VOLUME I - BOOK FOURTH - CHAPTER II

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 acquaintance--their 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 by showing surprise at the enemy's ignorance.

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 time, it none the less did treat everything as tacitly

concluded.

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 relief--there were hours when he required it--in 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, flattering--what 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 SHE would come out and find her.

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 echo--as distinct over there in the dry thin air as some

shrill "heading" above a column of print--seemed 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 reaffirm--a 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 mother--so 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,

would be the moral, and the woman would soon be found.

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 case--whatever else of minor

interest it might yield--was 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, could--COULD it?--signify. "It's a plot," he declared--

"there's more in it than meets the eye." He gave the rein to his

fancy. "It's a plant!"

His fancy seemed to please her. "Whose then?"

"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 engrossing--all, 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?"

He tossed it off. "Oh dear, yes!"

She had another pause while, across her carpets, he had another

walk. "If you don't look out you'll have them straight over."

"Oh but I've said he'll go back."

"And WILL he?" Miss Gostrey asked.

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 him--after

everything had led up--every facility to answer? What is it but

just the thing I came here to-day to get out of you? Will he?"

"No--he won't," she said at last. "He's not free."

The air of it held him. "Then you've all the while known--?"

"I've known nothing but what I've seen; and I wonder," she

declared with some impatience, that you didn't see as much. It was

enough to be with him there--"

"In the box? Yes," he rather blankly urged.

"Well--to feel sure."

"Sure of what?"

She got up from her chair, at this, with a nearer approach than

she had ever yet shown to dismay at his dimness. She even, fairly

pausing for it, spoke with a shade of pity. "Guess!"

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

situation may have held her own, may really have counted."

"That's exactly what I am!" said Miss Gostrey. But she as quickly

made her point. "I thought you thought--or that they think at

Woollett--that 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 somebody can such a miracle be?"

He took it in. "Because the fact itself IS the woman?"

"A woman. Some woman or other. It's one of the things that HAVE to

be."

"But you mean then at least a good one."

"A good woman?" She threw up her arms with a laugh. "I should call

her excellent!"

"Then why does he deny her?"

Miss Gostrey thought a moment. "Because she's too good to admit!

Don't you see," she went on, "how she accounts for him?"

Strether clearly, more and more, did see; yet it made him also see

other things. "But isn't what we want that he shall account for

HER?"

"Well, he does. What you have before you is his way. You must

forgive him if it isn't quite outspoken. In Paris such debts are

tacit."

Strether could imagine; but still--! "Even when the woman's good?"

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 as sudden unnatural goodness."

"Ah then you're speaking now," Strether said, "of people who are

NOT nice."

"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 her and judge her only in Chad."

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 his book. "But is that what I came

out for?"

She had to confess indeed that it wasn't. But there was something

else. "Don't make up your mind. There are all sorts of things. You

haven't seen him all."

This on his side Strether recognised; but his acuteness none the

less showed him the danger. "Yes, but if the more I see the better

he seems?"

Well, she found something. "That may be--but his disavowal of her

isn't, all the same, pure consideration. There's a hitch." She

made it out. "It's the effort to sink her."

Strether winced at the image. "To 'sink'--?"

"Well, I mean there's a struggle, and a part of it is just what he

hides. Take time--that'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 think!"

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 WAS--quite in fact insisted on being--as 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 him--and in its immediate effect,

as if it could produce no other--elbowed 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 them--Chad'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 so--that 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 sake--where 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 them--or 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 wanted to promote intercourse.

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 was--it was truly but the fact of a few

days since--focus 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 Post-Office 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 artist-man. 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 away--never 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

four-seated 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 a general monitor, this last queer

quantity could once more feel itself.

"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

comfort of indiscretion. "Where do you see him come out?"

Little Bilham, in meditation, looked at him with a kindness almost

paternal. "Don't you like it over here?"

Strether laughed out--for 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 asked wondering

"does he arrange his life?"

"Is the creature you mean Chad himself?" little Bilham said.

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 mean--or who does

with him what she likes."

"It's awfully charming of you," Bilham presently remarked, "not to

have asked me that before."

"Oh I'm not fit for my job!"

The exclamation had escaped our friend, but it made little Bilham

more deliberate. "Chad's a rare case!" he luminously observed.

"He's awfully changed," he added.

"Then you see it too?"

"The way he has improved? Oh yes--I think every one must see it.

But I'm not sure," said little Bilham, "that I didn't like him

about as well in his other state."

"Then this IS really a new state altogether?"

"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 of--revised 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 well-rubbed old-fashioned volume at all. But of course

I'm beastly immoral. I'm afraid it would be a funny world

altogether--a 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 die--simply. 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 it--for himself, I mean--to 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

opposite--an extraordinary case of the equilibrium arrived at and

assured."

"Oh there's a lot behind it."

"Ah there you are!" Strether exclaimed. "That's just what I want

to get at. You speak of your familiar volume altered out of

recognition. Well, who's the editor?"

Little Bilham looked before him a minute in silence. "He ought to

get married. THAT would do it. And he wants to."

"Wants to marry her?"

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."

Strether hesitated. "Then I may take it from you that he IS 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 nothing--except of course that he's so kind to me--to 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 keep me on here and set me a bad example."

As the half-hour 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 benevolently to

observe.

"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 free if he's good?"

Little Bilham looked him full in the face. "Because it's a

virtuous attachment."

This had settled the question so effectually for the time--that is

for the next few days--that 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 circumstance--a 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 sailing--or at least of mine, giving them some

sort of date--my 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 Paris--coming 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 uncertain--seemed in fact for the present

impossible. But he more than intimates that--if you can believe

it--their desire to make my acquaintance has had to do with their

surmounting difficulties."

"They're dying to see you?" Miss Gostrey asked.

"Dying. Of course," said Strether, "they're the virtuous attachment."

He had already told her about that--had 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 delayed--would 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 help him to make surer still.

She showed at first none the less as only amused. "You say there

are two? An attachment to them both then would, I suppose, almost

necessarily be innocent."

Our friend took the point, but he had his clue. "Mayn't he be

still in the stage of not quite knowing which of them, mother or

daughter, he likes best?"

She gave it more thought. "Oh it must be the daughter--at his

age."

"Possibly. Yet what do we know," Strether asked, "about hers? She

may be old enough."

"Old enough for what?"

"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 it--that is if she doesn't prevent repatriation

--why it may be plain sailing yet."

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 'free'?"

Strether, responsively, wondered indeed. "Perhaps the girl herself

doesn't like him."

"Then why does he speak of them to you as he does?"

Strether's mind echoed the question, but also again met it. "Perhaps

it's with the mother he's on good terms."

"As against the daughter?"

"Well, if she's trying to persuade the daughter to consent to him,

what could make him like the mother more? Only," Strether threw

out, "why shouldn't the daughter consent to him?"

"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

desires--that 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. It won't suit HER at least

that he shall miss them."

Miss Gostrey cast about. "No--you reason well! But of course on

the other hand there's always dear old Woollett itself."

"Oh yes," he mused--"there's always dear old Woollett itself."

She waited a moment. "The young lady mayn't find herself able to

swallow THAT quantity. She may think it's paying too much; she may

weigh one thing against another."

Strether, ever restless in such debates, took a vague turn "It

will all depend on who she is. That of course--the proved ability

to deal with dear old Woollett, since I'm sure she does deal with

it--is what makes so strongly for Mamie."

"Mamie?"

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 be said for her.

Mamie's MY girl!" she roundly declared.

Strether resumed for a minute his walk. "She's really perfectly

lovely, you know. Far prettier than any girl I've seen over here

yet."

"That's precisely on what I perhaps most build." And she mused a

moment in her friend's way. "I should positively like to take her

in hand!"

He humoured the fancy, though indeed finally to deprecate it. "Oh

but don't, in your zeal, go over to her! I need you most and

can't, you know, be left."

But she kept it up. "I wish they'd send her out to me!"

"If they knew you," he returned, "they would "

"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

WILL--before, 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 doing--keeping me along

for. He has been waiting for them."

Miss Gostrey drew in her lips. "You see a good deal in it!"

"I doubt if I see as much as you. Do you pretend," he went on,

"that you don't see--?"

"Well, what?"--she pressed him as he paused.

"Why that there must be a lot between them--and that it has been

going on from the first; even from before I came."

She took a minute to answer. "Who are they then--if it's so

grave?"

"It mayn't be grave--it 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 kind of refreshment not to feel obliged

to follow up."

"Oh," she returned, "if you think you've got off--!"

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

their name."

"Nor in their nationality?--American, French, English, Polish?"

"I don't care the least little 'hang,'" he smiled, "for their

nationality. It would be nice if they're Polish!" he almost

immediately added.

"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 might be joy in THAT."

"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

twenty--and she can't be less--the 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 ten--but 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 five-and-twenty

--a charming young widow."

Miss Gostrey entertained the suggestion. "She IS a widow then?"

"I haven't the least idea!" They once more, in spite of this

vagueness, exchanged a look--a 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. "I only feel what I've told you

--that he has some reason."

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 attachment--if it's to her--is

virtuous."

But she looked as if she scarce followed. "Why is it virtuous if--

since she's free--there's nothing to impose on it any condition?"

He laughed at her question. "Oh I perhaps don't mean as virtuous

as THAT! Your idea is that it can be virtuous--in any sense worthy

of the name--only if she's NOT free? But what does it become

then," he asked, "for HER?"

"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 you--has been

reporting on you to these friends."

Strether meanwhile had had time to think more. "Then where's his

straightness?"

"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."

"Do for what?"

"Why, for THEM--for ces dames. He has watched you, studied you,

liked you--and 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. Well," she gaily declared, "you're having it!"

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!"

"In what?"

"In the character of the attachment. In its innocence."

But she defended herself. "I don't pretend to know anything about

it. Everything's possible. We must see."

"See?" he echoed with a groan. "Haven't we seen enough?"

"I haven't," she smiled.

"But do you suppose then little Bilham has lied?"

"You must find out."

It made him almost turn pale. "Find out any MORE?"

He had dropped on a sofa for dismay; but she seemed, as she stood

over him, to have the last word. "Wasn't what you came out for to

find out ALL?"

Read next: VOLUME I#BOOK FIFTH#CHAPTER I

Read previous: VOLUME I#BOOK FOURTH#CHAPTER I

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