I
Those occasions on which Strether was, in association with the exile
from Milrose, to see the sacred rage glimmer through would doubtless
have their due periodicity; but our friend had meanwhile to find names
for many other matters. On no evening of his life perhaps, as he
reflected, had he had to supply so many as on the third of his short
stay in London; an evening spent by Miss Gostrey’s side at one of the
theatres, to which he had found himself transported, without his own
hand raised, on the mere expression of a conscientious wonder. She knew
her theatre, she knew her play, as she had triumphantly known, three
days running, everything else, and the moment filled to the brim, for
her companion, that apprehension of the interesting which, whether or
no the interesting happened to filter through his guide, strained now
to its limits his brief opportunity. Waymarsh hadn’t come with them; he
had seen plays enough, he signified, before Strether had joined him—an
affirmation that had its full force when his friend ascertained by
questions that he had seen two and a circus. Questions as to what he
had seen had on him indeed an effect only less favourable than
questions as to what he hadn’t. He liked the former to be
discriminated; but how could it be done, Strether asked of their
constant counsellor, without discriminating the latter?
Miss Gostrey had dined with him at his hotel, face to face over a small
table on which the lighted candles had rose-coloured shades; and the
rose-coloured shades and the small table and the soft fragrance of the
lady—had anything to his mere sense ever been so soft?—were so many
touches in he scarce knew what positive high picture. He had been to
the theatre, even to the opera, in Boston, with Mrs. Newsome, more than
once acting as her only escort; but there had been no little confronted
dinner, no pink lights, no whiff of vague sweetness, as a preliminary:
one of the results of which was that at present, mildly rueful, though
with a sharpish accent, he actually asked himself _why_ there hadn’t.
There was much the same difference in his impression of the noticed
state of his companion, whose dress was “cut down,” as he believed the
term to be, in respect to shoulders and bosom, in a manner quite other
than Mrs. Newsome’s, and who wore round her throat a broad red velvet
band with an antique jewel—he was rather complacently sure it was
antique—attached to it in front. Mrs. Newsome’s dress was never in any
degree “cut down,” and she never wore round her throat a broad red
velvet band: if she had, moreover, would it ever have served so to
carry on and complicate, as he now almost felt, his vision?
It would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the effect
of the ribbon from which Miss Gostrey’s trinket depended, had he not
for the hour, at the best, been so given over to uncontrolled
perceptions. What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his
friend’s velvet band somehow added, in her appearance, to the value of
every other item—to that of her smile and of the way she carried her
head, to that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her
hair? What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man’s work in the world
to do with red velvet bands? He wouldn’t for anything have so exposed
himself as to tell Miss Gostrey how much he liked hers, yet he _had_
none the less not only caught himself in the act—frivolous, no doubt,
idiotic, and above all unexpected—of liking it: he had in addition
taken it as a starting-point for fresh backward, fresh forward, fresh
lateral flights. The manner in which Mrs. Newsome’s throat _was_
encircled suddenly represented for him, in an alien order, almost as
many things as the manner in which Miss Gostrey’s was. Mrs. Newsome
wore, at operatic hours, a black silk dress—very handsome, he knew it
was “handsome”—and an ornament that his memory was able further to
identify as a ruche. He had his association indeed with the ruche, but
it was rather imperfectly romantic. He had once said to the wearer—and
it was as “free” a remark as he had ever made to her—that she looked,
with her ruff and other matters, like Queen Elizabeth; and it had after
this in truth been his fancy that, as a consequence of that tenderness
and an acceptance of the idea, the form of this special tribute to the
“frill” had grown slightly more marked. The connexion, as he sat there
and let his imagination roam, was to strike him as vaguely pathetic;
but there it all was, and pathetic was doubtless in the conditions the
best thing it could possibly be. It had assuredly existed at any rate;
for it seemed now to come over him that no gentleman of his age at
Woollett could ever, to a lady of Mrs. Newsome’s, which was not much
less than his, have embarked on such a simile.
All sorts of things in fact now seemed to come over him, comparatively
few of which his chronicler can hope for space to mention. It came over
him for instance that Miss Gostrey looked perhaps like Mary Stuart:
Lambert Strether had a candour of fancy which could rest for an instant
gratified in such an antithesis. It came over him that never before—no,
literally never—had a lady dined with him at a public place before
going to the play. The publicity of the place was just, in the matter,
for Strether, the rare strange thing; it affected him almost as the
achievement of privacy might have affected a man of a different
experience. He had married, in the far-away years, so young as to have
missed the time natural in Boston for taking girls to the Museum; and
it was absolutely true of hint that—even after the close of the period
of conscious detachment occupying the centre of his life, the grey
middle desert of the two deaths, that of his wife and that, ten years
later, of his boy—he had never taken any one anywhere. It came over him
in especial—though the monition had, as happened, already sounded,
fitfully gleamed, in other forms—that the business he had come out on
hadn’t yet been so brought home to him as by the sight of the people
about him. She gave him the impression, his friend, at first, more
straight than he got it for himself—gave it simply by saying with
off-hand illumination: “Oh yes, they’re types!”—but after he had taken
it he made to the full his own use of it; both while he kept silence
for the four acts and while he talked in the intervals. It was an
evening, it was a world of types, and this was a connexion above all in
which the figures and faces in the stalls were interchangeable with
those on the stage.
He felt as if the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow of
his neighbour, a great stripped handsome red-haired lady who conversed
with a gentleman on her other side in stray dissyllables which had for
his ear, in the oddest way in the world, so much sound that he wondered
they hadn’t more sense; and he recognised by the same law, beyond the
footlights, what he was pleased to take for the very flush of English
life. He had distracted drops in which he couldn’t have said if it were
actors or auditors who were most true, and the upshot of which, each
time, was the consciousness of new contacts. However he viewed his job
it was “types” he should have to tackle. Those before him and around
him were not as the types of Woollett, where, for that matter, it had
begun to seem to him that there must only have been the male and the
female. These made two exactly, even with the individual varieties.
Here, on the other hand, apart from the personal and the sexual
range—which might be greater or less—a series of strong stamps had been
applied, as it were, from without; stamps that his observation played
with as, before a glass case on a table, it might have passed from
medal to medal and from copper to gold. It befell that in the drama
precisely there was a bad woman in a yellow frock who made a pleasant
weak good-looking young man in perpetual evening dress do the most
dreadful things. Strether felt himself on the whole not afraid of the
yellow frock, but he was vaguely anxious over a certain kindness into
which he found himself drifting for its victim. He hadn’t come out, he
reminded himself, to be too kind, or indeed to be kind at all, to
Chadwick Newsome. Would Chad also be in perpetual evening dress? He
somehow rather hoped it—it seemed so to add to _this_ young man’s
general amenability; though he wondered too if, to fight him with his
own weapons, he himself (a thought almost startling) would have
likewise to be. This young man furthermore would have been much more
easy to handle—at least for _him_—than appeared probable in respect to
Chad.
It came up for him with Miss Gostrey that there were things of which
she would really perhaps after all have heard, and she admitted when a
little pressed that she was never quite sure of what she heard as
distinguished from things such as, on occasions like the present, she
only extravagantly guessed. “I seem with this freedom, you see, to have
guessed Mr. Chad. He’s a young man on whose head high hopes are placed
at Woollett; a young man a wicked woman has got hold of and whom his
family over there have sent you out to rescue. You’ve accepted the
mission of separating him from the wicked woman. Are you quite sure
she’s very bad for him?”
Something in his manner showed it as quite pulling him up. “Of course
we are. Wouldn’t _you_ be?”
“Oh I don’t know. One never does—does one?—beforehand. One can only
judge on the facts. Yours are quite new to me; I’m really not in the
least, as you see, in possession of them: so it will be awfully
interesting to have them from you. If you’re satisfied, that’s all
that’s required. I mean if you’re sure you _are_ sure: sure it won’t
do.”
“That he should lead such a life? Rather!”
“Oh but I don’t know, you see, about his life; you’ve not told me about
his life. She may be charming—his life!”
“Charming?”—Strether stared before him. “She’s base, venal—out of the
streets.”
“I see. And _he_—?”
“Chad, wretched boy?”
“Of what type and temper is he?” she went on as Strether had lapsed.
“Well—the obstinate.” It was as if for a moment he had been going to
say more and had then controlled himself.
That was scarce what she wished. “Do you like him?”
This time he was prompt. “No. How _can_ I?”
“Do you mean because of your being so saddled with him?”
“I’m thinking of his mother,” said Strether after a moment. “He has
darkened her admirable life.” He spoke with austerity. “He has worried
her half to death.”
“Oh that’s of course odious.” She had a pause as if for renewed
emphasis of this truth, but it ended on another note. “Is her life very
admirable?”
“Extraordinarily.”
There was so much in the tone that Miss Gostrey had to devote another
pause to the appreciation of it. “And has he only _her?_ I don’t mean
the bad woman in Paris,” she quickly added—“for I assure you I
shouldn’t even at the best be disposed to allow him more than one. But
has he only his mother?”
“He has also a sister, older than himself and married; and they’re both
remarkably fine women.”
“Very handsome, you mean?”
This promptitude—almost, as he might have thought, this precipitation,
gave him a brief drop; but he came up again. “Mrs. Newsome, I think, is
handsome, though she’s not of course, with a son of twenty-eight and a
daughter of thirty, in her very first youth. She married, however,
extremely young.”
“And is wonderful,” Miss Gostrey asked, “for her age?”
Strether seemed to feel with a certain disquiet the pressure of it. “I
don’t say she’s wonderful. Or rather,” he went on the next moment, “I
do say it. It’s exactly what she _is_—wonderful. But I wasn’t thinking
of her appearance,” he explained—“striking as that doubtless is. I was
thinking—well, of many other things.” He seemed to look at these as if
to mention some of them; then took, pulling himself up, another turn.
“About Mrs. Pocock people may differ.”
“Is that the daughter’s name—‘Pocock’?”
“That’s the daughter’s name,” Strether sturdily confessed.
“And people may differ, you mean, about _her_ beauty?”
“About everything.”
“But _you_ admire her?”
He gave his friend a glance as to show how he could bear this “I’m
perhaps a little afraid of her.”
“Oh,” said Miss Gostrey, “I see her from here! You may say then I see
very fast and very far, but I’ve already shown you I do. The young man
and the two ladies,” she went on, “are at any rate all the family?”
“Quite all. His father has been dead ten years, and there’s no brother,
nor any other sister. They’d do,” said Strether, “anything in the world
for him.”
“And you’d do anything in the world for _them?_”
He shifted again; she had made it perhaps just a shade too affirmative
for his nerves. “Oh I don’t know!”
“You’d do at any rate this, and the ‘anything’ they’d do is represented
by their _making_ you do it.”
“Ah they couldn’t have come—either of them. They’re very busy people
and Mrs. Newsome in particular has a large full life. She’s moreover
highly nervous—and not at all strong.”
“You mean she’s an American invalid?”
He carefully distinguished. “There’s nothing she likes less than to be
called one, but she would consent to be one of those things, I think,”
he laughed, “if it were the only way to be the other.”
“Consent to be an American in order to be an invalid?”
“No,” said Strether, “the other way round. She’s at any rate delicate
sensitive high-strung. She puts so much of herself into everything—”
Ah Maria knew these things! “That she has nothing left for anything
else? Of course she hasn’t. To whom do you say it? High-strung? Don’t I
spend my life, for them, jamming down the pedal? I see moreover how it
has told on you.”
Strether took this more lightly. “Oh I jam down the pedal too!”
“Well,” she lucidly returned, “we must from this moment bear on it
together with all our might.” And she forged ahead. “Have they money?”
But it was as if, while her energetic image still held him, her enquiry
fell short. “Mrs. Newsome,” he wished further to explain, “hasn’t
moreover your courage on the question of contact. If she had come it
would have been to see the person herself.”
“The woman? Ah but that’s courage.”
“No—it’s exaltation, which is a very different thing. Courage,” he,
however, accommodatingly threw out, “is what _you_ have.”
She shook her head. “You say that only to patch me up—to cover the
nudity of my want of exaltation. I’ve neither the one nor the other.
I’ve mere battered indifference. I see that what you mean,” Miss
Gostrey pursued, “is that if your friend _had_ come she would take
great views, and the great views, to put it simply, would be too much
for her.”
Strether looked amused at her notion of the simple, but he adopted her
formula. “Everything’s too much for her.”
“Ah then such a service as this of yours—”
“Is more for her than anything else? Yes—far more. But so long as it
isn’t too much for _me_—!”
“Her condition doesn’t matter? Surely not; we leave her condition out;
we take it, that is, for granted. I see it, her condition, as behind
and beneath you; yet at the same time I see it as bearing you up.”
“Oh it does bear me up!” Strether laughed.
“Well then as yours bears _me_ nothing more’s needed.” With which she
put again her question. “Has Mrs. Newsome money?”
This time he heeded. “Oh plenty. That’s the root of the evil. There’s
money, to very large amounts, in the concern. Chad has had the free use
of a great deal. But if he’ll pull himself together and come home, all
the same, he’ll find his account in it.”
She had listened with all her interest. “And I hope to goodness you’ll
find yours!”
“He’ll take up his definite material reward,” said Strether without
acknowledgement of this. “He’s at the parting of the ways. He can come
into the business now—he can’t come later.”
“Is there a business?”
“Lord, yes—a big brave bouncing business. A roaring trade.”
“A great shop?”
“Yes—a workshop; a great production, a great industry. The concern’s a
manufacture—and a manufacture that, if it’s only properly looked after,
may well be on the way to become a monopoly. It’s a little thing they
make—make better, it appears, than other people can, or than other
people, at any rate, do. Mr. Newsome, being a man of ideas, at least in
that particular line,” Strether explained, “put them on it with great
effect, and gave the place altogether, in his time, an immense lift.”
“It’s a place in itself?”
“Well, quite a number of buildings; almost a little industrial colony.
But above all it’s a thing. The article produced.”
“And what _is_ the article produced?”
Strether looked about him as in slight reluctance to say; then the
curtain, which he saw about to rise, came to his aid. “I’ll tell you
next time.” But when the next time came he only said he’d tell her
later on—after they should have left the theatre; for she had
immediately reverted to their topic, and even for himself the picture
of the stage was now overlaid with another image. His postponements,
however, made her wonder—wonder if the article referred to were
anything bad. And she explained that she meant improper or ridiculous
or wrong. But Strether, so far as that went, could satisfy her.
“Unmentionable? Oh no, we constantly talk of it; we are quite familiar
and brazen about it. Only, as a small, trivial, rather ridiculous
object of the commonest domestic use, it’s just wanting in—what shall I
say? Well, dignity, or the least approach to distinction. Right here
therefore, with everything about us so grand—!” In short he shrank.
“It’s a false note?”
“Sadly. It’s vulgar.”
“But surely not vulgarer than this.” Then on his wondering as she
herself had done: “Than everything about us.” She seemed a trifle
irritated. “What do you take this for?”
“Why for—comparatively—divine!”
“This dreadful London theatre? It’s impossible, if you really want to
know.”
“Oh then,” laughed Strether, “I _don’t_ really want to know!”
It made between them a pause, which she, however, still fascinated by
the mystery of the production at Woollett, presently broke. “‘Rather
ridiculous’? Clothes-pins? Saleratus? Shoe-polish?”
It brought him round. “No—you don’t even ‘burn.’ I don’t think, you
know, you’ll guess it.”
“How then can I judge how vulgar it is?”
“You’ll judge when I do tell you”—and he persuaded her to patience. But
it may even now frankly be mentioned that he in the sequel never _was_
to tell her. He actually never did so, and it moreover oddly occurred
that by the law, within her, of the incalculable, her desire for the
information dropped and her attitude to the question converted itself
into a positive cultivation of ignorance. In ignorance she could humour
her fancy, and that proved a useful freedom. She could treat the little
nameless object as indeed unnameable—she could make their abstention
enormously definite. There might indeed have been for Strether the
portent of this in what she next said.
“Is it perhaps then because it’s so bad—because your industry as you
call it, _is_ so vulgar—that Mr. Chad won’t come back? Does he feel the
taint? Is he staying away not to be mixed up in it?”
“Oh,” Strether laughed, “it wouldn’t appear—would it?—that he feels
‘taints’! He’s glad enough of the money from it, and the money’s his
whole basis. There’s appreciation in that—I mean as to the allowance
his mother has hitherto made him. She has of course the resource of
cutting this allowance off; but even then he has unfortunately, and on
no small scale, his independent supply—money left him by his
grandfather, her own father.”
“Wouldn’t the fact you mention then,” Miss Gostrey asked, “make it just
more easy for him to be particular? Isn’t he conceivable as fastidious
about the source—the apparent and public source—of his income?”
Strether was able quite good-humouredly to entertain the proposition.
“The source of his grandfather’s wealth—and thereby of his own share in
it—was not particularly noble.”
“And what source was it?”
Strether cast about. “Well—practices.”
“In business? Infamies? He was an old swindler?”
“Oh,” he said with more emphasis than spirit, “I shan’t describe _him_
nor narrate his exploits.”
“Lord, what abysses! And the late Mr. Newsome then?”
“Well, what about him?”
“Was he like the grandfather?”
“No—he was on the other side of the house. And he was different.”
Miss Gostrey kept it up. “Better?”
Her friend for a moment hung fire. “No.”
Her comment on his hesitation was scarce the less marked for being
mute. “Thank you. _Now_ don’t you see,” she went on, “why the boy
doesn’t come home? He’s drowning his shame.”
“His shame? What shame?”
“What shame? Comment donc? _The_ shame.”
“But where and when,” Strether asked, “is ‘_the_ shame’—where is any
shame—to-day? The men I speak of—they did as every one does; and
(besides being ancient history) it was all a matter of appreciation.”
She showed how she understood. “Mrs. Newsome has appreciated?”
“Ah I can’t speak for _her!_”
“In the midst of such doings—and, as I understand you, profiting by
them, she at least has remained exquisite?”
“Oh I can’t talk of her!” Strether said.
“I thought she was just what you _could_ talk of. You _don’t_ trust
me,” Miss Gostrey after a moment declared.
It had its effect. “Well, her money is spent, her life conceived and
carried on with a large beneficence—”
“That’s a kind of expiation of wrongs? Gracious,” she added before he
could speak, “how intensely you make me see her!”
“If you see her,” Strether dropped, “it’s all that’s necessary.”
She really seemed to have her. “I feel that. She _is_, in spite of
everything, handsome.”
This at least enlivened him. “What do you mean by everything?”
“Well, I mean _you_.” With which she had one of her swift changes of
ground. “You say the concern needs looking after; but doesn’t Mrs.
Newsome look after it?”
“So far as possible. She’s wonderfully able, but it’s not her affair,
and her life’s a good deal overcharged. She has many, many things.”
“And you also?”
“Oh yes—I’ve many too, if you will.”
“I see. But what I mean is,” Miss Gostrey amended, “do you also look
after the business?”
“Oh no, I don’t touch the business.”
“Only everything else?”
“Well, yes—some things.”
“As for instance—?”
Strether obligingly thought. “Well, the Review.”
“The Review?—you have a Review?”
“Certainly. Woollett has a Review—which Mrs. Newsome, for the most
part, magnificently pays for and which I, not at all magnificently,
edit. My name’s on the cover,” Strether pursued, “and I’m really rather
disappointed and hurt that you seem never to have heard of it.”
She neglected for a moment this grievance. “And what kind of a Review
is it?”
His serenity was now completely restored. “Well, it’s green.”
“Do you mean in political colour as they say here—in thought?”
“No; I mean the cover’s green—of the most lovely shade.”
“And with Mrs. Newsome’s name on it too?”
He waited a little. “Oh as for that you must judge if she peeps out.
She’s behind the whole thing; but she’s of a delicacy and a
discretion—!”
Miss Gostrey took it all. “I’m sure. She _would_ be. I don’t underrate
her. She must be rather a swell.”
“Oh yes, she’s rather a swell!”
“A Woollett swell—_bon!_ I like the idea of a Woollett swell. And you
must be rather one too, to be so mixed up with her.”
“Ah no,” said Strether, “that’s not the way it works.”
But she had already taken him up. “The way it works—you needn’t tell
me!—is of course that you efface yourself.”
“With my name on the cover?” he lucidly objected.
“Ah but you don’t put it on for yourself.”
“I beg your pardon—that’s exactly what I do put it on for. It’s exactly
the thing that I’m reduced to doing for myself. It seems to rescue a
little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions, the refuse-heap
of disappointments and failures, my one presentable little scrap of an
identity.”
On this she looked at him as to say many things, but what she at last
simply said was: “She likes to see it there. You’re the bigger swell of
the two,” she immediately continued, “because you think you’re not one.
She thinks she _is_ one. However,” Miss Gostrey added, “she thinks
you’re one too. You’re at all events the biggest she can get hold of.”
She embroidered, she abounded. “I don’t say it to interfere between
you, but on the day she gets hold of a bigger one—!” Strether had
thrown back his head as in silent mirth over something that struck him
in her audacity or felicity, and her flight meanwhile was already
higher. “Therefore close with her—!”
“Close with her?” he asked as she seemed to hang poised.
“Before you lose your chance.”
Their eyes met over it. “What do you mean by closing?”
“And what do I mean by your chance? I’ll tell you when you tell me all
the things _you_ don’t. Is it her _greatest_ fad?” she briskly pursued.
“The Review?” He seemed to wonder how he could best describe it. This
resulted however but in a sketch. “It’s her tribute to the ideal.”
“I see. You go in for tremendous things.”
“We go in for the unpopular side—that is so far as we dare.”
“And how far _do_ you dare?”
“Well, she very far. I much less. I don’t begin to have her faith. She
provides,” said Strether, “three fourths of that. And she provides, as
I’ve confided to you, _all_ the money.”
It evoked somehow a vision of gold that held for a little Miss
Gostrey’s eyes, and she looked as if she heard the bright dollars
shovelled in. “I hope then you make a good thing—”
“I _never_ made a good thing!” he at once returned.
She just waited. “Don’t you call it a good thing to be loved?”
“Oh we’re not loved. We’re not even hated. We’re only just sweetly
ignored.”
She had another pause. “You don’t trust me!” she once more repeated.
“Don’t I when I lift the last veil?—tell you the very secret of the
prison-house?”
Again she met his eyes, but to the result that after an instant her own
turned away with impatience. “You don’t sell? Oh I’m glad of _that!_”
After which however, and before he could protest, she was off again.
“She’s just a _moral_ swell.”
He accepted gaily enough the definition. “Yes—I really think that
describes her.”
But it had for his friend the oddest connexion. “How does she do her
hair?”
He laughed out. “Beautifully!”
“Ah that doesn’t tell me. However, it doesn’t matter—I know. It’s
tremendously neat—a real reproach; quite remarkably thick and without,
as yet, a single strand of white. There!”
He blushed for her realism, but gaped at her truth. “You’re the very
deuce.”
“What else _should_ I be? It was as the very deuce I pounced on you.
But don’t let it trouble you, for everything but the very deuce—at our
age—is a bore and a delusion, and even he himself, after all, but half
a joy.” With which, on a single sweep of her wing, she resumed. “You
assist her to expiate—which is rather hard when you’ve yourself not
sinned.”
“It’s she who hasn’t sinned,” Strether replied. “I’ve sinned the most.”
“Ah,” Miss Gostrey cynically laughed, “what a picture of _her!_ Have
you robbed the widow and the orphan?”
“I’ve sinned enough,” said Strether.
“Enough for whom? Enough for what?”
“Well, to be where I am.”
“Thank you!” They were disturbed at this moment by the passage between
their knees and the back of the seats before them of a gentleman who
had been absent during a part of the performance and who now returned
for the close; but the interruption left Miss Gostrey time, before the
subsequent hush, to express as a sharp finality her sense of the moral
of all their talk. “I knew you had something up your sleeve!” This
finality, however, left them in its turn, at the end of the play, as
disposed to hang back as if they had still much to say; so that they
easily agreed to let every one go before them—they found an interest in
waiting. They made out from the lobby that the night had turned to
rain; yet Miss Gostrey let her friend know that he wasn’t to see her
home. He was simply to put her, by herself, into a four-wheeler; she
liked so in London, of wet nights after wild pleasures, thinking things
over, on the return, in lonely four-wheelers. This was her great time,
she intimated, for pulling herself together. The delays caused by the
weather, the struggle for vehicles at the door, gave them occasion to
subside on a divan at the back of the vestibule and just beyond the
reach of the fresh damp gusts from the street. Here Strether’s comrade
resumed that free handling of the subject to which his own imagination
of it already owed so much. “Does your young friend in Paris like you?”
It had almost, after the interval, startled him. “Oh I hope not! Why
_should_ he?”
“Why shouldn’t he?” Miss Gostrey asked. “That you’re coming down on him
need have nothing to do with it.”
“You see more in it,” he presently returned, “than I.”
“Of course I see _you_ in it.”
“Well then you see more in ‘me’!”
“Than you see in yourself? Very likely. That’s always one’s right. What
I was thinking of,” she explained, “is the possible particular effect
on him of his _milieu_.”
“Oh his _milieu_—!” Strether really felt he could imagine it better now
than three hours before.
“Do you mean it can only have been so lowering?”
“Why that’s my very starting-point.”
“Yes, but you start so far back. What do his letters say?”
“Nothing. He practically ignores us—or spares us. He doesn’t write.”
“I see. But there are all the same,” she went on, “two quite distinct
things that—given the wonderful place he’s in—may have happened to him.
One is that he may have got brutalised. The other is that he may have
got refined.”
Strether stared—this _was_ a novelty. “Refined?”
“Oh,” she said quietly, “there _are_ refinements.”
The way of it made him, after looking at her, break into a laugh.
“_You_ have them!”
“As one of the signs,” she continued in the same tone, “they constitute
perhaps the worst.”
He thought it over and his gravity returned. “Is it a refinement not to
answer his mother’s letters?”
She appeared to have a scruple, but she brought it out. “Oh I should
say the greatest of all.”
“Well,” said Strether, “_I’m_ quite content to let it, as one of the
signs, pass for the worst that I know he believes he can do what he
likes with me.”
This appeared to strike her. “How do you know it?”
“Oh I’m sure of it. I feel it in my bones.”
“Feel he _can_ do it?”
“Feel that he believes he can. It may come to the same thing!” Strether
laughed.
She wouldn’t, however, have this. “Nothing for you will ever come to
the same thing as anything else.” And she understood what she meant, it
seemed, sufficiently to go straight on. “You say that if he does break
he’ll come in for things at home?”
“Quite positively. He’ll come in for a particular chance—a chance that
any properly constituted young man would jump at. The business has so
developed that an opening scarcely apparent three years ago, but which
his father’s will took account of as in certain conditions possible and
which, under that will, attaches to Chad’s availing himself of it a
large contingent advantage—this opening, the conditions having come
about, now simply awaits him. His mother has kept it for him, holding
out against strong pressure, till the last possible moment. It
requires, naturally, as it carries with it a handsome ‘part,’ a large
share in profits, his being on the spot and making a big effort for a
big result. That’s what I mean by his chance. If he misses it he comes
in, as you say, for nothing. And to see that he doesn’t miss it is, in
a word, what I’ve come out for.”
She let it all sink in. “What you’ve come out for then is simply to
render him an immense service.”
Well, poor Strether was willing to take it so. “Ah if you like.”
“He stands, as they say, if you succeed with him, to gain—”
“Oh a lot of advantages.” Strether had them clearly at his fingers’
ends.
“By which you mean of course a lot of money.”
“Well, not only. I’m acting with a sense for him of other things too.
Consideration and comfort and security—the general safety of being
anchored by a strong chain. He wants, as I see him, to be protected.
Protected I mean from life.”
“Ah voilà!”—her thought fitted with a click. “From life. What you
_really_ want to get him home for is to marry him.”
“Well, that’s about the size of it.”
“Of course,” she said, “it’s rudimentary. But to any one in
particular?”
He smiled at this, looking a little more conscious. “You get everything
out.”
For a moment again their eyes met. “You put everything in!”
He acknowledged the tribute by telling her. “To Mamie Pocock.”
She wondered; then gravely, even exquisitely, as if to make the oddity
also fit: “His own niece?”
“Oh you must yourself find a name for the relation. His
brother-in-law’s sister. Mrs. Jim’s sister-in-law.”
It seemed to have on Miss Gostrey a certain hardening effect. “And who
in the world’s Mrs. Jim?”
“Chad’s sister—who was Sarah Newsome. She’s married—didn’t I mention
it?—to Jim Pocock.”
“Ah yes,” she tacitly replied; but he had mentioned things—! Then,
however, with all the sound it could have, “Who in the world’s Jim
Pocock?” she asked.
“Why Sally’s husband. That’s the only way we distinguish people at
Woollett,” he good-humoredly explained.
“And is it a great distinction—being Sally’s husband?”
He considered. “I think there can be scarcely a greater—unless it may
become one, in the future, to be Chad’s wife.”
“Then how do they distinguish _you?_”
“They _don’t_—except, as I’ve told you, by the green cover.”
Once more their eyes met on it, and she held him an instant. “The green
cover won’t—nor will _any_ cover—avail you with _me_. You’re of a depth
of duplicity!” Still, she could in her own large grasp of the real
condone it. “Is Mamie a great _parti?_”
“Oh the greatest we have—our prettiest brightest girl.”
Miss Gostrey seemed to fix the poor child. “I know what they _can_ be.
And with money?”
“Not perhaps with a great deal of that—but with so much of everything
else that we don’t miss it. We _don’t_ miss money much, you know,”
Strether added, “in general, in America, in pretty girls.”
“No,” she conceded; “but I know also what you do sometimes miss. And do
you,” she asked, “yourself admire her?”
It was a question, he indicated, that there might be several ways of
taking; but he decided after an instant for the humorous. “Haven’t I
sufficiently showed you how I admire _any_ pretty girl?”
Her interest in his problem was by this time such that it scarce left
her freedom, and she kept close to the facts. “I supposed that at
Woollett you wanted them—what shall I call it?—blameless. I mean your
young men for your pretty girls.”
“So did I!” Strether confessed. “But you strike there a curious
fact—the fact that Woollett too accommodates itself to the spirit of
the age and the increasing mildness of manners. Everything changes, and
I hold that our situation precisely marks a date. We _should_ prefer
them blameless, but we have to make the best of them as we find them.
Since the spirit of the age and the increasing mildness send them so
much more to Paris—”
“You’ve to take them back as they come. When they _do_ come. _Bon!_”
Once more she embraced it all, but she had a moment of thought. “Poor
Chad!”
“Ah,” said Strether cheerfully “Mamie will save him!”
She was looking away, still in her vision, and she spoke with
impatience and almost as if he hadn’t understood her. “_You’ll_ save
him. That’s who’ll save him.”
“Oh but with Mamie’s aid. Unless indeed you mean,” he added, “that I
shall effect so much more with yours!”
It made her at last again look at him. “You’ll do more—as you’re so
much better—than all of us put together.”
“I think I’m only better since I’ve known _you!_” Strether bravely
returned.
The depletion of the place, the shrinkage of the crowd and now
comparatively quiet withdrawal of its last elements had already brought
them nearer the door and put them in relation with a messenger of whom
he bespoke Miss Gostrey’s cab. But this left them a few minutes more,
which she was clearly in no mood not to use. “You’ve spoken to me of
what—by your success—Mr. Chad stands to gain. But you’ve not spoken to
me of what you do.”
“Oh I’ve nothing more to gain,” said Strether very simply.
She took it as even quite too simple. “You mean you’ve got it all
‘down’? You’ve been paid in advance?”
“Ah don’t talk about payment!” he groaned.
Something in the tone of it pulled her up, but as their messenger still
delayed she had another chance and she put it in another way. “What—by
failure—do you stand to lose?”
He still, however, wouldn’t have it. “Nothing!” he exclaimed, and on
the messenger’s at this instant reappearing he was able to sink the
subject in their responsive advance. When, a few steps up the street,
under a lamp, he had put her into her four-wheeler and she had asked
him if the man had called for him no second conveyance, he replied
before the door was closed. “You won’t take me with you?”
“Not for the world.”
“Then I shall walk.”
“In the rain?”
“I like the rain,” said Strether. “Good-night!”
She kept him a moment, while his hand was on the door, by not
answering; after which she answered by repeating her question. “What do
you stand to lose?”
Why the question now affected him as other he couldn’t have said; he
could only this time meet it otherwise. “Everything.”
“So I thought. Then you shall succeed. And to that end I’m yours—”
“Ah, dear lady!” he kindly breathed.
“Till death!” said Maria Gostrey. “Good-night.”