VOLUME II - BOOK NINTH - CHAPTER III

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

possessed--by no aid from HIM--of the last number of the

salmon-coloured 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. Newsome--for she had been copious

indeed this time--was 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 well-filled 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 it--creeping 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 care--that 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

observe--in respect to his valour--that 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

retreating--before 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 Mamie--Mamie 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

Strether to watch her, to consider several things, without her

turning round.

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 them--for instance to Maria--he 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

recognised--and it was as if at the recognition Mrs. Newsome's

fixed intensity had suddenly, with a deep audible gasp, grown thin

and vague--that 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 obsession--oh 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 delay--the possibility even of some

relation as yet unacknowledged.

There was always their old relation, the fruit of the Woollett

years; but that--and it was what was strangest--had 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

backward--for 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 re-enforced by exams and teas--and 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 women--destined, it would

seem, remarkably to grow--felt 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 sister-in-law 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 Bilham--since little Bilham was, somewhat incongruously,

expected--appeared 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 crimson-and-gold 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 said--and 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

bridal--with 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 one--had 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 ice-cream 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 patronage--such a

hint of the polysyllabic as might make her something of a bore

toward middle age--and 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 it--by whom Strether was incapable of

meaning any one but Chad--she 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 half-prepared 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 to--well, 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 conveniently--as if they

had had no chance yet--about 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 place--only 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 entitled--so 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 Vionnet--of 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 clothes--clothes

that unfortunately wouldn't be themselves eternal--to call in the

Rue de Bellechasse.

At the sound of these names Strether almost blushed to feel that he

couldn't have sounded them first--and 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 them--though she didn't say how or where, which was a touch of

her own--she had found them beyond her supposition. She abounded in

praise of them, and after the manner of Woollett--which 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 her--she's so awfully right as

she is. Another touch will spoil her--so she oughtn't to BE touched."

"Ah but things, here in Paris," Strether observed, "do happen to

little girls." And then for the joke's and the occasion's sake:

"Haven't you found that yourself?"

"That things happen--? Oh I'm not a little girl. I'm a big

battered blowsy one. I don't care," Mamie laughed, "WHAT happens."

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 dreamed--a 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

question--though 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 married--I 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 Vionnet

presented to us."

"And was he nice?"

Mamie bloomed and bridled with her best reception manner. "Any

man's nice when he's in love."

It made Strether laugh. "But is Monsieur de Montbron in love--

already--with YOU?"

"Oh that's not necessary--it's so much better he should be so with

HER: which, thank goodness, I lost no time in discovering for

myself. He's perfectly gone--and I couldn't have borne it for her

if he hadn't been. She's just too sweet."

Strether hesitated. "And through being in love too?"

On which with a smile that struck him as wonderful Mamie had a

wonderful answer. "She doesn't know if she is or not."

It made him again laugh out. "Oh but YOU do!"

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 it--only holding her elbows perhaps a little too much out--the

momentary effect for Strether was that every one else, in all their

affair, seemed stupid.

"Know that poor little Jeanne doesn't know what's the matter with

her?"

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 enough--for she seemed to like me

to-day--to want me to tell her."

"And SHALL you?"

"Perfectly. I shall tell her the matter with her is that she wants

only too much to do right. To do right for her, naturally," said

Mamie, "is to please."

"Her mother, do you mean?"

"Her mother first."

Strether waited. "And then?"

"Well, 'then'--Mr. Newsome."

There was something really grand for him in the serenity of this

reference. "And last only Monsieur de Montbron?"

"Last only"--she good-humouredly kept it up.

Strether considered. "So that every one after all then will be

suited?"

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 do--it 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 good-bye

with a "Splendid, splendid, splendid!" And he left her, in her

splendour, still waiting for little Bilham.

Read next: VOLUME II#BOOK TENTH#CHAPTER I

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