himself he had divined in him the slight soreness of not

having yet thoroughly enjoyed; so he had brought it to him thus, as on a little silver breakfasttray, familiarly

though delicatelywithout oppressive pomp; and he was to bend and smile and acknowledge, was to take

and use and be grateful. He was notthat was the beauty of itto be asked to deflect too much from his

dignity. No wonder the old boy bloomed in this bland air of his own distillation. Strether felt for a moment as

if Sarah were actually walking up and down outside. Wasn't she hanging about the portecochere while her

friend thus summarily opened a way? Strether would meet her but to take it, and everything would be for the

best in the best of possible worlds. He had never so much known what any one meant as, in the light of this

demonstration, he knew what Mrs. Newsome did. It had reached Waymarsh from Sarah, but it had reached

Sarah from her mother, and there was no break in the chain by which it reached HIM. "Has anything

particular happened," he asked after a minute "so suddenly to determine her? Has she heard anything

Waymarsh, on this, it seemed to him, looked at him harder than ever. "'Unexpected'?" He had a brief

Waymarsh showed a different opinion. "Less so than it may seem. The purpose of Mrs. Pocock's visit is to

Strether didn't at all know if he had really an advantage anything that would practically count as one; but

he enjoyed for the momentas for the first time in his lifethe sense of so carrying it off. He wonderedit

was amusingif he felt as the impudent feel. "I shall take great pleasure, I assure you, in any explanation. I

The sombre glow just darkened in his comrade's eyes; but he was struck with the way it died out again. It was

too mixed with another consciousnessit was too smothered, as might be said, in flowers. He really for the

time regretted itpoor dear old sombre glow! Something straight and simple, something heavy and empty,

had been eclipsed in its company; something by which he had best known his friend. Waymarsh wouldn't BE

his friend, somehow, without the occasional ornament of the sacred rage, and the right to the sacred

rageinestimably precious for Strether's charityhe also seemed in a manner, and at Mrs. Pocock's elbow,

to have forfeited. Strether remembered the occasion early in their stay when on that very spot he had come

out with his earnest, his ominous "Quit it!" and, so remembering, felt it hang by a hair that he didn't

himself now utter the same note. Waymarsh was having a good time this was the truth that was

embarrassing for him, and he was having it then and there, he was having it in Europe, he was having it under

the very protection of circumstances of which he didn't in the least approve; all of which placed him in a false

position, with no issue possiblenone at least by the grand manner. It was practically in the manner of any

oneit was all but in poor Strether's ownthat instead of taking anything up he merely made the most of

having to be himself explanatory. "I'm not leaving for the United States direct. Mr. and Mrs. Pocock and Miss

Mamie are thinking of a little trip before their own return, and we've been talking for some days past of our

joining forces. We've settled it that we do join and that we sail together the end of next month. But we start

tomorrow for Switzerland. Mrs. Pocock wants some scenery. She hasn't had much yet."

He was brave in his way too, keeping nothing back, confessing all there was, and only leaving Strether to

make certain connexions. "Is what Mrs. Newsome had cabled her daughter an injunction to break off short?"

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

Their eyes met on it with some intensityduring the few seconds of which something happened quite out of

proportion to the time. It happened that Strether, looking thus at his friend, didn't take his answer for

truthand that something more again occurred in consequence of THAT. YesWaymarsh just DID know

about Mrs. Newsome's cables: to what other end than that had they dined together at Bignon's? Strether

almost felt for the instant that it was to Mrs. Newsome herself the dinner had been given; and, for that matter,

quite felt how she must have known about it and, as he might think, protected and consecrated it. He had a

quick blurred view of daily cables, questions, answers, signals: clear enough was his vision of the expense

that, when so wound up, the lady at home was prepared to incur. Vivid not less was his memory of what,

during his long observation of her, some of her attainments of that high pitch had cost her. Distinctly she was

at the highest now, and Waymarsh, who imagined himself an independent performer, was really, forcing his

fine old natural voice, an overstrained accompanist. The whole reference of his errand seemed to mark her for

Strether as by this time consentingly familiar to him, and nothing yet had so despoiled her of a special shade

of consideration. "You don't know," he asked, "whether Sarah has been directed from home to try me on the

"I know," said Waymarsh as manfully as possible, "nothing whatever about her private affairs; though I

believe her to be acting in conformity with things that have my highest respect." It was as manful as possible,

but it was still the false noteas it had to be to convey so sorry a statement. He knew everything, Strether

more and more felt, that he thus disclaimed, and his little punishment was just in this doom to a second fib.

What falser positiongiven the mancould the most vindictive mind impose? He ended by squeezing

through a passage in which three months before he would certainly have stuck fast. "Mrs Pocock will

probably be ready herself to answer any enquiry you may put to her. But," he continued, "BUT!" He

Waymarsh looked large, but the harm was done; he couldn't, do what he would, help looking rosy. "Don't do

It was an attenuation, Strether guessed, of something else that had been on his lips; it was a sudden drop to

directness, and was thereby the voice of sincerity. He had fallen to the supplicating note, and that

immediately, for our friend, made a difference and reinstated him. They were in communication as they had

been, that first morning, in Sarah's salon and in her presence and Madame de Vionnet's; and the same

recognition of a great good will was again, after all, possible. Only the amount of response Waymarsh had

then taken for granted was doubled, decupled now. This came out when he presently said: "Of course I

needn't assure you I hope you'll come with us." Then it was that his implications and expectations loomed up

The latter patted his shoulder while he thanked him, giving the goby to the question of joining the Pococks;

he expressed the joy he felt at seeing him go forth again so brave and free, and he in fact almost took leave of

him on the spot. "I shall see you again of course before you go; but I'm meanwhile much obliged to you for

arranging so conveniently for what you've told me. I shall walk up and down in the court theredear little

old court which we've each bepaced so, this last couple of months, to the tune of our flights and our drops,

our hesitations and our plunges: I shall hang about there, all impatience and excitement, please let Sarah

know, till she graciously presents herself. Leave me with her without fear," he laughed; "I assure you I shan't

hurt her. I don't think either she'll hurt ME: I'm in a situation in which damage was some time ago discounted.

Besides, THAT isn't what worries youbut don't, don't explain! We're all right as we are: which was the

degree of success our adventure was pledged to for each of us. We weren't, it seemed, all right as we were

before; and we've got over the ground, all things considered, quickly. I hope you'll have a lovely time in the

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

It was the conscience of Milrose in the very voice of Milrose, but, oh it was feeble and flat! Strether suddenly

felt quite ashamed for him; he breathed a greater boldness. "LET yourself, on the contrary, goin all

agreeable directions. These are precious hoursat our age they mayn't recur. Don't have it to say to yourself

at Milrose, next winter, that you hadn't courage for them." And then as his comrade queerly stared: "Live up

Waymarsh looked at it as at one of the uncomfortable things that were certainly true and that it was yet

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

Waymarsh had kept on his great panama, and, as he now stood nearer the door, his last look beneath the

shade of it had turned again to darkness and warning. "So do I! See here, Strether."

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

Almost the first thing, strangely enough, that, about an hour later, Strether found himself doing in Sarah's

presence was to remark articulately on this failure, in their friend, of what had been superficially his great

distinction. It was as ifhe alluded of course to the grand mannerthe dear man had sacrificed it to some

other advantage; which would be of course only for himself to measure. It might be simply that he was

physically so much more sound than on his first coming out; this was all prosaic, comparatively cheerful and

vulgar. And fortunately, if one came to that, his improvement in health was really itself grander than any

manner it could be conceived as having cost him. "You yourself alone, dear Sarah"Strether took the

plunge"have done him, it strikes me, in these three weeks, as much good as all the rest of his time

It was a plunge because somehow the range of reference was, in the conditions, "funny," and made funnier

still by Sarah's attitude, by the turn the occasion had, with her appearance, so sensibly taken. Her appearance

was really indeed funnier than anything elsethe spirit in which he felt her to be there as soon as she was

there, the shade of obscurity that cleared up for him as soon as he was seated with her in the small salon de

lecture that had, for the most part, in all the weeks, witnessed the wane of his early vivacity of discussion

with Waymarsh. It was an immense thing, quite a tremendous thing, for her to have come: this truth opened

out to him in spite of his having already arrived for himself at a fairly vivid view of it. He had done exactly

what he had given Waymarsh his word forhad walked and rewalked the court while he awaited her

advent; acquiring in this exercise an amount of light that affected him at the time as flooding the scene. She

had decided upon the step in order to give him the benefit of a doubt, in order to be able to say to her mother

that she had, even to abjectness, smoothed the way for him. The doubt had been as to whether he mightn't

take her as not having smoothed itand the admonition had possibly come from Waymarsh's more detached

spirit. Waymarsh had at any rate, certainly, thrown his weight into the scalehe had pointed to the

importance of depriving their friend of a grievance. She had done justice to the plea, and it was to set herself

right with a high ideal that she actually sat there in her state. Her calculation was sharp in the immobility with

which she held her tall parasolstick upright and at arm's length, quite as if she had struck the place to plant

her flag; in the separate precautions she took not to show as nervous; in the aggressive repose in which she

did quite nothing but wait for him. Doubt ceased to be possible from the moment he had taken in that she had

arrived with no proposal whatever; that her concern was simply to show what she had come to receive. She

had come to receive his submission, and Waymarsh was to have made it plain to him that she would expect

nothing less. He saw fifty things, her host, at this convenient stage; but one of those he most saw was that

their anxious friend hadn't quite had the hand required of him. Waymarsh HAD, however, uttered the request

that she might find him mild, and while hanging about the court before her arrival he had turned over with

zeal the different ways in which he could be so. The difficulty was that if he was mild he wasn't, for her

purpose, conscious. If she wished him consciousas everything about her cried aloud that she didshe

must accordingly be at costs to make him so. Conscious he was, for himselfbut only of too many things; so

Practically, however, it at last got itself named, and when once that had happened they were quite at the

centre of their situation. One thing had really done as well as another; when Strether had spoken of

Waymarsh's leaving him, and that had necessarily brought on a reference to Mrs. Pocock's similar intention,

the jump was but short to supreme lucidity. Light became indeed after that so intense that Strether would

doubtless have but half made out, in the prodigious glare, by which of the two the issue had been in fact

precipitated. It was, in their contracted quarters, as much there between them as if it had been something

suddenly spilled with a crash and a splash on the floor. The form of his submission was to be an engagement

to acquit himself within the twentyfour hours. "He'll go in a moment if you give him the wordhe assures

me on his honour he'll do that": this came in its order, out of its order, in respect to Chad, after the crash had

occurred. It came repeatedly during the time taken by Strether to feel that he was even more fixed in his

rigour than he had supposedthe time he was not above adding to a little by telling her that such a way of

putting it on her brother's part left him sufficiently surprised. She wasn't at all funny at lastshe was really

fine; and he felt easily where she was strongstrong for herself. It hadn't yet so come home to him that she

was nobly and appointedly officious. She was acting in interests grander and clearer than that of her poor

little personal, poor little Parisian equilibrium, and all his consciousness of her mother's moral pressure

profited by this proof of its sustaining force. She would be held up; she would be strengthened; he needn't in

the least be anxious for her. What would once more have been distinct to him had he tried to make it so was

that, as Mrs. Newsome was essentially all moral pressure, the presence of this element was almost identical

with her own presence. It wasn't perhaps that he felt he was dealing with her straight, but it was certainly as if

she had been dealing straight with HIM. She was reaching him somehow by the lengthened arm of the spirit,

and he was having to that extent to take her into account; but he wasn't reaching her in turn, not making her

take HIM; he was only reaching Sarah, who appeared to take so little of him. "Something has clearly passed

between you and Chad," he presently said, "that I think I ought to know something more about. Does he put it

But he replied to this no further than, after an instant, by saying: "Oh it's all right. Chad I mean's all right in

having said to youwell anything he may have said. I'll TAKE it all what he does put on me. Only I must

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

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

He fixed her a longer time. "Are your instructions from Mrs. Newsome that you shall, even at the worst,

"My instructions from Mrs. Newsome are, if you please, my affair. You know perfectly what your own were,

and you can judge for yourself of what it can do for you to have made what you have of them. You can

perfectly see, at any rate, I'll go so far as to say, that if I wish not to expose myself I must wish still less to

expose HER." She had already said more than she had quite expected; but, though she had also pulled up, the

colour in her face showed him he should from one moment to the other have it all. He now indeed felt the

high importance of his having it. "What is your conduct," she broke out as if to explain"what is your

conduct but an outrage to women like US? I mean your acting as if there can be a doubtas between us and

He thought a moment. It was rather much to deal with at once; not only the question itself, but the sore

"Do you mean to Madame de Vionnet?" He uttered the name not to affront her, but yet again to gain

timetime that he needed for taking in something still other and larger than her demand of a moment before.

It wasn't at once that he could see all that was in her actual challenge; but when he did he found himself just

checking a low vague sound, a sound which was perhaps the nearest approach his vocal chords had ever

known to a growl. Everything Mrs. Pocock had failed to give a sign of recognising in Chad as a particular

part of a transformationeverything that had lent intention to this particular failureaffected him as

gathered into a large loose bundle and thrown, in her words, into his face. The missile made him to that extent

catch his breath; which however he presently recovered. "Why when a woman's at once so charming and so

"You can sacrifice mothers and sisters to her without a blush and can make them cross the ocean on purpose

Yes, she had taken him up as short and as sharply as that, but he tried not to flounder in her grasp. "I don't

think there's anything I've done in any such calculated way as you describe. Everything has come as a sort of

indistinguishable part of everything else. Your coming out belonged closely to my having come before you,

and my having come was a result of our general state of mind. Our general state of mind had proceeded, on

its side, from our queer ignorance, our queer misconceptions and confusionsfrom which, since then, an

inexorable tide of light seems to have floated us into our perhaps still queerer knowledge. Don't you LIKE

your brother as he is," he went on, "and haven't you given your mother an intelligible account of all that that

It put to her also, doubtless, his own tone, too many things, this at least would have been the case hadn't his

final challenge directly helped her. Everything, at the stage they had reached, directly helped her, because

everything betrayed in him such a basis of intention. He sawthe odd way things came out!that he would

have been held less monstrous had he only been a little wilder. What exposed him was just his poor old trick

of quiet inwardness, what exposed him was his THINKING such offence. He hadn't in the least however the

desire to irritate that Sarah imputed to him, and he could only at last temporise, for the moment, with her

indignant view. She was altogether more inflamed than he had expected, and he would probably understand

this better when he should learn what had occurred for her with Chad. Till then her view of his particular

blackness, her clear surprise at his not clutching the pole she held out, must pass as extravagant. "I leave you

to flatter yourself," she returned, "that what you speak of is what YOU'VE beautifully done. When a thing has

been already described in such a lovely way!" But she caught herself up, and her comment on his

description rang out sufficiently loud. "Do you consider her even an apology for a decent woman?"

Ah there it was at last! She put the matter more crudely than, for his own mixed purposes, he had yet had to

do; but essentially it was all one matter. It was so muchso much; and she treated it, poor lady, as so little.

He grew conscious, as he was now apt to do, of a strange smile, and the next moment he found himself

talking like Miss Barrace. "She has struck me from the first as wonderful. I've been thinking too moreover

that, after all, she would probably have represented even for yourself something rather new and rather good."

He was to have given Mrs. Pocock with this, however, but her best opportunity for a sound of derision.

"I mean," he explained, "that she might have affected you by her exquisite amiabilitya real revelation, it

He had been, with these words, consciously a little "precious"; but he had had to behe couldn't give her the

truth of the case without them; and it seemed to him moreover now that he didn't care. He had at all events

not served his cause, for she sprang at its exposed side. "A 'revelation'to ME: I've come to such a woman

for a revelation? You talk to me about 'distinction' YOU, you who've had your privilege?when the most

distinguished woman we shall either of us have seen in this world sits there insulted, in her loneliness, by

Strether forbore, with an effort, from straying; but he looked all about him. "Does your mother herself make

Sarah's answer came so straight, so "pat," as might have been said, that he felt on the instant its origin. "She

has confided to my judgement and my tenderness the expression of her personal sense of everything, and the

They were the very words of the lady of Woolletthe would have known them in a thousand; her parting

charge to her child. Mrs. Pocock accordingly spoke to this extent by book, and the fact immensely moved

him. "If she does really feel as you say it's of course very very dreadful. I've given sufficient proof, one would

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

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

In his desire to avoid all vulgar retorts, to show how, even perversely, he clung to his rag of reason, he had

softly almost wailed this plea. Yet he knew it to be perhaps the most positive declaration he had ever made in

his life, and his visitor's reception of it virtually gave it that importance. "That's exactly what I'm delighted to

do. God knows WE don't want her! You take good care not to meet," she observed in a still higher key, "my

question about their life. If you do consider it a thing one can even SPEAK of, I congratulate you on your

The life she alluded to was of course Chad's and Madame de Vionnet's, which she thus bracketed together in

a way that made him wince a little; there being nothing for him but to take home her full intention. It was

none the less his inconsequence that while he had himself been enjoying for weeks the view of the brilliant

woman's specific action, he just suffered from any characterisation of it by other lips. "I think tremendously

well of her, at the same time that I seem to feel her 'life' to be really none of my business. It's my business,

that is, only so far as Chad's own life is affected by it; and what has happened, don't you see? is that Chad's

has been affected so beautifully. The proof of the pudding's in the eating"he tried, with no great success, to

help it out with a touch of pleasantry, while she let him go on as if to sink and sink. He went on however well

enough, as well as he could do without fresh counsel; he indeed shouldn't stand quite firm, he felt, till he

should have reestablished his communications with Chad. Still, he could always speak for the woman he

had so definitely promised to "save." This wasn't quite for her the air of salvation; but as that chill fairly

deepened what did it become but a reminder that one might at the worst perish WITH her? And it was simple

enoughit was rudimentary: not, not to give her away. "I find in her more merits than you would probably

have patience with my counting over. And do you know," he enquired, "the effect you produce on me by

alluding to her in such terms? It's as if you had some motive in not recognising all she has done for your

brother, and so shut your eyes to each side of the matter, in order, whichever side comes up, to get rid of the

other. I don't, you must allow me to say, see how you can with any pretence to candour get rid of the side

"Near meTHAT sort of thing?" And Sarah gave a jerk back of her head that well might have nullified any

It kept her friend himself at his distance, and he respected for a moment the interval. Then with a last

persuasive effort he bridged it. "You don't, on your honour, appreciate Chad's fortunate development?"

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

Her departure had been for some minutes marked as imminent, and she was already at the door that stood

open to the court, from the threshold of which she delivered herself of this judgement. It rang out so loud as

to produce for the time the hush of everything else. Strether quite, as an effect of it, breathed less bravely; he

"Then all's at an end? So much the better. I do think that!" She passed out as she spoke and took her way

straight across the court, beyond which, separated from them by the deep arch of the portecochere the low

victoria that had conveyed her from her own hotel was drawn up. She made for it with decision, and the

manner of her break, the sharp shaft of her rejoinder, had an intensity by which Strether was at first kept in

arrest. She had let fly at him as from a stretched cord, and it took him a minute to recover from the sense of

being pierced. It was not the penetration of surprise; it was that, much more, of certainty; his case being put

for him as he had as yet only put it to himself. She was away at any rate; she had distanced himwith rather

a grand spring, an effect of pride and ease, after all; she had got into her carriage before he could overtake

her, and the vehicle was already in motion. He stopped halfway; he stood there in the court only seeing her go

and noting that she gave him no other look. The way he had put it to himself was that all quite MIGHT be at

an end. Each of her movements, in this resolute rupture, reaffirmed, reenforced that idea. Sarah passed out

of sight in the sunny street while, planted there in the centre of the comparatively grey court, he continued

He went late that evening to the Boulevard Malesherbes, having his impression that it would be vain to go

early, and having also, more than once in the course of the day, made enquiries of the concierge. Chad hadn't

come in and had left no intimation; he had affairs, apparently, at this junctureas it occurred to Strether he

so well might havethat kept him long abroad. Our friend asked once for him at the hotel in the Rue de

Rivoli, but the only contribution offered there was the fact that every one was out. It was with the idea that he

would have to come home to sleep that Strether went up to his rooms, from which however he was still

absent, though, from the balcony, a few moments later, his visitor heard eleven o'clock strike. Chad's servant

had by this time answered for his reappearance; he HAD, the visitor learned, come quickly in to dress for

dinner and vanish again. Strether spent an hour in waiting for himan hour full of strange suggestions,

persuasions, recognitions; one of those that he was to recall, at the end of his adventure, as the particular

handful that most had counted. The mellowest lamplight and the easiest chair had been placed at his disposal

by Baptiste, subtlest of servants; the novel halfuncut, the novel lemoncoloured and tender, with the ivory

knife athwart it like the dagger in a contadina's hair, had been pushed within the soft circlea circle which,

for some reason, affected Strether as softer still after the same Baptiste had remarked that in the absence of a

further need of anything by Monsieur he would betake himself to bed. The night was hot and heavy and the

single lamp sufficient; the great flare of the lighted city, rising high, spending itself afar, played up from the

Boulevard and, through the vague vista of the successive rooms, brought objects into view and added to their

dignity. Strether found himself in possession as he never yet had been; he had been there alone, had turned

over books and prints, had invoked, in Chad's absence, the spirit of the place, but never at the witching hour

He spent a long time on the balcony; he hung over it as he had seen little Bilham hang the day of his first

approach, as he had seen Mamie hang over her own the day little Bilham himself might have seen her from

below; he passed back into the rooms, the three that occupied the front and that communicated by wide doors;

and, while he circulated and rested, tried to recover the impression that they had made on him three months

before, to catch again the voice in which they had seemed then to speak to him. That voice, he had to note,

failed audibly to sound; which he took as the proof of all the change in himself. He had heard, of old, only

what he COULD then hear; what he could do now was to think of three months ago as a point in the far past.

All voices had grown thicker and meant more things; they crowded on him as he moved aboutit was the

way they sounded together that wouldn't let him be still. He felt, strangely, as sad as if he had come for some

wrong, and yet as excited as if he had come for some freedom. But the freedom was what was most in the

place and the hour, it was the freedom that most brought him round again to the youth of his own that he had

long ago missed. He could have explained little enough today either why he had missed it or why, after

years and years, he should care that he had; the main truth of the actual appeal of everything was none the

less that everything represented the substance of his loss put it within reach, within touch, made it, to a degree

it had never been, an affair of the senses. That was what it became for him at this singular time, the youth he

had long ago misseda queer concrete presence, full of mystery, yet full of reality, which he could handle,

taste, smell, the deep breathing of which he could positively hear. It was in the outside air as well as within; it

was in the long watch, from the balcony, in the summer night, of the wide late life of Paris, the unceasing soft

quick rumble, below, of the little lighted carriages that, in the press, always suggested the gamblers he had

seen of old at Monte Carlo pushing up to the tables. This image was before him when he at last became aware

"She tells me you put it all on ME"he had arrived after this promptly enough at that information; which

expressed the case however quite as the young man appeared willing for the moment to leave it. Other things,

with this advantage of their virtually having the night before them, came up for them, and had, as well, the

odd effect of making the occasion, instead of hurried and feverish, one of the largest, loosest and easiest to

which Strether's whole adventure was to have treated him. He had been pursuing Chad from an early hour

and had overtaken him only now; but now the delay was repaired by their being so exceptionally confronted.

They had foregathered enough of course in all the various times; they had again and again, since that first

night at the theatre, been face to face over their question; but they had never been so alone together as they

were actually alonetheir talk hadn't yet been so supremely for themselves. And if many things moreover

passed before them, none passed more distinctly for Strether than that striking truth about Chad of which he

had been so often moved to take note: the truth that everything came happily back with him to his knowing

how to live. It had been seated in his pleased smilea smile that pleased exactly in the right degreeas his

visitor turned round, on the balcony, to greet his advent; his visitor in fact felt on the spot that there was

nothing their meeting would so much do as bear witness to that facility. He surrendered himself accordingly

to so approved a gift; for what was the meaning of the facility but that others DID surrender themselves? He

didn't want, luckily, to prevent Chad from living; but he was quite aware that even if he had he would himself

have thoroughly gone to pieces. It was in truth essentially by bringing down his personal life to a function all

subsidiary to the young man's own that he held together. And the great point, above all, the sign of how

completely Chad possessed the knowledge in question, was that one thus became, not only with a proper

cheerfulness, but with wild native impulses, the feeder of his stream. Their talk had accordingly not lasted

three minutes without Strether's feeling basis enough for the excitement in which he had waited. This

overflow fairly deepened, wastefully abounded, as he observed the smallness of anything corresponding to it

on the part of his friend. That was exactly this friend's happy case; he "put out" his excitement, or whatever

other emotion the matter involved, as he put out his washing; than which no arrangement could make more

for domestic order. It was quite for Strether himself in short to feel a personal analogy with the laundress

When he had reported on Sarah's visit, which he did very fully, Chad answered his question with perfect

candour. "I positively referred her to youtold her she must absolutely see you. This was last night, and it

all took place in ten minutes. It was our first free talkreally the first time she had tackled me. She knew I

also knew what her line had been with yourself; knew moreover how little you had been doing to make

anything difficult for her. So I spoke for you franklyassured her you were all at her service. I assured her I

was too," the young man continued; "and I pointed out how she could perfectly, at any time, have got at me.

"Her difficulty," Strether returned, "has been simply that she finds she's afraid of you. She's not afraid of ME,

Sarah, one little scrap; and it was just because she has seen how I can fidget when I give my mind to it that

she has felt her best chance, rightly enough to be in making me as uneasy as possible. I think she's at bottom

"But what in the world, my dear man," Chad enquired in objection to this luminosity, "have I done to make

"You've been 'wonderful, wonderful,' as we saywe poor people who watch the play from the pit; and that's

what has, admirably, made her. Made her all the more effectually that she could see you didn't set about it on

Chad cast a pleasant backward glance over his possibilities of motive. "I've only wanted to be kind and

Strether smiled at his comfortable clearness. "Well, there can certainly be no way for it better than by my

taking the onus. It reduces your personal friction and your personal offence to almost nothing."

Ah but Chad, with his completer conception of the friendly, wouldn't quite have this! They had remained on

the balcony, where, after their day of great and premature heat, the midnight air was delicious; and they

leaned back in turn against the balustrade, all in harmony with the chairs and the flowerpots, the cigarettes

and the starlight. "The onus isn't REALLY yoursafter our agreeing so to wait together and judge together.

That was all my answer to Sally," Chad pursued "that we have been, that we are, just judging together."

"I'm not afraid of the burden," Strether explained; "I haven't come in the least that you should take it off me.

I've come very much, it seems to me, to double up my fore legs in the manner of the camel when he gets

down on his knees to make his back convenient. But I've supposed you all this while to have been doing a lot

of special and private judgingabout which I haven't troubled you; and I've only wished to have your

conclusion first from you. I don't ask more than that; I'm quite ready to take it as it has come."

Chad turned up his face to the sky with a slow puff of his smoke. "Well, I've seen."

Strether waited a little. "I've left you wholly alone; haven't, I think I may say, since the first hour or

"We've both been good thenwe've played the game. We've given them the most liberal conditions."

"Ah," said Chad, "splendid conditions! It was open to them, open to them"he seemed to make it out, as he

smoked, with his eyes still on the stars. He might in quiet sport have been reading their horoscope. Strether

wondered meanwhile what had been open to them, and he finally let him have it. "It was open to them simply

to let me alone; to have made up their minds, on really seeing me for themselves, that I could go on well

Strether assented to this proposition with full lucidity, his companion's plural pronoun, which stood all for

Mrs. Newsome and her daughter, having no ambiguity for him. There was nothing, apparently, to stand for

Mamie and Jim; and this added to our friend's sense of Chad's knowing what he thought. "But they've made

Strether on his side also reflectively smoked. It was as if their high place really represented some moral

elevation from which they could look down on their recent past. "There never was the smallest chance, do

"They weren't willing." Strether had worked it all out. "It wasn't for you they came out, but for me. It wasn't

to see for themselves what you're doing, but what I'm doing. The first branch of their curiosity was inevitably

destined, under my culpable delay, to give way to the second; and it's on the second that, if I may use the

expression and you don't mind my marking the invidious fact, they've been of late exclusively perched. When

Chad took it in both with intelligence and with indulgence. "It IS rather a business thenwhat I've let you in

Strether had again a brief pause; which ended in a reply that seemed to dispose once for all of this element of

compunction. Chad was to treat it, at any rate, so far as they were again together, as having done so. "I was

"I only found you out. It was you who found me in. It was all in the day's work for them, at all events, that

His companion did himself presently the same justice. "So have I. I tried even this very morningwhile Mrs.

Pocock was with me. She enjoys for instance, almost as much as anything else, not being, as I've said, afraid

Strether debated. "Well, she was the most important thingshe was definite. She wasat lastcrystalline.

"Oh I wanted to see them for myself; so that if it were only for THAT!" Chad's own remorse was as small.

This appeared almost all Strether wanted. "Isn't your having seen them for yourself then THE thing, beyond

Chad looked as if he thought it nice of his old friend to put it so. "Don't you count it as anything that you're

It sounded as if he were asking if he had caught cold or hurt his foot, and Strether for a minute but smoked

It was as if Mrs. Newsome had somehow been placed by the words very far off. Chad however endeavoured

Strether, for all answer, gave him a longish look. "I was speaking of Sarah. I must positivelythough she

Again Strether exhaled. "She was what she had to be. I mean that from the moment they're not delighted they

can only bewell what I admit she was. We gave them," he went on, "their chance to be delighted, and

"Precisely. And the tune to which this morning Sarah wasn't delightedthe tune to which, to adopt your

Chad had a pause, and then as if consolingly: "It was never of course really the least on the cards that they

"Well, I don't know, after all," Strether mused. "I've had to come as far round. However"he shook it

"There are certainly moments," said Chad, "when you seem to me too good to be true. Yet if you are true," he

"I'm true, but I'm incredible. I'm fantastic and ridiculous I don't explain myself even TO myself. How can

"I see. They quarrel," said Chad rather comfortably, "with US." Strether noted once more the comfort, but his

young friend had already gone on. "I should feel greatly ashamed, all the same, if I didn't put it before you

again that you ought to think, after all, tremendously well. I mean before giving up beyond recall" With

"Well, at your age, and with whatwhen all's said and done Mother might do for you and be for you."

Chad had said it all, from his natural scruple, only to that extent; so that Strether after an instant himself took

a hand. "My absence of an assured future. The little I have to show toward the power to take care of myself.

The way, the wonderful way, she would certainly take care of me. Her fortune, her kindness, and the constant

miracle of her having been disposed to go even so far. Of course, of course"he summed it up. "There are

"I'll go if you'll say you now consider I should. You know," he went on, "I was ready six weeks ago."

"Ah," said Strether, "that was when you didn't know I wasn't! You're ready at present because you do know

"That may be," Chad returned; "but all the same I'm sincere. You talk about taking the whole thing on your

shoulders, but in what light do you regard me that you think me capable of letting you pay?" Strether patted

his arm, as they stood together against the parapet, reassuringlyseeming to wish to contend that he HAD

the wherewithal; but it was again round this question of purchase and price that the young man's sense of

fairness continued to hover. "What it literally comes to for you, if you'll pardon my putting it so, is that you

"Oh," Strether laughed, "if it were only just enough you'd still be justified in putting it so! But I've on my side

to remind you too that YOU give up money; and more than 'possibly'quite certainly, as I should

"True enough; but I've got a certain quantity," Chad returned after a moment. "Whereas you, my dear man,

"I can't be at all said"Strether took him up"to have a 'quantity' certain or uncertain? Very true. Still, I

"Oh you mustn't STARVE!" Chad pacifically emphasised; and so, in the pleasant conditions, they continued

to talk; though there was, for that matter, a pause in which the younger companion might have been taken as

weighing again the delicacy of his then and there promising the elder some provision against the possibility

just mentioned. This, however, he presumably thought best not to do, for at the end of another minute they

had moved in quite a different direction. Strether had broken in by returning to the subject of Chad's passage

with Sarah and enquiring if they had arrived, in the event, at anything in the nature of a "scene." To this Chad

replied that they had on the contrary kept tremendously polite; adding moreover that Sally was after all not

the woman to have made the mistake of not being. "Her hands are a good deal tied, you see. I got so, from the

"Well, I couldn't of course in common decency give less: only she hadn't expected, I think, that I'd give her

"Yes, she has liked italso more than she expected." After which Chad observed: "But she doesn't like ME.

"Because when you hate you want to triumph, and if she should get me neatly stuck there she WOULD

Strether followed afresh, but looking as he went. "Certainlyin a manner. But it would scarce be a triumph

worth having if, once entangled, feeling her dislike and possibly conscious in time of a certain quantity of

"Ah," said Chad, "she can bear MEcould bear me at least at home. It's my being there that would be her

"Yes, THAT'S it!"Chad had quickly understood this understanding; which formed on the part of each as

near an approach as they had yet made to naming Madame de Vionnet. The limitations of their distinctness

didn't, however, prevent its fairly lingering in the air that it was this lady Mrs. Pocock hated. It added one

more touch moreover to their established recognition of the rare intimacy of Chad's association with her. He

had never yet more twitched away the last light veil from this phenomenon than in presenting himself as

confounded and submerged in the feeling she had created at Woollett. "And I'll tell you who hates me too,"

Strether knew as immediately whom he meant, but with as prompt a protest. "Ah no! Mamie doesn't

Chad shook his head. "That's just why I mind it. She certainly doesn't like me."

It gave his companion a moment's pause. "You asked me just now if I don't, as you said, 'care' about a certain

person. You rather tempt me therefore to put the question in my turn. Don't YOU care about a certain other

Chad looked at him hard in the lamplight of the window. "The difference is that I don't want to."

"I try not tothat is I HAVE tried. I've done my best. You can't be surprised," the young man easily went on,

"when you yourself set me on it. I was indeed," he added, "already on it a little; but you set me harder. It was

"I don't knowit's what I WANT to know," said Chad. "And if I could have sufficiently wantedby

"Possibly"Strether considered. "But all you were able to achieve was to want to want to! And even then,"

he pursued, "only till our friends there came. Do you want to want to still?" As with a sound halfdolorous,

halfdroll and all vague and equivocal, Chad buried his face for a little in his hands, rubbing it in a whimsical

Chad kept for a time his attitude, but at last he looked up, and then abruptly, "Jim IS a damned dose!" he

"Oh I don't ask you to abuse or describe or in any way pronounce on your relatives; I simply put it to you

once more whether you're NOW ready. You say you've 'seen.' Is what you've seen that you can't resist?"

Chad gave him a strange smilethe nearest approach he had ever shown to a troubled one. "Can't you make

"What it comes to," Strether went on very gravely now and as if he hadn't heard him, "what it comes to is that

more has been done for you, I think, than I've ever seen doneattempted perhaps, but never so successfully

"Oh an immense deal certainly"Chad did it full justice. "And you yourself are adding to it."

It was without heeding this either that his visitor continued. "And our friends there won't have it."

"They demand you on the basis, as it were, of repudiation and ingratitude; and what has been the matter with

me," Strether went on, "is that I haven't seen my way to working with you for repudiation."

Chad appreciated this. "Then as you haven't seen yours you naturally haven't seen mine. There it is." After

which he proceeded, with a certain abruptness, to a sharp interrogation. "NOW do you say she doesn't hate

On whichthough as if for an instant it had hung fireChad remarkably replied: "Well, if they hate my

good friend, THAT comes to the same thing." It had a note of inevitable truth that made Strether take it as

enough, feel he wanted nothing more. The young man spoke in it for his "good friend" more than he had ever

yet directly spoken, confessed to such deep identities between them as he might play with the idea of working

free from, but which at a given moment could still draw him down like a whirlpool. And meanwhile he had

Chad, however, loyally stuck to itloyally, that is, to Strether. "She will if you don't look out."

"Well, I do look out. I am, after all, looking out. That's just why," our friend explained, "I want to see her

"Ah then there you are! And what I don't for the life of me make out," Chad pursued with resigned perplexity,

Oh it would have taken his companion too long to say! "That's because you have, I verily believe, no

imagination. You've other qualities. But no imagination, don't you see? at all."

"I dare say. I do see." It was an idea in which Chad showed interest. "But haven't you yourself rather too

"Oh RATHER!" So that after an instant, under this reproach and as if it were at last a fact really to escape

One of the features of the restless afternoon passed by him after Mrs. Pocock's visit was an hour spent,

shortly before dinner, with Maria Gostrey, whom of late, in spite of so sustained a call on his attention from

other quarters, he had by no means neglected. And that he was still not neglecting her will appear from the

fact that he was with her again at the same hour on the very morrowwith no less fine a consciousness

moreover of being able to hold her ear. It continued inveterately to occur, for that matter, that whenever he

had taken one of his greater turns he came back to where she so faithfully awaited him. None of these

excursions had on the whole been livelier than the pair of incidentsthe fruit of the short interval since his

previous visiton which he had now to report to her. He had seen Chad Newsome late the night before, and

he had had that morning, as a sequel to this conversation, a second interview with Sarah. "But they're all off,"

"Ah not yet! Sarah and Jim and Mamie. But Waymarsh with them for Sarah. It's too beautiful," Strether

continued; "I find I don't get over thatit's always a fresh joy. But it's a fresh joy too," he added,

"thatwell, what do you think? Little Bilham also goes. But he of course goes for Mamie."

"Well," said Strether, "say then for ME. He'll do anything for me; just as I will, for that matteranything I

Miss Gostrey gave a comprehensive sigh. "The way you reduce people to subjection!"

"It's certainly, on one side, wonderful. But it's quite equalled, on another, by the way I don't. I haven't reduced

Sarah, since yesterday; though I've succeeded in seeing her again, as I'll presently tell you. The others

however are really all right. Mamie, by that blessed law of ours, absolutely must have a young man."

"I mean that, by the same blessed law, it won't matter a grain if they don'tI shan't have in the least to

"Oh," Strether had to admit, "I couldn't manage THAT. He's thrown, as usual, on the world; the world which,

after all, by his accountfor he has prodigious adventuresseems very good to him. He fortunately'over

here,' as he saysfinds the world everywhere; and his most prodigious adventure of all," he went on, "has

Miss Gostrey, already knowing, instantly made the connexion. "He has seen Marie de Vionnet again?"

"He went, all by himself, the day after Chad's partydidn't I tell you?to tea with her. By her

"Oh but he's more wonderful about her than I am!" And then as his friend showed how she could believe it,

filling it out, fitting it on to old memories of the wonderful woman: "What I should have liked to manage

"For Jimand for symmetry. If it had been workable moreover for a fortnight she'd have gone. She's

"With Chadmarvellouslyas part of their general attention. And she does it"it kept before him"with

a light, light grace, a free, free gaiety, that may well softly bewilder Mr. Pocock."

It kept her so before him that his companion had after an instant a friendly comment. "As in short it has softly

"It's of no importance I should know," he replied. "It matters so littlehas nothing to do, practically, with

"All the same"Maria continued to smile"they go, the five, as I understand you, and you and Madame de

"Ah 'me'!"she gave a small impatient wail again, in which something of the unreconciled seemed suddenly

to break out. "I don't stay, it somehow seems to me, much to my advantage. In the presence of all you cause

Strether hesitated. "But your privation, your keeping out of everything, has beenhasn't it?by your own

"Oh yes; it has been necessarythat is it has been better for you. What I mean is only that I seem to have

"How can you tell that?" he asked. "You don't know how you serve me. When you cease"

"You're certainly very kind to me. But that," said Maria, "is for myself. It's getting late, as you see, and Paris

turning rather hot and dusty. People are scattering, and some of them, in other places want me. But if you

She had spoken as resigned to his word, but he had of a sudden a still sharper sense than he would have

She took it as if the words were all she had wished; as if they brought her, gave her something that was the

compensation of her case. "Thank you," she simply answered. And then as he looked at her a little harder,

It had broken as with a slight arrest into the current of their talk, and it held him a moment longer. "Why, two

months, or whatever the time was, ago, did you so suddenly dash off? The reason you afterwards gave me for

She recalled. "I never supposed you believed it was. Yet," she continued, "if you didn't guess it that was just

He looked away from her on this; he indulged, so far as space permitted, in one of his slow absences. "I've

often thought of it, but never to feel that I could guess it. And you see the consideration with which I've

"It doesn't seem to have done," she laughed, "all it might! However," she added, "if you've really never

"Well then I dashed off, as you say, so as not to have the confusion of being there if Marie de Vionnet should

He looked as if he considerably doubted. "You even then would have had to face it on your return."

"Oh if I had found reason to believe it something very bad I'd have left you altogether."

"So then," he continued, "it was only on guessing she had been on the whole merciful that you ventured

Maria kept it together. "I owe her thanks. Whatever her temptation she didn't separate us. That's one of my

"Let it pass then," said Strether, "for one of mine as well. But what would have been her temptation?"

"She would have had you, with it, more for herself. But she saw she could have you without it."

"Oh 'have' me!" Strether a trifle ambiguously sighed. "YOU," he handsomely declared, "would have had me

"Oh 'have' you!"she echoed it as he had done. "I do have you, however," she less ironically said, "from the

Which indeed begot in her, with a certain inconsequence, a return of her small wail. "Ah there you are!"

There, if it were so, he continued for the rest of the time to be, and it was as if to show her how she could still

serve him that, coming back to the departure of the Pococks, he gave her the view, vivid with a hundred more

touches than we can reproduce, of what had happened for him that morning. He had had ten minutes with

Sarah at her hotel, ten minutes reconquered, by irresistible pressure, from the time over which he had already

described her to Miss Gostrey as having, at the end of their interview on his own premises, passed the great

sponge of the future. He had caught her by not announcing himself, had found her in her sittingroom with a

dressmaker and a lingere whose accounts she appeared to have been more or less ingenuously settling and

who soon withdrew. Then he had explained to her how he had succeeded, late the night before, in keeping his

Maria waited. "And who takes it if he does?" she enquired with a certain grimness of gaiety.

"By which I suppose you mean," his companion brought out after a moment, "that you definitely understand

He stood before her again. "It does come perhaps to the same thing. But Chad, now that he has seen, doesn't

She could believe that, but she made, as always, for clearness. "Still, what, after all, HAS he seen?"

"Oh," said Strether, "what I want is a thing I've ceased to measure or even to understand."

But his friend none the less went on. "Do you want Mrs. Newsome after such a way of treating you?"

It was a straighter mode of dealing with this lady than they had as yetsuch was their high formpermitted

themselves; but it seemed not wholly for this that he delayed a moment. "I dare say it has been, after all, the

"I've tremendously disappointed her," Strether thought it worth while to mention.

"Of course you have. That's rudimentary; that was plain to us long ago. But isn't it almost as plain," Maria

went on, "that you've even yet your straight remedy? Really drag him away, as I believe you still can, and

But this barely struck her now. "What, in that case, should you call counting? You haven't come out where

"Oh," he insisted, "that too, you know, has been part of it. I can't separateit's all one; and that's perhaps

why, as I say, I don't understand." But he was ready to declare again that this didn't in the least matter; all the

more that, as he affirmed, he HADn't really as yet "come out." "She gives me after all, on its coming to the

pinch, a last mercy, another chance. They don't sail, you see, for five or six weeks more, and they

haven'tshe admits thatexpected Chad would take part in their tour. It's still open to him to join them, at

Miss Gostrey considered. "How in the world is it 'open' unless you open it? How can he join them at

"He has given heras I explained to you that she let me know yesterdayhis word of honour to do as I

Well, he as usual walked about on it. "I did say something this morning. I gave her my answerthe word I

had promised her after hearing from himself what HE had promised. What she demanded of me yesterday,

you'll remember, was the engagement then and there to make him take up this vow."

"Well then," Miss Gostrey enquired, "was the purpose of your visit to her only to decline?"

"Precisely!" She had spoken with impatience, but, so far as that at least, he knew where he was. "If I AM

weak I want to find it out. If I don't find it out I shall have the comfort, the little glory, of thinking I'm

"At any rate," he said, "it will have been a month more. Paris may grow, from day to day, hot and dusty, as

you say; but there are other things that are hotter and dustier. I'm not afraid to stay on; the summer here must

be amusing in a wildif it isn't a tame way of its own; the place at no time more picturesque. I think I

shall like it. And then," he benevolently smiled for her, "there will be always you."

"Oh," she objected, "it won't be as a part of the picturesqueness that I shall stay, for I shall be the plainest

thing about you. You may, you see, at any rate," she pursued, "have nobody else. Madame de Vionnet may

very well be going off, mayn't she?and Mr. Newsome by the same stroke: unless indeed you've had an

assurance from them to the contrary. So that if your idea's to stay for them" it was her duty to suggest

it"you may be left in the lurch. Of course if they do stay"she kept it up"they would be part of the

Strether seemed to face it as if it were a happy thought; but the next moment he spoke more critically. "Do

She just considered. "I think it will be treating you quite without ceremony if they do; though after all," she

added, "it would be difficult to see now quite what degree of ceremony properly meets your case."

"Just so; so that one may ask one's self what style of proceeding on their own part can altogether match it.

The attitude of their own that won't pale in its light they've doubtless still to work out. The really handsome

thing perhaps," she presently threw off, "WOULD be for them to withdraw into more secluded conditions,

offering at the same time to share them with you." He looked at her, on this, as if some generous

irritationall in his interest had suddenly again flickered in her; and what she next said indeed

halfexplained it. "Don't really be afraid to tell me if what now holds you IS the pleasant prospect of the

empty town, with plenty of seats in the shade, cool drinks, deserted museums, drives to the Bois in the

evening, and our wonderful woman all to yourself." And she kept it up still more. "The handsomest thing of

ALL, when one makes it out, would, I dare say, be that Mr. Chad should for a while go off by himself. It's a

pity, from that point of view," she wound up, "that he doesn't pay his mother a visit. It would at least occupy

your interval." The thought in fact held her a moment. "Why doesn't he pay his mother a visit? Even a week,

"My dear lady," Strether repliedand he had it even to himself surprisingly ready"my dear lady, his

mother has paid HIM a visit. Mrs. Newsome has been with him, this month, with an intensity that I'm sure he

has thoroughly felt; he has lavishly entertained her, and she has let him have her thanks. Do you suggest he

Well, she succeeded after a little in shaking it off. "I see. It's what you don't suggestwhat you haven't

"Well, you see," he partly explained, "what it comes to is that she's all cold thoughtwhich Sarah could

serve to us cold without its really losing anything. So it is that we know what she thinks of us."

Maria had followed, but she had an arrest. "What I've never made out, if you come to that, is what you

thinkI mean you personally of HER. Don't you so much, when all's said, as care a little?"

"That," he answered with no loss of promptness, "is what even Chad himself asked me last night. He asked

me if I don't mind the loss well, the loss of an opulent future. Which moreover," he hastened to add, "was a

"I call your attention, all the same," said Miss Gostrey, "to the fact that I don't ask it. What I venture to ask is

"I haven't been so"he spoke with all assurance. "I've been the very opposite. I've been, from the first

moment, preoccupied with the impression everything might be making on herquite oppressed, haunted,

tormented by it. I've been interested ONLY in her seeing what I've seen. And I've been as disappointed in her

refusal to see it as she has been in what has appeared to her the perversity of my insistence."

Strether weighed it. "I'm probably not so shockable. But on the other hand I've gone much further to meet

"So that you're now at last"Maria pointed the moral"in the sad stage of recriminations."

"Noit's only to you I speak. I've been like a lamb to Sarah. I've only put my back to the wall. It's to THAT

She turned it over, but as hoping to clarify much rather than to harmonise. "The thing is that I suppose you've

"Quite from the very first of my arrival? I dare say. I admit I was surprising even to myself."

"That will do," she laughed, "if you're too delicate to call it MY being! Naturally," she added, "you came over

"But they were to have been all for you"she continued to piece it out"and none of them for HER."

Once more he stopped before her as if she had touched the point. "That's just her difficultythat she doesn't

admit surprises. It's a fact that, I think, describes and represents her; and it falls in with what I tell youthat

she's all, as I've called it, fine cold thought. She had, to her own mind, worked the whole thing out in

advance, and worked it out for me as well as for herself. Whenever she has done that, you see, there's no

room left; no margin, as it were, for any alteration. She's filled as full, packed as tight, as she'll hold and if

"What it comes to," said Strether, "is that you've got morally and intellectually to get rid of her."

But her friend threw back his head. "I haven't touched her. She won't BE touched. I see it now as I've never

done; and she hangs together with a perfection of her own," he went on, "that does suggest a kind of wrong in

ANY change of her composition. It was at any rate," he wound up, "the woman herself, as you call her the

whole moral and intellectual being or block, that Sarah brought me over to take or to leave."

It turned Miss Gostrey to deeper thought. "Fancy having to take at the point of the bayonet a whole moral and

"It was in fact," said Strether, "what, at home, I HAD done. But somehow over there I didn't quite know it."

"One never does, I suppose," Miss Gostrey concurred, "realise in advance, in such a case, the size, as you

may say, of the block. Little by little it looms up. It has been looming for you more and more till at last you

"I see it all," he absently echoed, while his eyes might have been fixing some particularly large iceberg in a

But his friend, who was used to this kind of inconsequence in him, kept the thread. "There's nothing so

It brought him straight round. "Ah there you are! It's what I said last night to Chad. That he himself, I mean,

"Then it would appear," Maria suggested, "that he has, after all, something in common with his mother."

"He has in common that he makes one, as you say, 'feel' him. And yet," he added, as if the question were

"Certainlyshe had quantities of old. But there are different ways of making one's self felt."

He was benevolently going on, but she wouldn't have it. "Oh I DON'T make myself felt; so my quantity

needn't be settled. Yours, you know," she said, "is monstrous. No one has ever had so much."

"That's all that would be wanting! But apropos of what," Maria went on, "did the question come up?"

She had a pause. "Then as I've asked you too it settles my case. Oh you HAVE," she repeated, "treasures of

But he had been for an instant thinking away from this, and he came up in another place. "And yet Mrs.

Newsomeit's a thing to rememberHAS imagined, did, that is, imagine, and apparently still does, horrors

about what I should have found. I was booked, by her visionextraordinarily intense, after allto find

them; and that I didn't, that I couldn't, that, as she evidently felt, I wouldn't this evidently didn't at all, as

they say, 'suit' her book. It was more than she could bear. That was her disappointment."

"Found her as she imagined her." And Strether paused as if for his own expression of it he could add no touch

His companion had meanwhile thought. "She imagined stupidlyso it comes to the same thing."

This question might have held him, but he let it pass. "Sarah isn't ignorantnow; she keeps up the theory of

"Ah but she's intenseand that by itself will do sometimes as well. If it doesn't do, in this case, at any rate, to

But he continued without heeding. "That's what I wanted them to come out forto see for themselves if she's

"And now that they've done so they won't admit that she's good even for anything?"

"They do think," Strether presently admitted, "that she's on the whole about as bad for me. But they're

consistent of course, inasmuch as they've their clear view of what's good for both of us."

"For you, to begin with"Maria, all responsive, confined the question for the moment"to eliminate from

your existence and if possible even from your memory the dreadful creature that I must gruesomely shadow

forth for them, even more than to eliminate the distincter evilthereby a little less portentousof the person

whose confederate you've suffered yourself to become. However, that's comparatively simple. You can

"I can easily at the worst, after all, give you up." The irony was so obvious that it needed no care. "I can

"Call that then workable. But Mr. Newsome has much more to forget. How can HE do it?"

"Ah there again we are! That's just what I was to have made him do; just where I was to have worked with

She took it in silence and without attenuationas if perhaps from very familiarity with the facts; and her

thought made a connexion without showing the links. "Do you remember how we used to talk at Chester and

in London about my seeing you through?" She spoke as of faroff things and as if they had spent weeks at

"Ah but the worstsince you've left such a marginmay be still to come. You may yet break down."

She also debated "Mr. Newsome and Madame de Vionnet may, as we were saying, leave town. How long do

Strether's reply to this was at first another question. "Do you mean in order to get away from me?"

Her answer had an abruptness. "Don't find me rude if I say I should think they'd want to!"

He looked at her hard againseemed even for an instant to have an intensity of thought under which his

At this, however, with a laugh, he was all right again. "Ah but she hasn't done it yet!"

He had taken the train a few days after this from a station as well as to a stationselected almost at

random; such days, whatever should happen, were numbered, and he had gone forth under the

impulseartless enough, no doubtto give the whole of one of them to that French ruralism, with its cool

special green, into which he had hitherto looked only through the little oblong window of the pictureframe.

It had been as yet for the most part but a land of fancy for himthe background of fiction, the medium of art,

the nursery of letters; practically as distant as Greece, but practically also wellnigh as consecrated. Romance

could weave itself, for Strether's sense, out of elements mild enough; and even after what he had, as he felt,

lately "been through," he could thrill a little at the chance of seeing something somewhere that would remind

him of a certain small Lambinet that had charmed him, long years before, at a Boston dealer's and that he had

quite absurdly never forgotten. It had been offered, he remembered, at a price he had been instructed to

believe the lowest ever named for a Lambinet, a price he had never felt so poor as on having to recognise, all

the same, as beyond a dream of possibility. He had dreamed had turned and twisted possibilities for an

hour: it had been the only adventure of his life in connexion with the purchase of a work of art. The

adventure, it will be perceived, was modest; but the memory, beyond all reason and by some accident of

association, was sweet. The little Lambinet abode with him as the picture he WOULD have boughtthe

particular production that had made him for the moment overstep the modesty of nature. He was quite aware

that if he were to see it again he should perhaps have a drop or a shock, and he never found himself wishing

that the wheel of time would turn it up again, just as he had seen it in the marooncoloured, skylighted inner

shrine of Tremont Street. It would be a different thing, however, to see the remembered mixture resolved

back into its elementsto assist at the restoration to nature of the whole faraway hour: the dusty day in

Boston, the background of the Fitchburg Depot, of the marooncoloured sanctum, the specialgreen vision,

the ridiculous price, the poplars, the willows, the rushes, the river, the sunny silvery sky, the shady woody

He observed in respect to his train almost no condition save that it should stop a few times after getting out of

the banlieue; he threw himself on the general amiability of the day for the hint of where to alight. His theory

of his excursion was that he could alight anywherenot nearer Paris than an hour's runon catching a

suggestion of the particular note required. It made its sign, the suggestionweather, air, light, colour and his

mood all favouring at the end of some eighty minutes; the train pulled up just at the right spot, and he

found himself getting out as securely as if to keep an appointment. It will be felt of him that he could amuse

himself, at his age, with very small things if it be again noted that his appointment was only with a

superseded Boston fashion. He hadn't gone far without the quick confidence that it would be quite

sufficiently kept. The oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the poplars and willows, the reeds and

river a river of which he didn't know, and didn't want to know, the name fell into a composition, full of

felicity, within them; the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish; the village on the left was white and the

church on the right was grey; it was all there, in shortit was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was

France, it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely walking about in it. He did this last, for an hour, to his

heart's content, making for the shady woody horizon and boring so deep into his impression and his idleness

that he might fairly have got through them again and reached the marooncoloured wall. It was a wonder, no

doubt, that the taste of idleness for him shouldn't need more time to sweeten; but it had in fact taken the few

previous days; it had been sweetening in truth ever since the retreat of the Pococks. He walked and walked as

if to show himself how little he had now to do; he had nothing to do but turn off to some hillside where he

might stretch himself and hear the poplars rustle, and whencein the course of an afternoon so spent, an

afternoon richly suffused too with the sense of a book in his pockethe should sufficiently command the

scene to be able to pick out just the right little rustic inn for an experiment in respect to dinner. There was a

train back to Paris at 9.20, and he saw himself partaking, at the close of the day, with the enhancements of a

coarse white cloth and a sanded door, of something fried and felicitous, washed down with authentic wine;

after which he might, as he liked, either stroll back to his station in the gloaming or propose for the local

carriole and converse with his driver, a driver who naturally wouldn't fail of a stiff clean blouse, of a knitted

nightcap and of the genius of responsewho, in fine, would sit on the shafts, tell him what the French people

were thinking, and remind him, as indeed the whole episode would incidentally do, of Maupassant. Strether

heard his lips, for the first time in French air, as this vision assumed consistency, emit sounds of expressive

intention without fear of his company. He had been afraid of Chad and of Maria and of Madame de Vionnet;

he had been most of all afraid of Waymarsh, in whose presence, so far as they had mixed together in the light

of the town, he had never without somehow paying for it aired either his vocabulary or his accent. He usually

Such were the liberties with which his fancy played after he had turned off to the hillside that did really and

truly, as well as most amiably, await him beneath the poplars, the hillside that made him feel, for a

murmurous couple of hours, how happy had been his thought. He had the sense of success, of a finer

harmony in things; nothing but what had turned out as yet according to his plan. It most of all came home to

him, as he lay on his back on the grass, that Sarah had really gone, that his tension was really relaxed; the

peace diffused in these ideas might be delusive, but it hung about him none the less for the time. It fairly, for

half an hour, sent him to sleep; he pulled his straw hat over his eyes he had bought it the day before with a

reminiscence of Waymarsh's and lost himself anew in Lambinet. It was as if he had found out he was

tiredtired not from his walk, but from that inward exercise which had known, on the whole, for three

months, so little intermission. That was itwhen once they were off he had dropped; this moreover was

what he had dropped to, and now he was touching bottom. He was kept luxuriously quiet, soothed and

amused by the consciousness of what he had found at the end of his descent. It was very much what he had

told Maria Gostrey he should like to stay on for, the hugelydistributed Paris of summer, alternately dazzling

and dusky, with a weight lifted for him off its columns and cornices and with shade and air in the flutter of

awnings as wide as avenues. It was present to him without attenuation that, reaching out, the day after making

the remark, for some proof of his freedom, he had gone that very afternoon to see Madame de Vionnet. He

had gone again the next day but one, and the effect of the two visits, the aftersense of the couple of hours

spent with her, was almost that of fulness and frequency. The brave intention of frequency, so great with him

from the moment of his finding himself unjustly suspected at Woollett, had remained rather theoretic, and

one of the things he could muse about under his poplars was the source of the special shyness that had still

made him careful. He had surely got rid of it now, this special shyness; what had become of it if it hadn't

It struck him now in fact as sufficiently plain that if he had still been careful he had been so for a reason. He

had really feared, in his behaviour, a lapse from good faith; if there was a danger of one's liking such a

woman too much one's best safety was in waiting at least till one had the right to do so. In the light of the last

few days the danger was fairly vivid; so that it was proportionately fortunate that the right was likewise

established. It seemed to our friend that he had on each occasion profited to the utmost by the latter: how

could he have done so more, he at all events asked himself, than in having immediately let her know that, if it

was all the same to her, he preferred not to talk about anything tiresome? He had never in his life so

sacrificed an armful of high interests as in that remark; he had never so prepared the way for the

comparatively frivolous as in addressing it to Madame de Vionnet's intelligence. It hadn't been till later that

he quite recalled how in conjuring away everything but the pleasant he had conjured away almost all they had

hitherto talked about; it was not till later even that he remembered how, with their new tone, they hadn't so

much as mentioned the name of Chad himself. One of the things that most lingered with him on his hillside

was this delightful facility, with such a woman, of arriving at a new tone; he thought, as he lay on his back, of

all the tones she might make possible if one were to try her, and at any rate of the probability that one could

trust her to fit them to occasions. He had wanted her to feel that, as he was disinterested now, so she herself

should be, and she had showed she felt it, and he had showed he was grateful, and it had been for all the

world as if he were calling for the first time. They had had other, but irrelevant, meetings; it was quite as if,

had they sooner known how much they REALLY had in common, there were quantities of comparatively

dull matters they might have skipped. Well, they were skipping them now, even to graceful gratitude, even to

handsome "Don't mention it!" and it was amazing what could still come up without reference to what had

been going on between them. It might have been, on analysis, nothing more than Shakespeare and the

musical glasses; but it had served all the purpose of his appearing to have said to her: "Don't like me, if it's a

question of liking me, for anything obvious and clumsy that I've, as they call it, 'done' for you: like me

well, like me, hang it, for anything else you choose. So, by the same propriety, don't be for me simply the

person I've come to know through my awkward connexion with Chadwas ever anything, by the way,

MORE awkward? Be for me, please, with all your admirable tact and trust, just whatever I may show you it's

a present pleasure to me to think you." It had been a large indication to meet; but if she hadn't met it what

HAD she done, and how had their time together slipped along so smoothly, mild but not slow, and melting,

liquefying, into his happy illusion of idleness? He could recognise on the other hand that he had probably not

been without reason, in his prior, his restricted state, for keeping an eye on his liability to lapse from good

He really continued in the picturethat being for himself his situationall the rest of this rambling day; so

that the charm was still, was indeed more than ever upon him when, toward six o'clock he found himself

amicably engaged with a stout whitecapped deepvoiced woman at the door of the auberge of the biggest

village, a village that affected him as a thing of whiteness, blueness and crookedness, set in coppery green,

and that had the river flowing behind or before itone couldn't say which; at the bottom, in particular, of the

inngarden. He had had other adventures before this; had kept along the height, after shaking off slumber;

had admired, had almost coveted, another small old church, all steep roof and dim slatecolour without and

all whitewash and paper flowers within; had lost his way and had found it again; had conversed with rustics

who struck him perhaps a little more as men of the world than he had expected; had acquired at a bound a

fearless facility in French; had had, as the afternoon waned, a watery bock, all pale and Parisian, in the cafe

of the furthest village, which was not the biggest; and had meanwhile not once overstepped the oblong gilt

frame. The frame had drawn itself out for him, as much as you please; but that was just his luck. He had

finally come down again to the valley, to keep within touch of stations and trains, turning his face to the

quarter from which he had started; and thus it was that he had at last pulled up before the hostess of the

Cheval Blanc, who met him, with a rough readiness that was like the clatter of sabots over stones, on their

common ground of a cotelette de veau a l'oseille and a subsequent lift. He had walked many miles and didn't

know he was tired; but he still knew he was amused, and even that, though he had been alone all day, he had

never yet so struck himself as engaged with others and in midstream of his drama. It might have passed for

finished his drama, with its catastrophe all but reached: it had, however, none the less been vivid again for

him as he thus gave it its fuller chance. He had only had to be at last well out of it to feel it, oddly enough,

For this had been all day at bottom the spell of the picturethat it was essentially more than anything else a

scene and a stage, that the very air of the play was in the rustle of the willows and the tone of the sky. The

play and the characters had, without his knowing it till now, peopled all his space for him, and it seemed

somehow quite happy that they should offer themselves, in the conditions so supplied, with a kind of

inevitability. It was as if the conditions made them not only inevitable, but so much more nearly natural and

right as that they were at least easier, pleasanter, to put up with. The conditions had nowhere so asserted their

difference from those of Woollett as they appeared to him to assert it in the little court of the Cheval Blanc

while he arranged with his hostess for a comfortable climax. They were few and simple, scant and humble,

but they were THE THING, as he would have called it, even to a greater degree than Madame de Vionnet's

old high salon where the ghost of the Empire walked. "The" thing was the thing that implied the greatest

number of other things of the sort he had had to tackle; and it was queer of course, but so it wasthe

implication here was complete. Not a single one of his observations but somehow fell into a place in it; not a

breath of the cooler evening that wasn't somehow a syllable of the text. The text was simply, when

condensed, that in THESE places such things were, and that if it was in them one elected to move about one

had to make one's account with what one lighted on. Meanwhile at all events it was enough that they did

affect oneso far as the village aspect was concernedas whiteness, crookedness and blueness set in

coppery green; there being positively, for that matter, an outer wall of the White Horse that was painted the

most improbable shade. That was part of the amusementas if to show that the fun was harmless; just as it

was enough, further, that the picture and the play seemed supremely to melt together in the good woman's

broad sketch of what she could do for her visitor's appetite. He felt in short a confidence, and it was general,

and it was all he wanted to feel. It suffered no shock even on her mentioning that she had in fact just laid the

cloth for two persons who, unlike Monsieur, had arrived by the riverin a boat of their own; who had asked

her, half an hour before, what she could do for them, and had then paddled away to look at something a little

further upfrom which promenade they would presently return. Monsieur might meanwhile, if he liked,

pass into the garden, such as it was, where she would serve him, should he wish itfor there were tables and

benches in plentya "bitter" before his repast. Here she would also report to him on the possibility of a

conveyance to his station, and here at any rate he would have the agrement of the river .

It may be mentioned without delay that Monsieur had the agrement of everything, and in particular, for the

next twenty minutes, of a small and primitive pavilion that, at the garden's edge, almost overhung the water,

testifying, in its somewhat battered state, to much fond frequentation. It consisted of little more than a

platform, slightly raised, with a couple of benches and a table, a protecting rail and a projecting roof; but it

raked the full greyblue stream, which, taking a turn a short distance above, passed out of sight to reappear

much higher up; and it was clearly in esteemed requisition for Sundays and other feasts. Strether sat there

and, though hungry, felt at peace; the confidence that had so gathered for him deepened with the lap of the

water, the ripple of the surface, the rustle of the reeds on the opposite bank, the faint diffused coolness and

the slight rock of a couple of small boats attached to a rough landingplace hard by. The valley on the further

side was all coppergreen level and glazed pearly sky, a sky hatched across with screens of trimmed trees,

which looked flat, like espaliers; and though the rest of the village straggled away in the near quarter the view

had an emptiness that made one of the boats suggestive. Such a river set one afloat almost before one could

take up the oarsthe idle play of which would be moreover the aid to the full impression. This perception

went so far as to bring him to his feet; but that movement, in turn, made him feel afresh that he was tired, and

while he leaned against a post and continued to look out he saw something that gave him a sharper arrest.

What he saw was exactly the right thinga boat advancing round the bend and containing a man who held

the paddles and a lady, at the stern, with a pink parasol. It was suddenly as if these figures, or something like

them, had been wanted in the picture, had been wanted more or less all day, and had now drifted into sight,

with the slow current, on purpose to fill up the measure. They came slowly, floating down, evidently directed

to the landingplace near their spectator and presenting themselves to him not less clearly as the two persons

for whom his hostess was already preparing a meal. For two very happy persons he found himself

straightway taking thema young man in shirtsleeves, a young woman easy and fair, who had pulled

pleasantly up from some other place and, being acquainted with the neighbourhood, had known what this

particular retreat could offer them. The air quite thickened, at their approach, with further intimations; the

intimation that they were expert, familiar, frequentthat this wouldn't at all events be the first time. They

knew how to do it, he vaguely feltand it made them but the more idyllic, though at the very moment of the

impression, as happened, their boat seemed to have begun to drift wide, the oarsman letting it go. It had by

this time none the less come much nearernear enough for Strether to dream the lady in the stern had for

some reason taken account of his being there to watch them. She had remarked on it sharply, yet her

companion hadn't turned round; it was in fact almost as if our friend had felt her bid him keep still. She had

taken in something as a result of which their course had wavered, and it continued to waver while they just

stood off. This little effect was sudden and rapid, so rapid that Strether's sense of it was separate only for an

instant from a sharp start of his own. He too had within the minute taken in something, taken in that he knew

the lady whose parasol, shifting as if to hide her face, made so fine a pink point in the shining scene. It was

too prodigious, a chance in a million, but, if he knew the lady, the gentleman, who still presented his back

and kept off, the gentleman, the coatless hero of the idyll, who had responded to her start, was, to match the

Chad and Madame de Vionnet were then like himself taking a day in the countrythough it was as queer as

fiction, as farce, that their country could happen to be exactly his; and she had been the first at recognition,

the first to feel, across the water, the shock for it appeared to come to thatof their wonderful accident.

Strether became aware, with this, of what was taking place that her recognition had been even stranger for

the pair in the boat, that her immediate impulse had been to control it, and that she was quickly and intensely

debating with Chad the risk of betrayal. He saw they would show nothing if they could feel sure he hadn't

made them out; so that he had before him for a few seconds his own hesitation. It was a sharp fantastic crisis

that had popped up as if in a dream, and it had had only to last the few seconds to make him feel it as quite

horrible. They were thus, on either side, TRYING the other side, and all for some reason that broke the

stillness like some unprovoked harsh note. It seemed to him again, within the limit, that he had but one thing

to doto settle their common question by some sign of surprise and joy. He hereupon gave large play to

these things, agitating his hat and his stick and loudly calling out a demonstration that brought him relief

as soon as he had seen it answered. The boat, in midstream, still went a little wild which seemed natural,

however, while Chad turned round, half springing up; and his good friend, after blankness and wonder, began

gaily to wave her parasol. Chad dropped afresh to his paddles and the boat headed round, amazement and

pleasantry filling the air meanwhile, and relief, as Strether continued to fancy, superseding mere violence.

Our friend went down to the water under this odd impression as of violence avertedthe violence of their

having "cut" him, out there in the eye of nature, on the assumption that he wouldn't know it. He awaited them

with a face from which he was conscious of not being able quite to banish this idea that they would have gone

on, not seeing and not knowing, missing their dinner and disappointing their hostess, had he himself taken a

line to match. That at least was what darkened his vision for the moment. Afterwards, after they had bumped

at the landingplace and he had assisted their getting ashore, everything found itself sponged over by the

They could so much better at last, on either side, treat it as a wild extravagance of hazard, that the situation

was made elastic by the amount of explanation called into play. Why indeedapart from odditythe

situation should have been really stiff was a question naturally not practical at the moment, and in fact, so far

as we are concerned, a question tackled, later on and in private, only by Strether himself. He was to reflect

later on and in private that it was mainly HE who had explainedas he had had moreover comparatively

little difficulty in doing. He was to have at all events meanwhile the worrying thought of their perhaps

secretly suspecting him of having plotted this coincidence, taking such pains as might be to give it the

semblance of an accident. That possibilityas their imputationdidn't of course bear looking into for an

instant; yet the whole incident was so manifestly, arrange it as they would, an awkward one, that he could

scarce keep disclaimers in respect to his own presence from rising to his lips. Disclaimers of intention would

have been as tactless as his presence was practically gross; and the narrowest escape they either of them had

was his lucky escape, in the event, from making any. Nothing of the sort, so far as surface and sound were

involved, was even in question; surface and sound all made for their common ridiculous good fortune, for the

general invraisemblance of the occasion, for the charming chance that they had, the others, in passing,

ordered some food to be ready, the charming chance that he had himself not eaten, the charming chance, even

more, that their little plans, their hours, their train, in short, from labas, would all match for their return

together to Paris. The chance that was most charming of all, the chance that drew from Madame de Vionnet

her clearest, gayest "Comme cela se trouve!" was the announcement made to Strether after they were seated

at table, the word given him by their hostess in respect to his carriage for the station, on which he might now

count. It settled the matter for his friends as well; the conveyance it WAS all too lucky!would serve for

them; and nothing was more delightful than his being in a position to make the train so definite. It might have

been, for themselvesto hear Madame de Vionnet almost unnaturally vague, a detail left to be fixed;

though Strether indeed was afterwards to remember that Chad had promptly enough intervened to forestall

this appearance, laughing at his companion's flightiness and making the point that he had after all, in spite of

Strether was to remember afterwards further that this had had for him the effect of forming Chad's almost

sole intervention; and indeed he was to remember further still, in subsequent meditation, many things that, as

it were, fitted together. Another of them was for instance that the wonderful woman's overflow of surprise

and amusement was wholly into French, which she struck him as speaking with an unprecedented command

of idiomatic turns, but in which she got, as he might have said, somewhat away from him, taking all at once

little brilliant jumps that he could but lamely match. The question of his own French had never come up for

them; it was the one thing she wouldn't have permittedit belonged, for a person who had been through

much, to mere boredom; but the present result was odd, fairly veiling her identity, shifting her back into a

mere voluble class or race to the intense audibility of which he was by this time inured. When she spoke the

charming slightly strange English he best knew her by he seemed to feel her as a creature, among all the

millions, with a language quite to herself, the real monopoly of a special shade of speech, beautifully easy for

her, yet of a colour and a cadence that were both inimitable and matters of accident. She came back to these

things after they had shaken down in the innparlour and knew, as it were, what was to become of them; it

was inevitable that loud ejaculation over the prodigy of their convergence should at last wear itself out. Then

it was that his impression took fuller formthe impression, destined only to deepen, to complete itself, that

they had something to put a face upon, to carry off and make the best of, and that it was she who, admirably

on the whole, was doing this. It was familiar to him of course that they had something to put a face upon;

their friendship, their connexion, took any amount of explainingthat would have been made familiar by his

twenty minutes with Mrs. Pocock if it hadn't already been so. Yet his theory, as we know, had bountifully

been that the facts were specifically none of his business, and were, over and above, so far as one had to do

with them, intrinsically beautiful; and this might have prepared him for anything, as well as rendered him

proof against mystification. When he reached home that night, however, he knew he had been, at bottom,

neither prepared nor proof; and since we have spoken of what he was, after his return, to recall and interpret,

it may as well immediately be said that his real experience of these few hours put on, in that belated

visionfor he scarce went to bed till morningthe aspect that is most to our purpose.

He then knew more or less how he had been affectedhe but half knew at the time. There had been plenty to

affect him even after, as has been said, they had shaken down; for his consciousness, though muffled, had its

sharpest moments during this passage, a marked drop into innocent friendly Bohemia. They then had put their

elbows on the table, deploring the premature end of their two or three dishes; which they had tried to make up

with another bottle while Chad joked a little spasmodically, perhaps even a little irrelevantly, with the

hostess. What it all came to had been that fiction and fable WERE, inevitably, in the air, and not as a simple

term of comparison, but as a result of things said; also that they were blinking it, all round, and that they yet

needn't, so much as that, have blinked itthough indeed if they hadn't Strether didn't quite see what else they

could have done. Strether didn't quite see THAT even at an hour or two past midnight, even when he had, at

his hotel, for a long time, without a light and without undressing, sat back on his bedroom sofa and stared

straight before him. He was, at that point of vantage, in full possession, to make of it all what he could. He

kept making of it that there had been simply a LIE in the charming affaira lie on which one could now,

detached and deliberate, perfectly put one's finger. It was with the lie that they had eaten and drunk and

talked and laughed, that they had waited for their carriole rather impatiently, and had then got into the vehicle

and, sensibly subsiding, driven their three or four miles through the darkening summer night. The eating and

drinking, which had been a resource, had had the effect of having served its turn; the talk and laughter had

done as much; and it was during their somewhat tedious progress to the station, during the waits there, the

further delays, their submission to fatigue, their silences in the dim compartment of the muchstopping train,

that he prepared himself for reflexions to come. It had been a performance, Madame de Vionnet's manner,

and though it had to that degree faltered toward the end, as through her ceasing to believe in it, as if she had

asked herself, or Chad had found a moment surreptitiously to ask her, what after all was the use, a

performance it had none the less quite handsomely remained, with the final fact about it that it was on the

From the point of view of presence of mind it had been very wonderful indeed, wonderful for readiness, for

beautiful assurance, for the way her decision was taken on the spot, without time to confer with Chad,

without time for anything. Their only conference could have been the brief instants in the boat before they

confessed to recognising the spectator on the bank, for they hadn't been alone together a moment since and

must have communicated all in silence. It was a part of the deep impression for Strether, and not the least of

the deep interest, that they COULD so communicatethat Chad in particular could let her know he left it to

her. He habitually left things to others, as Strether was so well aware, and it in fact came over our friend in

these meditations that there had been as yet no such vivid illustration of his famous knowing how to live. It

was as if he had humoured her to the extent of letting her lie without correctionalmost as if, really, he

would be coming round in the morning to set the matter, as between Strether and himself, right. Of course he

couldn't quite come; it was a case in which a man was obliged to accept the woman's version, even when

fantastic; if she had, with more flurry than she cared to show, elected, as the phrase was, to represent that they

had left Paris that morning, and with no design but of getting back within the dayif she had so sizedup, in

the Woollett phrase, their necessity, she knew best her own measure. There were things, all the same, it was

impossible to blink and which made this measure an odd onethe too evident fact for instance that she

hadn't started out for the day dressed and hatted and shod, and even, for that matter, pink parasol'd, as she had

been in the boat. From what did the drop in her assurance proceed as the tension increasedfrom what did

this slightly baffled ingenuity spring but from her consciousness of not presenting, as night closed in, with

not so much as a shawl to wrap her round, an appearance that matched her story? She admitted that she was

cold, but only to blame her imprudence which Chad suffered her to give such account of as she might. Her

shawl and Chad's overcoat and her other garments, and his, those they had each worn the day before, were at

the place, best known to themselvesa quiet retreat enough, no doubtat which they had been spending the

twentyfour hours, to which they had fully meant to return that evening, from which they had so remarkably

swum into Strether's ken, and the tacit repudiation of which had been thus the essence of her comedy.

Strether saw how she had perceived in a flash that they couldn't quite look to going back there under his nose;

though, honestly, as he gouged deeper into the matter, he was somewhat surprised, as Chad likewise had

perhaps been, at the uprising of this scruple. He seemed even to divine that she had entertained it rather for

Chad than for herself, and that, as the young man had lacked the chance to enlighten her, she had had to go on

He was rather glad, none the less, that they had in point of fact not parted at the Cheval Blanc, that he hadn't

been reduced to giving them his blessing for an idyllic retreat down the river. He had had in the actual case to

makebelieve more than he liked, but this was nothing, it struck him, to what the other event would have

required. Could he, literally, quite have faced the other event? Would he have been capable of making the

best of it with them? This was what he was trying to do now; but with the advantage of his being able to give

more time to it a good deal counteracted by his sense of what, over and above the central fact itself, he had to

swallow. It was the quantity of makebelieve involved and so vividly exemplified that most disagreed with

his spiritual stomach. He moved, however, from the consideration of that quantityto say nothing of the

consciousness of that organ back to the other feature of the show, the deep, deep truth of the intimacy

revealed. That was what, in his vain vigil, he oftenest reverted to: intimacy, at such a point, was LIKE

thatand what in the world else would one have wished it to be like? It was all very well for him to feel the

pity of its being so much like lying; he almost blushed, in the dark, for the way he had dressed the possibility

in vagueness, as a little girl might have dressed her doll. He had made themand by no fault of their

ownmomentarily pull it for him, the possibility, out of this vagueness; and must he not therefore take it

now as they had had simply, with whatever thin attenuations, to give it to him? The very question, it may be

added, made him feel lonely and cold. There was the element of the awkward all round, but Chad and

Madame de Vionnet had at least the comfort that they could talk it over together. With whom could HE talk

of such things?unless indeed always, at almost any stage, with Maria? He foresaw that Miss Gostrey

would come again into requisition on the morrow; though it wasn't to be denied that he was already a little

afraid of her "What on earththat's what I want to know nowhad you then supposed?" He recognised at

last that he had really been trying all along to suppose nothing. Verily, verily, his labour had been lost. He

Strether couldn't have said he had during the previous hours definitely expected it; yet when. later on, that

morningthough no later indeed than for his coming forth at ten o'clockhe saw the concierge produce, on

his approach, a petit bleu delivered since his letters had been sent up, he recognised the appearance as the first

symptom of a sequel. He then knew he had been thinking of some early sign from Chad as more likely, after

all, than not; and this would be precisely the early sign. He took it so for granted that he opened the petit bleu

just where he had stopped, in the pleasant cool draught of the portecochereonly curious to see where the

young man would, at such a juncture, break out. His curiosity, however, was more than gratified; the small

missive, whose gummed edge he had detached without attention to the address, not being from the young

man at all, but from the person whom the case gave him on the spot as still more worth while. Worth while or

not, he went round to the nearest telegraphoffice, the big one on the Boulevard, with a directness that almost

confessed to a fear of the danger of delay. He might have been thinking that if he didn't go before he could

think he wouldn't perhaps go at all. He at any rate kept, in the lower sidepocket of his morning coat, a very

deliberate hand on his blue missive, crumpling it up rather tenderly than harshly. He wrote a reply, on the

Boulevard, also in the form of a petit bleuwhich was quickly done, under pressure of the place, inasmuch

as, like Madame de Vionnet's own communication, it consisted of the fewest words. She had asked him if he

could do her the very great kindness of coming to see her that evening at halfpast nine, and he answered, as

if nothing were easier, that he would present himself at the hour she named. She had added a line of

postscript, to the effect that she would come to him elsewhere and at his own hour if he preferred; but he took

no notice of this, feeling that if he saw her at all half the value of it would be in seeing her where he had

already seen her best. He mightn't see her at all; that was one of the reflexions he made after writing and

before he dropped his closed card into the box; he mightn't see any one at all any more at all; he might make

an end as well now as ever, leaving things as they were, since he was doubtless not to leave them better, and

taking his way home so far as should appear that a home remained to him. This alternative was for a few

minutes so sharp that if he at last did deposit his missive it was perhaps because the pressure of the place had

There was none other, however, than the common and constant pressure, familiar to our friend under the

rubric of Postes et Telegraphes the something in the air of these establishments; the vibration of the vast

strange life of the town, the influence of the types, the performers concocting their messages; the little prompt

Paris women, arranging, pretexting goodness knew what, driving the dreadful needlepointed public pen at

the dreadful sandstrewn public table: implements that symbolised for Strether's too interpretative innocence

something more acute in manners, more sinister in morals, more fierce in the national life. After he had put in

his paper he had ranged himself, he was really amused to think, on the side of the fierce, the sinister, the

acute. He was carrying on a correspondence, across the great city, quite in the key of the Postes et

Telegraphes in general; and it was fairly as if the acceptance of that fact had come from something in his state

that sorted with the occupation of his neighbours. He was mixed up with the typical tale of Paris, and so were

they, poor thingshow could they all together help being? They were no worse than he, in short, and he no

worse than they if, queerly enough, no better; and at all events he had settled his hash, so that he went out

to begin, from that moment, his day of waiting. The great settlement was, as he felt, in his preference for

seeing his correspondent in her own best conditions. THAT was part of the typical tale, the part most

significant in respect to himself. He liked the place she lived in, the picture that each time squared itself, large

and high and clear, around her: every occasion of seeing it was a pleasure of a different shade. Yet what

precisely was he doing with shades of pleasure now, and why hadn't he properly and logically compelled her

to commit herself to whatever of disadvantage and penalty the situation might throw up? He might have

proposed, as for Sarah Pocock, the cold hospitality of his own salon de lecture, in which the chill of Sarah's

visit seemed still to abide and shades of pleasure were dim; he might have suggested a stone bench in the

dusty Tuileries or a penny chair at the back part of the Champs Elysees. These things would have been a trifle

stern, and sternness alone now wouldn't be sinister. An instinct in him cast about for some form of discipline

in which they might meetsome awkwardness they would suffer from, some danger, or at least some grave

inconvenience, they would incur. This would give a sensewhich the spirit required, rather ached and

sighed in the absence ofthat somebody was paying something somewhere and somehow, that they were at

least not all floating together on the silver stream of impunity. Just instead of that to go and see her late in the

evening, as if, for all the worldwell, as if he were as much in the swim as anybody else: this had as little as

Even when he had felt that objection melt away, however, the practical difference was small; the long stretch

of his interval took the colour it would, and if he lived on thus with the sinister from hour to hour it proved an

easier thing than one might have supposed in advance. He reverted in thought to his old tradition, the one he

had been brought up on and which even so many years of life had but little worn away; the notion that the

state of the wrongdoer, or at least this person's happiness, presented some special difficulty. What struck him

now rather was the ease of it for nothing in truth appeared easier. It was an ease he himself fairly tasted of

for the rest of the day; giving himself quite up; not so much as trying to dress it out, in any particular

whatever, as a difficulty; not after all going to see Mariawhich would have been in a manner a result of

such dressing; only idling, lounging, smoking, sitting in the shade, drinking lemonade and consuming ices.

The day had turned to heat and eventual thunder, and he now and again went back to his hotel to find that

Chad hadn't been there. He hadn't yet struck himself, since leaving Woollett, so much as a loafer, though

there had been times when he believed himself touching bottom. This was a deeper depth than any, and with

no foresight, scarcely with a care, as to what he should bring up. He almost wondered if he didn't LOOK

demoralised and disreputable; he had the fanciful vision, as he sat and smoked, of some accidental, some

motived, return of the Pococks, who would be passing along the Boulevard and would catch this view of him.

They would have distinctly, on his appearance, every ground for scandal. But fate failed to administer even

that sternness; the Pococks never passed and Chad made no sign. Strether meanwhile continued to hold off

from Miss Gostrey, keeping her till tomorrow; so that by evening his irresponsibility, his impunity, his

Between nine and ten, at last, in the high clear picturehe was moving in these days, as in a gallery, from

clever canvas to clever canvashe drew a long breath: it was so presented to him from the first that the spell

of his luxury wouldn't be broken. He wouldn't have, that is, to become responsiblethis was admirably in

the air: she had sent for him precisely to let him feel it, so that he might go on with the comfort (comfort

already established, hadn't it been?) of regarding his ordeal, the ordeal of the weeks of Sarah's stay and of

their climax, as safely traversed and left behind him. Didn't she just wish to assure him that SHE now took it

all and so kept it; that he was absolutely not to worry any more, was only to rest on his laurels and continue

generously to help her? The light in her beautiful formal room was dim, though it would do, as everything

would always do; the hot night had kept out lamps, but there was a pair of clusters of candles that glimmered

over the chimneypiece like the tall tapers of an altar. The windows were all open, their redundant hangings

swaying a little, and he heard once more, from the empty court, the small plash of the fountain. From beyond

this, and as from a great distancebeyond the court, beyond the corps de logis forming the frontcame, as

if excited and exciting, the vague voice of Paris. Strether had all along been subject to sudden gusts of fancy

in connexion with such matters as theseodd starts of the historic sense, suppositions and divinations with

no warrant but their intensity. Thus and so, on the eve of the great recorded dates, the days and nights of

revolution, the sounds had come in, the omens, the beginnings broken out. They were the smell of revolution,

It was at present queer beyond words, "subtle," he would have risked saying, that such suggestions should

keep crossing the scene; but it was doubtless the effect of the thunder in the air, which had hung about all day

without release. His hostess was dressed as for thunderous times, and it fell in with the kind of imagination

we have just attributed to him that she should be in simplest coolest white, of a character so oldfashioned, if

he were not mistaken, that Madame Roland must on the scaffold have worn something like it. This effect was

enhanced by a small black fichu or scarf, of crape or gauze, disposed quaintly round her bosom and now

completing as by a mystic touch the pathetic, the noble analogy. Poor Strether in fact scarce knew what

analogy was evoked for him as the charming woman, receiving him and making him, as she could do such

things, at once familiarly and gravely welcome, moved over her great room with her image almost repeated in

its polished floor, which had been fully bared for summer. The associations of the place, all felt again; the

gleam here and there, in the subdued light, of glass and gilt and parquet, with the quietness of her own note as

the centrethese things were at first as delicate as if they had been ghostly, and he was sure in a moment

that, whatever he should find he had come for, it wouldn't be for an impression that had previously failed

him. That conviction held him from the outset, and, seeming singularly to simplify, certified to him that the

objects about would help him, would really help them both. No, he might never see them againthis was

only too probably the last time; and he should certainly see nothing in the least degree like them. He should

soon be going to where such things were not, and it would be a small mercy for memory, for fancy, to have,

in that stress, a loaf on the shelf. He knew in advance he should look back on the perception actually sharpest

with him as on the view of something old, old, old, the oldest thing he had ever personally touched; and he

also knew, even while he took his companion in as the feature among features, that memory and fancy

couldn't help being enlisted for her. She might intend what she would, but this was beyond anything she

could intend, with things from far backtyrannies of history, facts of type, values, as the painters said, of

expression all working for her and giving her the supreme chance, the chance of the happy, the really

luxurious few, the chance, on a great occasion, to be natural and simple. She had never, with him, been more

so; or if it was the perfection of art it would never and that came to the same thingbe proved against her.

What was truly wonderful was her way of differing so from time to time without detriment to her simplicity.

Caprices, he was sure she felt, were before anything else bad manners, and that judgement in her was by itself

a thing making more for safety of intercourse than anything that in his various own past intercourses he had

had to reckon on. If therefore her presence was now quite other than the one she had shown him the night

before, there was nothing of violence in the changeit was all harmony and reason. It gave him a mild deep

person, whereas he had had on the occasion to which their interview was a direct reference a person

committed to movement and surface and abounding in them; but she was in either character more remarkable

for nothing than for her bridging of intervals, and this now fell in with what he understood he was to leave to

her. The only thing was that, if he was to leave it ALL to her, why exactly had she sent for him? He had had,

vaguely, in advance, his explanation, his view of the probability of her wishing to set something right, to deal

in some way with the fraud so lately practised on his presumed credulity. Would she attempt to carry it

further or would she blot it out? Would she throw over it some more or less happy colour; or would she do

nothing about it at all? He perceived soon enough at least that, however reasonable she might be, she wasn't

vulgarly confused, and it herewith pressed upon him that their eminent "lie," Chad's and hers, was simply

after all such an inevitable tribute to good taste as he couldn't have wished them not to render. Away from

them, during his vigil, he had seemed to wince at the amount of comedy involved; whereas in his present

posture he could only ask himself how he should enjoy any attempt from her to take the comedy back. He

shouldn't enjoy it at all; but, once more and yet once more, he could trust her. That is he could trust her to

make deception right. As she presented things the uglinessgoodness knew why went out of them; none

the less too that she could present them, with an art of her own, by not so much as touching them. She let the

matter, at all events, lie where it waswhere the previous twentyfour hours had placed it; appearing merely

to circle about it respectfully, tenderly, almost piously, while she took up another question.

She knew she hadn't really thrown dust in his eyes; this, the previous night, before they separated, had

practically passed between them; and, as she had sent for him to see what the difference thus made for him

might amount to, so he was conscious at the end of five minutes that he had been tried and tested. She had

settled with Chad after he left them that she would, for her satisfaction, assure herself of this quantity, and

Chad had, as usual, let her have her way. Chad was always letting people have their way when he felt that it

would somehow turn his wheel for him; it somehow always did turn his wheel. Strether felt, oddly enough,

before these facts, freshly and consentingly passive; they again so rubbed it into him that the couple thus

fixing his attention were intimate, that his intervention had absolutely aided and intensified their intimacy,

and that in fine he must accept the consequence of that. He had absolutely become, himself, with his

perceptions and his mistakes, his concessions and his reserves, the droll mixture, as it must seem to them, of

his braveries and his fears, the general spectacle of his art and his innocence, almost an added link and

certainly a common priceless ground for them to meet upon. It was as if he had been hearing their very tone

when she brought out a reference that was comparatively straight. "The last twice that you've been here, you

know, I never asked you," she said with an abrupt transitionthey had been pretending before this to talk

simply of the charm of yesterday and of the interest of the country they had seen. The effort was confessedly

vain; not for such talk had she invited him; and her impatient reminder was of their having done for it all the

needful on his coming to her after Sarah's flight. What she hadn't asked him then was to state to her where

and how he stood for her; she had been resting on Chad's report of their midnight hour together in the

Boulevard Malesherbes. The thing therefore she at present desired was ushered in by this recall of the two

occasions on which, disinterested and merciful, she hadn't worried him. Tonight truly she WOULD worry

him, and this was her appeal to him to let her risk it. He wasn't to mind if she bored him a little: she had

"Oh, you're all right, you're all right," he almost impatiently declared; his impatience being moreover not for

her pressure, but for her scruple. More and more distinct to him was the tune to which she would have had the

matter out with Chad: more and more vivid for him the idea that she had been nervous as to what he might be

able to "stand." Yes, it had been a question if he had "stood" what the scene on the river had given him, and,

though the young man had doubtless opined in favour of his recuperation, her own last word must have been

that she should feel easier in seeing for herself. That was it, unmistakeably; she WAS seeing for herself. What

he could stand was thus, in these moments, in the balance for Strether, who reflected, as he became fully

aware of it, that he must properly brace himself. He wanted fully to appear to stand all he might; and there

was a certain command of the situation for him in this very wish not to look too much at sea. She was ready

with everything, but so, sufficiently, was he; that is he was at one point the more prepared of the two,

inasmuch as, for all her cleverness, she couldn't produce on the spotand it was surprisingan account of

the motive of her note. He had the advantage that his pronouncing her "all right" gave him for an enquiry.

"May I ask, delighted as I've been to come, if you've wished to say something special?" He spoke as if she

might have seen he had been waiting for itnot indeed with discomfort, but with natural interest. Then he

saw that she was a little taken aback, was even surprised herself at the detail she had neglected the only

one ever yet; having somehow assumed he would know, would recognise, would leave some things not to be

said. She looked at him, however, an instant as if to convey that if he wanted them ALL!

"Selfish and vulgarthat's what I must seem to you. You've done everything for me, and here I am as if I

were asking for more. But it isn't," she went on, "because I'm afraidthough I AM of course afraid, as a

woman in my position always is. I mean it isn't because one lives in terrorit isn't because of that one is

selfish, for I'm ready to give you my word tonight that I don't care; don't care what still may happen and

what I may lose. I don't ask you to raise your little finger for me again, nor do I wish so much as to mention

to you what we've talked of before, either my danger or my safety, or his mother, or his sister, or the girl he

may marry, or the fortune he may make or miss, or the right or the wrong, of any kind, he may do. If after the

help one has had from you one can't either take care of one's self or simply hold one's tongue, one must

renounce all claim to be an object of interest. It's in the name of what I DO care about that I've tried still to

keep hold of you. How can I be indifferent," she asked, "to how I appear to you?" And as he found himself

unable immediately to say: "Why, if you're going, NEED you, after all? Is it impossible you should stay

"Not 'with' us, if you object to that, but near enough to us, somewhere, for us to see youwell," she

beautifully brought out, "when we feel we MUST. How shall we not sometimes feel it? I've wanted to see

you often when I couldn't," she pursued, "all these last weeks. How shan't I then miss you now, with the sense

of your being gone forever?" Then as if the straightness of this appeal, taking him unprepared, had visibly left

him wondering: "Where IS your 'home' moreover nowwhat has become of it? I've made a change in your

life, I know I have; I've upset everything in your mind as well; in your sense ofwhat shall I call it?all the

decencies and possibilities. It gives me a kind of detestation" She pulled up short.

"Too little, precisely"she was eager. "What I hate is myself when I think that one has to take so much,

to be happy, out of the lives of others, and that one isn't happy even then. One does it to cheat one's self and

to stop one's mouthbut that's only at the best for a little. The wretched self is always there, always making

one somehow a fresh anxiety. What it comes to is that it's not, that it's never, a happiness, any happiness at

all, to TAKE. The only safe thing is to give. It's what plays you least false." Interesting, touching, strikingly

sincere as she let these things come from her, she yet puzzled and troubled himso fine was the quaver of

her quietness. He felt what he had felt before with her, that there was always more behind what she showed,

and more and more again behind that. "You know so, at least," she added, "where you are!"

"YOU ought to know it indeed then; for isn't what you've been giving exactly what has brought us together

this way? You've been making, as I've so fully let you know I've felt," Strether said, "the most precious

present I've ever seen made, and if you can't sit down peacefully on that performance you ARE, no doubt,

"And not trouble you any more, no doubtnot thrust on you even the wonder and the beauty of what I've

done; only let you regard our business as over, and well over, and see you depart in a peace that matches my

own? No doubt, no doubt, no doubt," she nervously repeated"all the more that I don't really pretend I

believe you couldn't, for yourself, NOT have done what you have. I don't pretend you feel yourself

victimised, for this evidently is the way you live, and it's whatwe're agreedis the best way. Yes, as you

say," she continued after a moment, "I ought to be easy and rest on my work. Well then here am I doing so. I

AM easy. You'll have it for your last impression. When is it you say you go?" she asked with a quick change.

He took some time to replyhis last impression was more and more so mixed a one. It produced in him a

vague disappointment, a drop that was deeper even than the fall of his elation the previous night. The good of

what he had done, if he had done so much, wasn't there to enliven him quite to the point that would have been

ideal for a grand gay finale. Women were thus endlessly absorbent, and to deal with them was to walk on

water. What was at bottom the matter with her, embroider as she might and disclaim as she might what

was at bottom the matter with her was simply Chad himself. It was of Chad she was after all renewedly

afraid; the strange strength of her passion was the very strength of her fear; she clung to HIM, Lambert

Strether, as to a source of safety she had tested, and, generous graceful truthful as she might try to be,

exquisite as she was, she dreaded the term of his being within reach. With this sharpest perception yet, it was

like a chill in the air to him, it was almost appalling, that a creature so fine could be, by mysterious forces, a

creature so exploited. For at the end of all things they WERE mysterious: she had but made Chad what he

wasso why could she think she had made him infinite? She had made him better, she had made him best,

she had made him anything one would; but it came to our friend with supreme queerness that he was none the

less only Chad. Strether had the sense that HE, a little, had made him too; his high appreciation had as it

were, consecrated her work The work, however admirable, was nevertheless of the strict human order, and in

short it was marvellous that the companion of mere earthly joys, of comforts, aberrations (however one

classed them) within the common experience should be so transcendently prized. It might have made Strether

hot or shy, as such secrets of others brought home sometimes do make us; but he was held there by

something so hard that it was fairly grim. This was not the discomposure of last night; that had quite

passedsuch discomposures were a detail; the real coercion was to see a man ineffably adored. There it was

againit took women, it took women; if to deal with them was to walk on water what wonder that the water

rose? And it had never surely risen higher than round this woman. He presently found himself taking a long

look from her, and the next thing he knew he had uttered all his thought. "You're afraid for your life!"

It drew out her long look, and he soon enough saw why. A spasm came into her face, the tears she had

already been unable to hide overflowed at first in silence, and then, as the sound suddenly comes from a

child, quickened to gasps, to sobs. She sat and covered her face with her hands, giving up all attempt at a

manner. "It's how you see me, it's how you see me"she caught her breath with it"and it's as I AM, and as

I must take myself, and of course it's no matter." Her emotion was at first so incoherent that he could only

stand there at a loss, stand with his sense of having upset her, though of having done it by the truth. He had to

listen to her in a silence that he made no immediate effort to attenuate, feeling her doubly woeful amid all her

dim diffused elegance; consenting to it as he had consented to the rest, and even conscious of some vague

inward irony in the presence of such a fine free range of bliss and bale. He couldn't say it was NOT no

matter; for he was serving her to the end, he now knew, anyway quite as if what he thought of her had

nothing to do with it. It was actually moreover as if he didn't think of her at all, as if he could think of nothing

but the passion, mature, abysmal, pitiful, she represented, and the possibilities she betrayed. She was older for

him tonight, visibly less exempt from the touch of time; but she was as much as ever the finest and subtlest

creature, the happiest apparition, it had been given him, in all his years, to meet; and yet he could see her

there as vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as a maidservant crying for her young man. The only thing was that

she judged herself as the maidservant wouldn't; the weakness of which wisdom too, the dishonour of which

judgement, seemed but to sink her lower. Her collapse, however, no doubt, was briefer and she had in a

manner recovered herself before he intervened. "Of course I'm afraid for my life. But that's nothing. It isn't

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

But she threw off at last, with a sharp sad headshake, drying her eyes, what he could still do. "I don't care for

that. Of course, as I've said, you're acting, in your wonderful way, for yourself; and what's for yourself is no

more my businessthough I may reach out unholy hands so clumsily to touch itthan if it were something

in Timbuctoo. It's only that you don't snub me, as you've had fifty chances to doit's only your beautiful

patience that makes one forget one's manners. In spite of your patience, all the same," she went on, "you'd do

anything rather than be with us here, even if that were possible. You'd do everything for us but be mixed up

with uswhich is a statement you can easily answer to the advantage of your own manners. You can say

'What's the use of talking of things that at the best are impossible?' What IS of course the use? It's only my

little madness. You'd talk if you were tormented. And I don't mean now about HIM. Oh for him!"

Positively, strangely, bitterly, as it seemed to Strether, she gave "him," for the moment, away. "You don't care

what I think of you; but I happen to care what you think of me. And what you MIGHT," she added. "What

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

"That's perfectly false, I believe," she returned"except that you may, no doubt, often pull up when things

become TOO ugly; or even, I'll say, to save you a protest, too beautiful. At any rate, even so far as it's true,

we've thrust on you appearances that you've had to take in and that have therefore made your obligation. Ugly

or beautifulit doesn't matter what we call themyou were getting on without them, and that's where we're

detestable. We bore youthat's where we are. And we may wellfor what we've cost you. All you can do

NOW is not to think at all. And I who should have liked to seem to youwell, sublime!"

"I'm old and abject and hideous"she went on as without hearing him. "Abject above all. Or old above all.

It's when one's old that it's worst. I don't care what becomes of itlet what WILL; there it is. It's a doomI

know it; you can't see it more than I do myself. Things have to happen as they will." With which she came

back again to what, face to face with him, had so quite broken down. "Of course you wouldn't, even if

possible, and no matter what may happen to you, be near us. But think of me, think of me!" She exhaled it

He took refuge in repeating something he had already said and that she had made nothing of. "There's

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

She shook her head. "There's not a grain of certainty in my futurefor the only certainty is that I shall be the

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

"What's cheerful for ME," she replied, "is that we might, you and I, have been friends. That's itthat's it.

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

His purpose had been to see Chad the next day, and he had prefigured seeing him by an early call; having in

general never stood on ceremony in respect to visits at the Boulevard Malesherbes. It had been more often

natural for him to go there than for Chad to come to the small hotel, the attractions of which were scant; yet it

nevertheless, just now, at the eleventh hour, did suggest itself to Strether to begin by giving the young man a

chance. It struck him that, in the inevitable course, Chad would be "round," as Waymarsh used to say

Waymarsh who already, somehow, seemed long ago. He hadn't come the day before, because it had been

arranged between them that Madame de Vionnet should see their friend first; but now that this passage had

taken place he would present himself, and their friend wouldn't have long to wait. Strether assumed, he

became aware, on this reasoning, that the interesting parties to the arrangement would have met betimes, and

that the more interesting of the twoas she was after allwould have communicated to the other the issue

of her appeal. Chad would know without delay that his mother's messenger had been with her, and, though it

was perhaps not quite easy to see how she could qualify what had occurred, he would at least have been

sufficiently advised to feel he could go on. The day, however, brought, early or late, no word from him, and

Strether felt, as a result of this, that a change had practically come over their intercourse. It was perhaps a

premature judgement; or it only meant perhapshow could he tell?that the wonderful pair he protected

had taken up again together the excursion he had accidentally checked. They might have gone back to the

country, and gone back but with a long breath drawn; that indeed would best mark Chad's sense that

reprobation hadn't rewarded Madame de Vionnet's request for an interview. At the end of the twentyfour

hours, at the end of the fortyeight, there was still no overture; so that Strether filled up the time, as he had so

He proposed amusements to her; he felt expert now in proposing amusements; and he had thus, for several

days, an odd sense of leading her about Paris, of driving her in the Bois, of showing her the penny

steamboatsthose from which the breeze of the Seine was to be best enjoyedthat might have belonged to

a kindly uncle doing the honours of the capital to an Intelligent niece from the country. He found means even

to take her to shops she didn't know, or that she pretended she didn't; while she, on her side, was, like the

country maiden, all passive modest and grateful going in fact so far as to emulate rusticity in occasional

fatigues and bewilderments. Strether described these vague proceedings to himself, described them even to

her, as a happy interlude; the sign of which was that the companions said for the time no further word about

the matter they had talked of to satiety. He proclaimed satiety at the outset, and she quickly took the hint; as

docile both in this and in everything else as the intelligent obedient niece. He told her as yet nothing of his

late adventurefor as an adventure it now ranked with him; he pushed the whole business temporarily aside

and found his interest in the fact of her beautiful assent. She left questions unaskedshe who for so long had

been all questions; she gave herself up to him with an understanding of which mere mute gentleness might

have seemed the sufficient expression. She knew his sense of his situation had taken still another stepof

that he was quite aware; but she conveyed that, whatever had thus happened for him, it was thrown into the

shade by what was happening for herself. Thisthough it mightn't to a detached spirit have seemed

muchwas the major interest, and she met it with a new directness of response, measuring it from hour to

hour with her grave hush of acceptance. Touched as he had so often been by her before, he was, for his part

too, touched afresh; all the more that though he could be duly aware of the principle of his own mood he

couldn't be equally so of the principle of hers. He knew, that is, in a mannerknew roughly and

resignedlywhat he himself was hatching; whereas he had to take the chance of what he called to himself

Maria's calculations. It was all he needed that she liked him enough for what they were doing, and even

should they do a good deal more would still like him enough for that; the essential freshness of a relation so

simple was a cool bath to the soreness produced by other relations. These others appeared to him now

horribly complex; they bristled with fine points, points all unimaginable beforehand, points that pricked and

drew blood; a fact that gave to an hour with his present friend on a bateaumouche, or in the afternoon shade

of the Champs Elysees, something of the innocent pleasure of handling rounded ivory. His relation with Chad

personallyfrom the moment he had got his point of viewhad been of the simplest; yet this also struck

him as bristling, after a third and a fourth blank day had passed. It was as if at last however his care for such

indications had dropped; there came a fifth blank day and he ceased to enquire or to heed.

They now took on to his fancy, Miss Gostrey and he, the image of the Babes in the Wood; they could trust

the merciful elements to let them continue at peace. He had been great already, as he knew, at postponements;

but he had only to get afresh into the rhythm of one to feel its fine attraction. It amused him to say to himself

that he might for all the world have been going to diedie resignedly; the scene was filled for him with so

deep a deathbed hush, so melancholy a charm. That meant the postponement of everything else which

made so for the quiet lapse of life; and the postponement in especial of the reckoning to comeunless indeed

the reckoning to come were to be one and the same thing with extinction. It faced him, the reckoning, over

the shoulder of much interposing experience which also faced him; and one would float to it doubtless

duly through these caverns of Kubla Khan. It was really behind everything; it hadn't merged in what he had

done; his final appreciation of what he had donehis appreciation on the spotwould provide it with its

main sharpness. The spot so focussed was of course Woollett, and he was to see, at the best, what Woollett

would be with everything there changed for him. Wouldn't THAT revelation practically amount to the

windup of his career? Well, the summer's end would show; his suspense had meanwhile exactly the

sweetness of vain delay; and he had with it, we should mention, other pastimes than Maria's

companyplenty of separate musings in which his luxury failed him but at one point. He was well in port,

the outer sea behind him, and it was only a matter of getting ashore. There was a question that came and went

for him, however, as he rested against the side of his ship, and it was a little to get rid of the obsession that he

prolonged his hours with Miss Gostrey. It was a question about himself, but it could only be settled by seeing

Chad again; it was indeed his principal reason for wanting to see Chad. After that it wouldn't signifyit was

a ghost that certain words would easily lay to rest. Only the young man must be there to take the words. Once

they were taken he wouldn't have a question left; none, that is, in connexion with this particular affair. It

wouldn't then matter even to himself that he might now have been guilty of speaking BECAUSE of what he

had forfeited. That was the refinement of his supreme scruplehe wished so to leave what he had forfeited

out of account. He wished not to do anything because he had missed something else, because he was sore or

sorry or impoverished, because he was maltreated or desperate; he wished to do everything because he was

lucid and quiet, just the same for himself on all essential points as he had ever been. Thus it was that while he

virtually hung about for Chad he kept mutely putting it: "You've been chucked, old boy; but what has that to

These tints of feeling indeed were doubtless but the iridescence of his idleness, and they were presently lost

in a new light from Maria. She had a fresh fact for him before the week was out, and she practically met him

with it on his appearing one night. He hadn't on this day seen her, but had planned presenting himself in due

course to ask her to dine with him somewhere out of doors, on one of the terraces, in one of the gardens, of

which the Paris of summer was profuse. It had then come on to rain, so that, disconcerted, he changed his

mind; dining alone at home, a little stuffily and stupidly, and waiting on her afterwards to make up his loss.

He was sure within a minute that something had happened; it was so in the air of the rich little room that he

had scarcely to name his thought. Softly lighted, the whole colour of the place, with its vague values, was in

cool fusionan effect that made the visitor stand for a little agaze. It was as if in doing so now he had felt a

recent presencehis recognition of the passage of which his hostess in turn divined. She had scarcely to say

it"Yes, she has been here, and this time I received her." It wasn't till a minute later that she added: "There

"I've certainly so far done it," Strether said, "as that you needn't fear the effect, or the appearance of coming

between us. There's nothing between us now but what we ourselves have put there, and not an inch of room

for anything else whatever. Therefore you're only beautifully WITH us as alwaysthough doubtless now, if

she has talked to you, rather more with us than less. Of course if she came," he added, "it was to talk to you."

"It was to talk to me," Maria returned; on which he was further sure that she was practically in possession of

what he himself hadn't yet told her. He was even sure she was in possession of things he himself couldn't

have told; for the consciousness of them was now all in her face and accompanied there with a shade of

sadness that marked in her the close of all uncertainties. It came out for him more than ever yet that she had

had from the first a knowledge she believed him not to have had, a knowledge the sharp acquisition of which

might be destined to make a difference for him. The difference for him might not inconceivably be an arrest

of his independence and a change in his attitudein other words a revulsion in favour of the principles of

Woollett. She had really prefigured the possibility of a shock that would send him swinging back to Mrs.

Newsome. He hadn't, it was true, week after week, shown signs of receiving it, but the possibility had been

none the less in the air. What Maria accordingly had had now to take in was that the shock had descended and

that he hadn't, all the same, swung back. He had grown clear, in a flash, on a point long since settled for

herself; but no reapproximation to Mrs. Newsome had occurred in consequence. Madame de Vionnet had by

her visit held up the torch to these truths, and what now lingered in poor Maria's face was the somewhat

smoky light of the scene between them. If the light however wasn't, as we have hinted, the glow of joy, the

reasons for this also were perhaps discernible to Strether even through the blur cast over them by his natural

modesty. She had held herself for months with a firm hand; she hadn't interfered on any chanceand

chances were specious enoughthat she might interfere to her profit. She had turned her back on the dream

that Mrs. Newsome's rupture, their friend's forfeiturethe engagement the relation itself, broken beyond all

mendingmight furnish forth her advantage; and, to stay her hand from promoting these things, she had on

private, difficult, but rigid, lines, played strictly fair. She couldn't therefore but feel that, though, as the end of

all, the facts in question had been stoutly confirmed, her ground for personal, for what might have been called

interested, elation remained rather vague. Strether might easily have made out that she had been asking

herself, in the hours she had just sat through, if there were still for her, or were only not, a fair shade of

uncertainty. Let us hasten to add, however, that what he at first made out on this occasion he also at first kept

to himself. He only asked what in particular Madame de Vionnet had come for, and as to this his companion

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

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

"Then I've not seen him for a weekand of course I've wondered." His wonderment showed at this moment

as sharper, but he presently went on. "Still, I dare say I can put my hand on him. Did she strike you," he

"After all I've done for her?" And he had one of the last flickers of his occasional mild mirth. "To think that

She looked at him a little. "What woman was EVER safe? She told me," she addedand it was as if at the

touch of the connexion "of your extraordinary meeting in the country. After that a quoi se fier?"

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

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

"Oh you'll get him back. But now you know," she said, "why I went to Mentone." He had sufficiently let her

see that he had by this time gathered things together, but there was nature in her wish to make them clearer

"The question of what you were at lasta week agoto see for yourself. I didn't want to have to lie for her.

I felt that to be too much for me. A man of course is always expected to do it to do it, I mean, for a

woman; but not a woman for another woman; unless perhaps on the titfortat principle, as an indirect way

of protecting herself. I don't need protection, so that I was free to 'funk' yousimply to dodge your test. The

responsibility was too much for me. I gained time, and when I came back the need of a test had blown over."

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

"Well," said Strether, "it was but a technical liehe classed the attachment as virtuous. That was a view for

which there was much to be saidand the virtue came out for me hugely There was of course a great deal of

"What I see, what I saw," Maria returned, "is that you dressed up even the virtue. You were wonderfulyou

were beautiful, as I've had the honour of telling you before; but, if you wish really to know," she sadly

confessed, "I never quite knew WHERE you were. There were moments," she explained, "when you struck

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

She considered him with one of her deep returns of indulgence returns out of all proportion to the

"You're always too personal," he goodhumouredly said; "but that's precisely how I wondered and

"If you mean," she went on, "that she was from the first for you the most charming woman in the world,

"Well, it was all not a fixed quantity. And it had for meit has stillsuch elements of strangeness. Her

greater age than his, her different world, traditions, association; her other opportunities, liabilities, standards."

His friend listened with respect to his enumeration of these disparities; then she disposed of them at a stroke.

Strether, on his side, did justice to that plea. "Oh of course I saw she was hit. That she was hit was what we

were busy with; that she was hit was our great affair. But somehow I couldn't think of her as down in the

Strether admitted it. "Of course I moved among miracles. It was all phantasmagoric. But the great fact was

that so much of it was none of my businessas I saw my business. It isn't even now."

His companion turned away on this, and it might well have been yet again with the sharpness of a fear of how

"Nonot Mrs. Newsome; since I understand you that it doesn't matter now what Mrs. Newsome hears.

"Practicallyyes." He had thought a moment, but he went on. "You wish Madame de Vionnet could hear

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

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

"Might have known you don't?" Miss Gostrey asked as he let it drop. "She was sure of it at first," she pursued

as he said nothing; "she took it for granted, at least, as any woman in her position would. But after that she

"Why in her sublimity. And that belief had remained with her, I make out, till the accident of the other day

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

"Then they WERE closed? There you are! However, if you see her as the most charming woman in the world

it comes to the same thing. And if you'd like me to tell her that you do still so see her!" Miss Gostrey, in

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

"Not favourably enough, she mentioned to me, to wish ever to see her again. She told me you had taken a

Maria had a pause; then she spoke as if for conscience. "She wouldn't have done with YOU. She feels she has

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

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

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

It made her think a momentmade her even speak with a smile. But she didn't really retract. "I'm sorry for

He was to delay no longer to reestablish communication with Chad, and we have just seen that he had

spoken to Miss Gostrey of this intention on hearing from her of the young man's absence. It was not

moreover only the assurance so given that prompted him; it was the need of causing his conduct to square

with another profession stillthe motive he had described to her as his sharpest for now getting away. If he

was to get away because of some of the relations involved in staying, the cold attitude toward them might

look pedantic in the light of lingering on. He must do both things; he must see Chad, but he must go. The

more he thought of the former of these duties the more he felt himself make a subject of insistence of the

latter. They were alike intensely present to him as he sat in front of a quiet little cafe into which he had

dropped on quitting Maria's entresol. The rain that had spoiled his evening with her was over; for it was still

to him as if his evening HAD been spoiledthough it mightn't have been wholly the rain. It was late when

he left the cafe, yet not too late; he couldn't in any case go straight to bed, and he would walk round by the

Boulevard Malesherbesrather far roundon his way home. Present enough always was the small

circumstance that had originally pressed for him the spring of so big a differencethe accident of little

Bilham's appearance on the balcony of the mystic troisieme at the moment of his first visit, and the effect of it

on his sense of what was then before him. He recalled his watch, his wait, and the recognition that had

proceeded from the young stranger, that had played frankly into the air and had presently brought him

upthings smoothing the way for his first straight step. He had since had occasion, a few times, to pass the

house without going in; but he had never passed it without again feeling how it had then spoken to him. He

stopped short tonight on coming to sight of it: it was as if his last day were oddly copying his first. The

windows of Chad's apartment were open to the balcony a pair of them lighted; and a figure that had come

out and taken up little Bilham's attitude, a figure whose cigarettespark he could see leaned on the rail and

looked down at him. It denoted however no reappearance of his younger friend; it quickly defined itself in the

tempered darkness as Chad's more solid shape; so that Chad's was the attention that after he had stepped

forward into the street and signalled, he easily engaged; Chad's was the voice that, sounding into the night

That the young man had been visible there just in this position expressed somehow for Strether that, as Maria

Gostrey had reported, he had been absent and silent; and our friend drew breath on each landingthe lift, at

that hour, having ceased to workbefore the implications of the fact. He had been for a week intensely

away, away to a distance and alone; but he was more back than ever, and the attitude in which Strether had

surprised him was something more than a returnit was clearly a conscious surrender. He had arrived but an

hour before, from London, from Lucerne, from Homburg, from no matter wherethough the visitor's fancy,

on the staircase, liked to fill it out; and after a bath, a talk with Baptiste and a supper of light cold clever

French things, which one could see the remains of there in the circle of the lamp, pretty and ultraParisian, he

had come into the air again for a smoke, was occupied at the moment of Strether's approach in what might

have been called taking up his life afresh. His life, his life!Strether paused anew, on the last flight, at this

final rather breathless sense of what Chad's life was doing with Chad's mother's emissary. It was dragging

him, at strange hours, up the staircases of the rich; it was keeping him out of bed at the end of long hot days;

it was transforming beyond recognition the simple, subtle, conveniently uniform thing that had anciently

passed with him for a life of his own. Why should it concern him that Chad was to be fortified in the pleasant

practice of smoking on balconies, of supping on salads, of feeling his special conditions agreeably reaffirm

themselves, of finding reassurance in comparisons and contrasts? There was no answer to such a question but

that he was still practically committedhe had perhaps never yet so much known it. It made him feel old,

and he would buy his railwayticketfeeling, no doubt, olderthe next day; but he had meanwhile come

up four flights, counting the entresol, at midnight and without a lift, for Chad's life. The young man, hearing

him by this time, and with Baptiste sent to rest, was already at the door; so that Strether had before him in full

visibility the cause in which he was labouring and even, with the troisieme fairly gained, panting a little.

Chad offered him, as always, a welcome in which the cordial and the formalso far as the formal was the

respectfulhandsomely met; and after he had expressed a hope that he would let him put him up for the

night Strether was in full possession of the key, as it might have been called, to what had lately happened. If

he had just thought of himself as old Chad was at sight of him thinking of him as older: he wanted to put him

up for the night just because he was ancient and weary. It could never be said the tenant of these quarters

wasn't nice to him; a tenant who, if he might indeed now keep him, was probably prepared to work it all still

more thoroughly. Our friend had in fact the impression that with the minimum of encouragement Chad would

propose to keep him indefinitely; an impression in the lap of which one of his own possibilities seemed to sit.

Madame de Vionnet had wished him to stayso why didn't that happily fit? He could enshrine himself for

the rest of his days in his young host's chambre d'ami and draw out these days at his young host's expense:

there could scarce be greater logical expression of the countenance he had been moved to give. There was

literally a minuteit was strange enoughduring which he grasped the idea that as he WAS acting, as he

could only act, he was inconsistent. The sign that the inward forces he had obeyed really hung together would

be thatin default always of another careerhe should promote the good cause by mounting guard on it.

These things, during his first minutes, came and went; but they were after all practically disposed of as soon

as he had mentioned his errand. He had come to say goodbyeyet that was only a part; so that from the

moment Chad accepted his farewell the question of a more ideal affirmation gave way to something else. He

proceeded with the rest of his business. "You'll be a brute, you knowyou'll be guilty of the last infamyif

That, uttered there at the solemn hour, uttered in the place that was full of her influence, was the rest of his

business; and when once he had heard himself say it he felt that his message had never before been spoken. It

placed his present call immediately on solid ground, and the effect of it was to enable him quite to play with

what we have called the key. Chad showed no shade of embarrassment, but had none the less been troubled

for him after their meeting in the country; had had fears and doubts on the subject of his comfort. He was

disturbed, as it were, only FOR him, and had positively gone away to ease him off, to let him down if it

wasn't indeed rather to screw him upthe more gently. Seeing him now fairly jaded he had come, with

characteristic good humour, all the way to meet him, and what Strether thereupon supremely made out was

that he would abound for him to the end in conscientious assurances. This was what was between them while

the visitor remained; so far from having to go over old ground he found his entertainer keen to agree to

everything. It couldn't be put too strongly for him that he'd be a brute. "Oh rather!if I should do anything of

"I want it," said Strether, "to be my last word of all to you. I can't say more, you know; and I don't see how I

"She'd have cleared up your doubt?" Chad understood"rather" again! It even kept him briefly silent. But

"She WAS," Strether candidly admittedall of which practically told as a reference to the conditions created

They appeared for a little to be looking back at it; and that came out still more in what Chad next said. "I

don't know what you've really thought, all along; I never did knowfor anything, with you, seemed to be

possible. But of courseof course" Without confusion, quite with nothing but indulgence, he broke down,

he pulled up. "After all, you understand. I spoke to you originally only as I HAD to speak. There's only one

wayisn't there?about such things. However," he smiled with a final philosophy, "I see it's all right."

Strether met his eyes with a sense of multiplying thoughts. What was it that made him at present, late at night

and after journeys, so renewedly, so substantially young? Strether saw in a moment what it wasit was that

he was younger again than Madame de Vionnet. He himself said immediately none of the things that he was

thinking; he said something quite different. "You HAVE really been to a distance?"

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

Strether wanted no more factshe only wanted to justify, as it were, his question. "Of course you do as

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

Strether's easy answer for this was that it was a disposition he had exactly come to profit by. "Even at the risk

Chad took it in. "Oh yesfor us to make if possible a still better impression." And he stood there happily

exhaling his full general consciousness. "I'm delighted to gather that you feel we've made it."

There was a pleasant irony in the words, which his guest, preoccupied and keeping to the point, didn't take

up. "If I had my sense of wanting the rest of the timethe time of their being still on this side," he continued

He was as grave, as distinct, as a demonstrator before a blackboard, and Chad continued to face him like an

Strether again, for a moment, said nothing; he turned his eyes away, and they lost themselves, through the

open window, in the dusky outer air. "I shall learn from the Bank here where they're now having their letters,

and my last word, which I shall write in the morning and which they're expecting as my ultimatum, will so

immediately reach them." The light of his plural pronoun was sufficiently reflected in his companion's face as

he again met it; and he completed his demonstration. He pursued indeed as if for himself. "Of course I've first

"It's not a question of advising you not to go," Strether said, "but of absolutely preventing you, if possible,

from so much as thinking of it. Let me accordingly appeal to you by all you hold sacred."

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

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

Strether didn't quite know either, and such impressions, for the imaginative mind, were always too fine, too

floating, to produce on the spot their warrant. There was none the less for him, in the very manner of his

host's allusion to satiety as a thinkable motive, a slight breath of the ominous. "I feel how much more she can

Chad had kept smiling, but its effect in Strether was a shade of dryness. "Don't leave her BEFORE. When

you've got all that can be gotI don't say," he added a trifle grimly. "That will be the proper time. But as, for

you, from such a woman, there will always be something to be got, my remark's not a wrong to her." Chad let

him go on, showing every decent deference, showing perhaps also a candid curiosity for this sharper accent.

The response was as prompt as if he had pressed a spring; it had a ready abundance at which he even winced;

so that he took a moment to meet it. "You certainly then wouldn't have seemed worth all you've let me in for.

"If one SHOULD wish to live on one's accumulations?" After which, however, as his friend appeared cold to

the joke, the young man as easily dropped it. "Of course I really never forget, night or day, what I owe her. I

owe her everything. I give you my word of honour," he frankly rang out, "that I'm not a bit tired of her."

Strether at this only gave him a stare: the way youth could express itself was again and again a wonder. He

meant no harm, though he might after all be capable of much; yet he spoke of being "tired" of her almost as

he might have spoken of being tired of roast mutton for dinner. "She has never for a moment yet bored me

never been wanting, as the cleverest women sometimes are, in tact. She has never talked about her tactas

even they too sometimes talk; but she has always had it. She has never had it more"he handsomely made

the point"than just lately." And he scrupulously went further. "She has never been anything I could call a

Strether for a moment said nothing; then he spoke gravely, with his shade of dryness deepened. "Oh if you

Strether devoted no time to saying what he would be; THAT, visibly, would take them far. If there was

nothing for it but to repeat, however, repetition was no mistake. "You owe her everythingvery much more

than she can ever owe you. You've in other words duties to her, of the most positive sort; and I don't see what

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

"Much of ityesand to the best of my ability. But not allfrom the moment your sister took my place."

"She didn't," Chad returned. "Sally took a place, certainly; but it was never, I saw from the first moment, to

"Ah of course," sighed Strether, "I knew it. I believe you're right. No one in the world, I imagine, was ever so

portentously solemn. There I am," he added with another sigh, as if weary enough, on occasion, of this truth.

Chad appeared for a little to consider the way he was made; he might for this purpose have measured him up

and down. His conclusion favoured the fact. "YOU have never needed any one to make you better. There has

"'Two'?"Chad stared and laughed. "Oh I don't believe, for such work, in any more than one! So you're

proving too much. And what IS beastly, at all events," he added, "is losing you."

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

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

"Yes, you spoil us for all the stupid!" This might have been, on Chad's part, in its extreme emphasis,

almost too freely extravagant; but it was full, plainly enough, of the intention of comfort, it carried with it a

protest against doubt and a promise, positively, of performance. Picking up a hat in the vestibule he came out

with his friend, came downstairs, took his arm, affectionately, as to help and guide him, treating him if not

exactly as aged and infirm, yet as a noble eccentric who appealed to tenderness, and keeping on with him,

while they walked, to the next corner and the next. "You needn't tell me, you needn't tell me!"this again as

they proceeded, he wished to make Strether feel. What he needn't tell him was now at last, in the geniality of

separation, anything at all it concerned him to know. He knew, up to the hiltthat really came over Chad; he

understood, felt, recorded his vow; and they lingered on it as they had lingered in their walk to Strether's

hotel the night of their first meeting. The latter took, at this hour, all he could get; he had given all he had had

to give; he was as depleted as if he had spent his last sou. But there was just one thing for which, before they

broke off, Chad seemed disposed slightly to bargain. His companion needn't, as he said, tell him, but he

might himself mention that he had been getting some news of the art of advertisement. He came out quite

suddenly with this announcement while Strether wondered if his revived interest were what had taken him,

with strange inconsequence, over to London. He appeared at all events to have been looking into the question

and had encountered a revelation. Advertising scientifically worked presented itself thus as the great new

They were face to face under the streetlamp as they had been the first night, and Strether, no doubt, looked

"Yesbut affects it extraordinarily; really beyond what one had supposed. I mean of course when it's done

as one makes out that in our roaring age, it CAN be done. I've been finding out a little, though it doubtless

doesn't amount to much more than what you originally, so awfully vividlyand all, very nearly, that first

nightput before me. It's an art like another, and infinite like all the arts." He went on as if for the joke of

italmost as if his friend's face amused him. "In the hands, naturally, of a master. The right man must take

Strether had watched him quite as if, there on the pavement without a pretext, he had begun to dance a fancy

step. "Is what you're thinking of that you yourself, in the case you have in mind, would be the right man?"

Chad had thrown back his light coat and thrust each of his thumbs into an armhole of his waistcoat; in which

position his fingers played up and down. "Why, what is he but what you yourself, as I say, took me for when

Strether felt a little faint, but he coerced his attention. "Oh yes, and there's no doubt that, with your natural

parts, you'd have much in common with him. Advertising is clearly at this time of day the secret of trade. It's

quite possible it will be open to you giving the whole of your mind to itto make the whole place hum

with you. Your mother's appeal is to the whole of your mind, and that's exactly the strength of her case."

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

"Only because it was part of our original discussion. To wind up where we began, my interest's purely

platonic. There at any rate the fact isthe fact of the possible. I mean the money in it."

"Oh damn the money in it!" said Strether. And then as the young man's fixed smile seemed to shine out more

Chad preserved his handsome grimace as well as the rest of his attitude. "You're not altogetherin your so

great 'solemnity' kind. Haven't I been drinking you inshowing you all I feel you're worth to me? What

have I done, what am I doing, but cleave to her to the death? The only thing is," he goodhumouredly

explained, "that one can't but have it before one, in the cleaving the point where the death comes in. Don't

be afraid for THAT. It's pleasant to a fellow's feelings," he developed, "to 'sizeup' the bribe he applies his

"Good. Then there it goes!" Chad administered his kick with fantastic force and sent an imaginary object

flying. It was accordingly as if they were once more rid of the question and could come back to what really

But Strether scarce heeded the plan proposed for this; he had still the impressionnot the slighter for the

He had, however, within two days, another separation to face. He had sent Maria Gostrey a word early, by

hand, to ask if he might come to breakfast; in consequence of which, at noon, she awaited him in the cool

shade of her little Dutchlooking diningroom. This retreat was at the back of the house, with a view of a

scrap of old garden that had been saved from modern ravage; and though he had on more than one other

occasion had his legs under its small and peculiarly polished table of hospitality, the place had never before

struck him as so sacred to pleasant knowledge, to intimate charm, to antique order, to a neatness that was

almost august. To sit there was, as he had told his hostess before, to see life reflected for the time in ideally

kept pewter; which was somehow becoming, improving to life, so that one's eyes were held and comforted.

Strether's were comforted at all events nowand the more that it was the last timewith the charming

effect, on the board bare of a cloth and proud of its perfect surface, of the small old crockery and old silver,

matched by the more substantial pieces happily disposed about the room. The specimens of vivid Delf, in

particular had the dignity of family portraits; and it was in the midst of them that our friend resignedly

expressed himself. He spoke even with a certain philosophic humour. "There's nothing more to wait for; I

seem to have done a good day's work. I've let them have it all round. I've seen Chad, who has been to London

and come back. He tells me I'm 'exciting,' and I seem indeed pretty well to have upset every one. I've at any

"Oh you were that when I found you. It seems to me I've rather got you out of it. What's this," he asked as he

"I wish with all my heart," she presently replied, "I could make you treat it as a haven of rest." On which they

Strether seemed, in his way, when he next spoke, to take some of them up. "It wouldn't give methat would

be the troublewhat it will, no doubt, still give you. I'm not," he explained, leaning back in his chair, but

with his eyes on a small ripe round melon "in real harmony with what surrounds me. You ARE. I take it

too hard. You DON'T. It makesthat's what it comes to in the enda fool of me." Then at a tangent, "What

Yeshe took the reminder. "And you brought ME back." He brooded there opposite to her, but without

gloom. "Whom has Chad brought? He's full of ideas. And I wrote to Sarah," he added, "the first thing this

She neglected certain parts of this speech in the interest of others. "Marie said to me the other day that she felt

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

"What is it then?" He came back to his breakfast; he partook presently of the charming melon, which she

liberally cut for him; and it was only after this that he met her question. Then moreover it was but to remark

that he'd answer her presently. She waited, she watched, she served him and amused him, and it was perhaps

with this last idea that she soon reminded him of his having never even yet named to her the article produced

at Woollett. "Do you remember our talking of it in Londonthat night at the play?" Before he could say yes,

however, she had put it to him for other matters. Did he remember, did he rememberthis and that of their

first days? He remembered everything, bringing up with humour even things of which she professed no

recollection, things she vehemently denied; and falling back above all on the great interest of their early time,

the curiosity felt by both of them as to where he would "come out." They had so assumed it was to be in some

wonderful placethey had thought of it as so very MUCH out. Well, that was doubtless what it had

beensince he had come out just there. He was out, in truth, as far as it was possible to be, and must now

rather bethink himself of getting in again. He found on the spot the image of his recent history; he was like

one of the figures of the old clock at Berne. THEY came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged along their

little course in the public eye, and went in on the other side. He too had jigged his little coursehim too a

modest retreat awaited. He offered now, should she really like to know, to name the great product of

Woollett. It would be a great commentary on everything. At this she stopped him off; she not only had no

wish to know, but she wouldn't know for the world. She had done with the products of Woollettfor all the

good she had got from them. She desired no further news of them, and she mentioned that Madame de

Vionnet herself had, to her knowledge, lived exempt from the information he was ready to supply. She had

never consented to receive it, though she would have taken it, under stress, from Mrs. Pocock. But it was a

matter about which Mrs. Pocock appeared to have had little to saynever sounding the wordand it didn't

signify now. There was nothing clearly for Maria Gostrey that signified nowsave one sharp point, that is,

to which she came in time. "I don't know whether it's before you as a possibility that, left to himself, Mr.

Chad may after all go back. I judge that it IS more or less so before you, from what you just now said of

Her guest had his eyes on her, kindly but attentively, as if foreseeing what was to follow this. "I don't think it

will be for the money." And then as she seemed uncertain: "I mean I don't believe it will be for that he'll give

Strether waited a moment, rather slow and deliberate now, drawing out a little this last soft stage, pleading

with her in various suggestive and unspoken ways for patience and understanding. "What were you just about

Her assent, as if she had had a delicacy about sounding the name, was only in her face; but she added with it:

"To patch it up with me?" His answer came at last in a conclusive headshake. "There's nothing any one can

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

"Ah but," he interrupted, "she's not." And as Miss Gostrey wondered again: "She's the same. She's more than

He spoke gravely and as if responsiblysince he had to pronounce; and the effect of it was slightly solemn,

so that she simply exclaimed "Oh!" Satisfied and grateful, however, she showed in her own next words an

He had pushed his plate a little away, occupied with another side of the matter; taking refuge verily in that

side and feeling so moved that he soon found himself on his feet. He was affected in advance by what he

believed might come from her, and he would have liked to forestall it and deal with it tenderly; yet in the

presence of it he wished still more to bethough as smoothly as possibledeterrent and conclusive. He put

her question by for the moment; he told her more about Chad. "It would have been impossible to meet me

more than he did last night on the question of the infamy of not sticking to her."

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

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

She hesitated afresh, but she brought it out. "I've never believed, you know, that you did propose. I always

believed it was really she and, so far as that goes, I can understand it. What I mean is," she explained, "that

with such a spiritthe spirit of curses! your breach is past mending. She has only to know what you've

"I've done," said Strether, "what I couldone can't do more. He protests his devotion and his horror. But I'm

not sure I've saved him. He protests too much. He asks how one can dream of his being tired. But he has all

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

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

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

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

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

He had sufficiently understood. "So good as this place at this moment? So good as what YOU make of

everything you touch?" He took a moment to say, for, really and truly, what stood about him there in her

offerwhich was as the offer of exquisite service, of lightened care, for the rest of his daysmight well

have tempted. It built him softly round, it roofed him warmly over, it rested, all so firm, on selection. And

what ruled selection was beauty and knowledge. It was awkward, it was almost stupid, not to seem to prize

such things; yet, none the less, so far as they made his opportunity they made it only for a moment. She'd

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

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

She had echoed it in vague deprecation, but he felt it already clear for her. "That, you see, is my only logic.

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

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

Honest and fine, she couldn't greatly pretend she didn't see it. Still she could pretend just a little. "But why

"That's the way thatif I must goyou yourself would be the first to want me. And I can't do anything

So then she had to take it, though still with her defeated protest. "It isn't so much your BEING 'right'it's

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

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