VOLUME I - BOOK SIXTH - CHAPTER II

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 fille--I mean the type--as 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 take--you can carry home with you, where you'll

find again so much to compare it with."

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 reflected--and in fact with wonder--on 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 as their problem became more complicated?

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 that--what 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 be--to a

deeper scrutiny--not 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 NOW--even 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 to-night in relation to the fresh fact of Chad's

acquaintance with the two ladies--not 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 behalf--Strether made her out

vividly, with a thought at the back of his head, a Countess--if he

wouldn't name a day for dining with her, he had replied lucidly:

"Thank you very much--impossible." 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 others--for any, for every occasion

as to which his old friend should have a funny scruple.

"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 remarked--making the most of the advantage of his years--that

it frightened him quite enough to find himself dedicated to the

entertainment of a little foreign girl. There were girls he wasn't

afraid of--he 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 be--I mean LIKE

that; for she has wanted me to have lots of freedom. She has known

such good results from it."

She was fairly beautiful to him--a 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 old-time 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 maid-servant

suspected of a "follower." And then young men, young men--well, the

thing was their business simply, or was at all events hers. She was

fluttered, fairly fevered--to the point of a little glitter that

came and went in her eyes and a pair of pink spots that stayed in

her cheeks--with 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 eye-glasses, 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 chill--nothing 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 impression--with all it had thrown off and

all it had taken in--was 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

thoroughly--he had to cast about for the word, but it came--bred.

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, was a case, also exquisite, of--well, he didn't know what.

"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 quality--which 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 further--paying 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 dropped--dropped 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

modern--she 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 good-natured 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 Miss Barrace's

benefit, he wondered. "Is she too then under the charm--?"

"No, not a bit"--Miss Barrace was prompt. "She makes nothing of him.

She's bored. She won't help you with him."

"Oh," Strether laughed, "she can't do everything.

"Of course not--wonderful as she is. Besides, he makes nothing of

HER. She won't take him from me--though 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 to-night,

when she's so magnificent, it would seem to her strange--if she

minded. So at any rate I have him all. Je suis tranquille!''

Strether understood, so far as that went; but he was feeling for

his clue. "She strikes you to-night as particularly magnificent?"

"Surely. Almost as I've never seen her. Doesn't she you?

Why it's FOR you."

He persisted in his candour. "'For' me--?"

"Oh, oh, oh!" cried Miss Barrace, who persisted in the opposite of

that quality.

"Well," he acutely admitted, "she IS different. She's gay. "

"She's gay!" Miss Barrace laughed. "And she has beautiful

shoulders--though there's nothing different in that."

"No," said Strether, "one was sure of her shoulders.

It isn't her shoulders."

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 ."

"What then is it?" Strether earnestly enquired.

"Why, it's SHE--simply. It's her mood. It's her charm."

"Of course it's her charm, but we're speaking of the difference."

"Well," Miss Barrace explained, "she's just brilliant, as we used

to say. That's all. She's various. She's fifty women."

"Ah but only one"--Strether kept it clear--"at a time."

"Perhaps. But in fifty times--!"

"Oh we shan't come to that," our friend declared; and the next

moment he had moved in another direction. "Will you answer me a

plain question? Will she ever divorce?"

Miss Barrace looked at him through all her tortoise-shell. "Why

should she?"

It wasn't what he had asked for, he signified; but he met it well

enough. "To marry Chad."

"Why should she marry Chad?"

"Because I'm convinced she's very fond of him. She has done wonders

for him."

"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 marrying."

Strether considered a moment this proposition. "You mean it's so

beautiful for our friends simply to go on so?"

But whatever he said made her laugh. "Beautiful."

He nevertheless insisted. "And THAT because it's disinterested?"

She was now, however, suddenly tired of the question. "Yes then--

call it that. Besides, she'll never divorce. Don't, moreover," she

added, "believe everything you hear about her husband."

He's not then," Strether asked, "a wretch?"

"Oh yes. But charming."

"Do you know him?"

"I've met him. He's bien aimable."

"To every one but his wife?"

"Oh for all I know, to her too--to any, to every woman. I hope you

at any rate," she pursued with a quick change, "appreciate the care

I take of Mr. Waymarsh."

"Oh immensely." But Strether was not yet in line. "At all events,"

he roundly brought out, "the attachment's an innocent one."

"Mine and his? Ah," she laughed, "don't rob it of ALL interest!"

"I mean our friend's here--to 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. "It's innocent," he repeated--"I see the

whole thing."

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 see--it being so much!--

of Sitting Bull. But I'm not, you know--I 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 them--in whom I see no end of things." Then after

she had smoked a moment, "He's touching, you know," she said.

"'Know'?" Strether echoed--"don't I, indeed? We must move you

almost to tears."

"Oh but I don't mean YOU!" she laughed.

"You ought to then, for the worst sign of all--as I must have it

for you--is that you can't help me. That's when a woman pities."

"Ah but I do help you!" she cheerfully insisted.

Again he looked at her hard, and then after a pause: "No you

don't!"

Her tortoise-shell, on its long chain, rattled down. "I help you

with Sitting Bull. That's a good deal."

"Oh that, yes." But Strether hesitated. "Do you mean he talks of

me?"

"So that I have to defend you? No, never.'

"I see," Strether mused. "It's too deep."

"That's his only fault," she returned--"that everything, with him,

is too deep. He has depths of silence--which 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 himself--never 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," she

continued: "he tries to make me presents."

"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 so--at 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 then I've all I can do to prevent his buying me things."

"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 same--and if you saw what he sometimes selects--from

buying. I save him hundreds and hundreds. I only take flowers."

"Flowers?" Strether echoed again with a rueful reflexion. How many

nosegays had her present converser sent?

"Innocent flowers," she pursued, "as much as he likes. And he sends

me splendours; he knows all the best places--he has found them for

himself; he's wonderful."

"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 conclusion. "WHAT a rage it is!"

He had worked it out. "It's an opposition."

She followed, but at a distance. "That's what I feel. Yet to what?"

"Well, he thinks, you know, that I'VE a life of my own. And I haven't!"

"You haven't?" She showed doubt, and her laugh confirmed it.

"Oh, oh, oh!"

"No--not for myself. I seem to have a life only for other people."

"Ah for them and WITH them! Just now for instance with--"

"Well, with whom?" he asked before she had had time to say.

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!"

Read next: VOLUME I#BOOK SIXTH#CHAPTER III

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