I
It was quite by half-past five—after the two men had been together in
Madame de Vionnet’s drawing-room not more than a dozen minutes—that
Chad, with a look at his watch and then another at their hostess, said
genially, gaily: “I’ve an engagement, and I know you won’t complain if
I leave him with you. He’ll interest you immensely; and as for her,” he
declared to Strether, “I assure you, if you’re at all nervous, she’s
perfectly safe.”
He had left them to be embarrassed or not by this guarantee, as they
could best manage, and embarrassment was a thing that Strether wasn’t
at first sure Madame de Vionnet escaped. He escaped it himself, to his
surprise; but he had grown used by this time to thinking of himself as
brazen. She occupied, his hostess, in the Rue de Bellechasse, the first
floor of an old house to which our visitors had had access from an old
clean court. The court was large and open, full of revelations, for our
friend, of the habit of privacy, the peace of intervals, the dignity of
distances and approaches; the house, to his restless sense, was in the
high homely style of an elder day, and the ancient Paris that he was
always looking for—sometimes intensely felt, sometimes more acutely
missed—was in the immemorial polish of the wide waxed staircase and in
the fine _boiseries_, the medallions, mouldings, mirrors, great clear
spaces, of the greyish-white salon into which he had been shown. He
seemed at the very outset to see her in the midst of possessions not
vulgarly numerous, but hereditary cherished charming. While his eyes
turned after a little from those of his hostess and Chad freely
talked—not in the least about _him_, but about other people, people he
didn’t know, and quite as if he did know them—he found himself making
out, as a background of the occupant, some glory, some prosperity of
the First Empire, some Napoleonic glamour, some dim lustre of the great
legend; elements clinging still to all the consular chairs and
mythological brasses and sphinxes’ heads and faded surfaces of satin
striped with alternate silk.
The place itself went further back—that he guessed, and how old Paris
continued in a manner to echo there; but the post-revolutionary period,
the world he vaguely thought of as the world of Châteaubriand, of
Madame de Staël, even of the young Lamartine, had left its stamp of
harps and urns and torches, a stamp impressed on sundry small objects,
ornaments and relics. He had never before, to his knowledge, had
present to him relics, of any special dignity, of a private
order—little old miniatures, medallions, pictures, books; books in
leather bindings, pinkish and greenish, with gilt garlands on the back,
ranged, together with other promiscuous properties, under the glass of
brass-mounted cabinets. His attention took them all tenderly into
account. They were among the matters that marked Madame de Vionnet’s
apartment as something quite different from Miss Gostrey’s little
museum of bargains and from Chad’s lovely home; he recognised it as
founded much more on old accumulations that had possibly from time to
time shrunken than on any contemporary method of acquisition or form of
curiosity. Chad and Miss Gostrey had rummaged and purchased and picked
up and exchanged, sifting, selecting, comparing; whereas the mistress
of the scene before him, beautifully passive under the spell of
transmission—transmission from her father’s line, he quite made up his
mind—had only received, accepted and been quiet. When she hadn’t been
quiet she had been moved at the most to some occult charity for some
fallen fortune. There had been objects she or her predecessors might
even conceivably have parted with under need, but Strether couldn’t
suspect them of having sold old pieces to get “better” ones. They would
have felt no difference as to better or worse. He could but imagine
their having felt—perhaps in emigration, in proscription, for his
sketch was slight and confused—the pressure of want or the obligation
of sacrifice.
The pressure of want—whatever might be the case with the other
force—was, however, presumably not active now, for the tokens of a
chastened ease still abounded after all, many marks of a taste whose
discriminations might perhaps have been called eccentric. He guessed at
intense little preferences and sharp little exclusions, a deep
suspicion of the vulgar and a personal view of the right. The general
result of this was something for which he had no name on the spot quite
ready, but something he would have come nearest to naming in speaking
of it as the air of supreme respectability, the consciousness, small,
still, reserved, but none the less distinct and diffused, of private
honour. The air of supreme respectability—that was a strange blank wall
for his adventure to have brought him to break his nose against. It had
in fact, as he was now aware, filled all the approaches, hovered in the
court as he passed, hung on the staircase as he mounted, sounded in the
grave rumble of the old bell, as little electric as possible, of which
Chad, at the door, had pulled the ancient but neatly-kept tassel; it
formed in short the clearest medium of its particular kind that he had
ever breathed. He would have answered for it at the end of a quarter of
an hour that some of the glass cases contained swords and epaulettes of
ancient colonels and generals; medals and orders once pinned over
hearts that had long since ceased to beat; snuff-boxes bestowed on
ministers and envoys; copies of works presented, with inscriptions, by
authors now classic. At bottom of it all for him was the sense of her
rare unlikeness to the women he had known. This sense had grown, since
the day before, the more he recalled her, and had been above all
singularly fed by his talk with Chad in the morning. Everything in fine
made her immeasurably new, and nothing so new as the old house and the
old objects. There were books, two or three, on a small table near his
chair, but they hadn’t the lemon-coloured covers with which his eye had
begun to dally from the hour of his arrival and to the opportunity of a
further acquaintance with which he had for a fortnight now altogether
succumbed. On another table, across the room, he made out the great
_Revue_; but even that familiar face, conspicuous in Mrs. Newsome’s
parlours, scarce counted here as a modern note. He was sure on the
spot—and he afterwards knew he was right—that this was a touch of
Chad’s own hand. What would Mrs. Newsome say to the circumstance that
Chad’s interested “influence” kept her paper-knife in the _Revue_? The
interested influence at any rate had, as we say, gone straight to the
point—had in fact soon left it quite behind.
She was seated, near the fire, on a small stuffed and fringed chair one
of the few modern articles in the room, and she leaned back in it with
her hands clasped in her lap and no movement, in all her person, but
the fine prompt play of her deep young face. The fire, under the low
white marble, undraped and academic, had burnt down to the silver ashes
of light wood, one of the windows, at a distance, stood open to the
mildness and stillness, out of which, in the short pauses, came the
faint sound, pleasant and homely, almost rustic, of a plash and a
clatter of _sabots_ from some coach-house on the other side of the
court. Madame de Vionnet, while Strether sat there, wasn’t to shift her
posture by an inch. “I don’t think you seriously believe in what you’re
doing,” she said; “but all the same, you know, I’m going to treat you
quite as if I did.”
“By which you mean,” Strether directly replied, “quite as if you
didn’t! I assure you it won’t make the least difference with me how you
treat me.”
“Well,” she said, taking that menace bravely and philosophically
enough, “the only thing that really matters is that you shall get on
with me.”
“Ah but I don’t!” he immediately returned.
It gave her another pause; which, however, she happily enough shook
off. “Will you consent to go on with me a little—provisionally—as if
you did?”
Then it was that he saw how she had decidedly come all the way; and
there accompanied it an extraordinary sense of her raising from
somewhere below him her beautiful suppliant eyes. He might have been
perched at his door-step or at his window and she standing in the road.
For a moment he let her stand and couldn’t moreover have spoken. It had
been sad, of a sudden, with a sadness that was like a cold breath in
his face. “What can I do,” he finally asked, “but listen to you as I
promised Chadwick?”
“Ah but what I’m asking you,” she quickly said, “isn’t what Mr. Newsome
had in mind.” She spoke at present, he saw, as if to take courageously
_all_ her risk. “This is my own idea and a different thing.”
It gave poor Strether in truth—uneasy as it made him too—something of
the thrill of a bold perception justified. “Well,” he answered kindly
enough, “I was sure a moment since that some idea of your own had come
to you.”
She seemed still to look up at him, but now more serenely. “I made out
you were sure—and that helped it to come. So you see,” she continued,
“we do get on.”
“Oh but it appears to me I don’t at all meet your request. How can I
when I don’t understand it?”
“It isn’t at all necessary you should understand; it will do quite well
enough if you simply remember it. Only feel I trust you—and for nothing
so tremendous after all. Just,” she said with a wonderful smile, “for
common civility.”
Strether had a long pause while they sat again face to face, as they
had sat, scarce less conscious, before the poor lady had crossed the
stream. She was the poor lady for Strether now because clearly she had
some trouble, and her appeal to him could only mean that her trouble
was deep. He couldn’t help it; it wasn’t his fault; he had done
nothing; but by a turn of the hand she had somehow made their encounter
a relation. And the relation profited by a mass of things that were not
strictly in it or of it; by the very air in which they sat, by the high
cold delicate room, by the world outside and the little plash in the
court, by the First Empire and the relics in the stiff cabinets, by
matters as far off as those and by others as near as the unbroken clasp
of her hands in her lap and the look her expression had of being most
natural when her eyes were most fixed. “You count upon me of course for
something really much greater than it sounds.”
“Oh it sounds great enough too!” she laughed at this.
He found himself in time on the point of telling her that she was, as
Miss Barrace called it, wonderful; but, catching himself up, he said
something else instead. “What was it Chad’s idea then that you should
say to me?”
“Ah his idea was simply what a man’s idea always is—to put every effort
off on the woman.”
“The ‘woman’—?” Strether slowly echoed.
“The woman he likes—and just in proportion as he likes her. In
proportion too—for shifting the trouble—as she likes _him_.”
Strether followed it; then with an abruptness of his own: “How much do
you like Chad?”
“Just as much as _that_—to take all, with you, on myself.” But she got
at once again away from this. “I’ve been trembling as if we were to
stand or fall by what you may think of me; and I’m even now,” she went
on wonderfully, “drawing a long breath—and, yes, truly taking a great
courage—from the hope that I don’t in fact strike you as impossible.”
“That’s at all events, clearly,” he observed after an instant, “the way
I don’t strike _you_.”
“Well,” she so far assented, “as you haven’t yet said you _won’t_ have
the little patience with me I ask for—”
“You draw splendid conclusions? Perfectly. But I don’t understand
them,” Strether pursued. “You seem to me to ask for much more than you
need. What, at the worst for you, what at the best for myself, can I
after all do? I can use no pressure that I haven’t used. You come
really late with your request. I’ve already done all that for myself
the case admits of. I’ve said my say, and here I am.”
“Yes, here you are, fortunately!” Madame de Vionnet laughed. “Mrs.
Newsome,” she added in another tone, “didn’t think you can do so
little.”
He had an hesitation, but he brought the words out. “Well, she thinks
so now.”
“Do you mean by that—?” But she also hung fire.
“Do I mean what?”
She still rather faltered. “Pardon me if I touch on it, but if I’m
saying extraordinary things, why, perhaps, mayn’t I? Besides, doesn’t
it properly concern us to know?”
“To know what?” he insisted as after thus beating about the bush she
had again dropped.
She made the effort. “Has she given you up?”
He was amazed afterwards to think how simply and quietly he had met it.
“Not yet.” It was almost as if he were a trifle disappointed—had
expected still more of her freedom. But he went straight on. “Is that
what Chad has told you will happen to me?”
She was evidently charmed with the way he took it. “If you mean if
we’ve talked of it—most certainly. And the question’s not what has had
least to do with my wishing to see you.”
“To judge if I’m the sort of man a woman _can_—?”
“Precisely,” she exclaimed—“you wonderful gentleman! I do judge—I
_have_ judged. A woman can’t. You’re safe—with every right to be. You’d
be much happier if you’d only believe it.”
Strether was silent a little; then he found himself speaking with a
cynicism of confidence of which even at the moment the sources were
strange to him. “I try to believe it. But it’s a marvel,” he exclaimed,
“how _you_ already get at it!”
Oh she was able to say. “Remember how much I was on the way to it
through Mr. Newsome—before I saw you. He thinks everything of your
strength.”
“Well, I can bear almost anything!” our friend briskly interrupted.
Deep and beautiful on this her smile came back, and with the effect of
making him hear what he had said just as she had heard it. He easily
enough felt that it gave him away, but what in truth had everything
done but that? It had been all very well to think at moments that he
was holding her nose down and that he had coerced her: what had he by
this time done but let her practically see that he accepted their
relation? What was their relation moreover—though light and brief
enough in form as yet—but whatever she might choose to make it? Nothing
could prevent her—certainly he couldn’t—from making it pleasant. At the
back of his head, behind everything, was the sense that she was—there,
before him, close to him, in vivid imperative form—one of the rare
women he had so often heard of, read of, thought of, but never met,
whose very presence, look, voice, the mere contemporaneous _fact_ of
whom, from the moment it was at all presented, made a relation of mere
recognition. That was not the kind of woman he had ever found Mrs.
Newsome, a contemporaneous fact who had been distinctly slow to
establish herself; and at present, confronted with Madame de Vionnet,
he felt the simplicity of his original impression of Miss Gostrey. She
certainly had been a fact of rapid growth; but the world was wide, each
day was more and more a new lesson. There were at any rate even among
the stranger ones relations and relations. “Of course I suit Chad’s
grand way,” he quickly added. “He hasn’t had much difficulty in working
me in.”
She seemed to deny a little, on the young man’s behalf, by the rise of
her eyebrows, an intention of any process at all inconsiderate. “You
must know how grieved he’d be if you were to lose anything. He believes
you can keep his mother patient.”
Strether wondered with his eyes on her. “I see. _That’s_ then what you
really want of me. And how am I to do it? Perhaps you’ll tell me that.”
“Simply tell her the truth.”
“And what do you call the truth?”
“Well, _any_ truth—about us all—that you see yourself. I leave it to
you.”
“Thank you very much. I like,” Strether laughed with a slight
harshness, “the way you leave things!”
But she insisted kindly, gently, as if it wasn’t so bad. “Be perfectly
honest. Tell her all.”
“All?” he oddly echoed.
“Tell her the simple truth,” Madame de Vionnet again pleaded.
“But what _is_ the simple truth? The simple truth is exactly what I’m
trying to discover.”
She looked about a while, but presently she came back to him. “Tell
her, fully and clearly, about _us_.”
Strether meanwhile had been staring. “You and your daughter?”
“Yes—little Jeanne and me. Tell her,” she just slightly quavered, “you
like us.”
“And what good will that do me? Or rather”—he caught himself up—“what
good will it do _you?_”
She looked graver. “None, you believe, really?”
Strether debated. “She didn’t send me out to ‘like’ you.”
“Oh,” she charmingly contended, “she sent you out to face the facts.”
He admitted after an instant that there was something in that. “But how
can I face them till I know what they are? Do you want him,” he then
braced himself to ask, “to marry your daughter?”
She gave a headshake as noble as it was prompt. “No—not that.”
“And he really doesn’t want to himself?”
She repeated the movement, but now with a strange light in her face.
“He likes her too much.”
Strether wondered. “To be willing to consider, you mean, the question
of taking her to America?”
“To be willing to do anything with her but be immensely kind and
nice—really tender of her. We watch over her, and you must help us. You
must see her again.”
Strether felt awkward. “Ah with pleasure—she’s so remarkably
attractive.”
The mother’s eagerness with which Madame de Vionnet jumped at this was
to come back to him later as beautiful in its grace. “The dear thing
_did_ please you?” Then as he met it with the largest “Oh!” of
enthusiasm: “She’s perfect. She’s my joy.”
“Well, I’m sure that—if one were near her and saw more of her—she’d be
mine.”
“Then,” said Madame de Vionnet, “tell Mrs. Newsome that!”
He wondered the more. “What good will that do you?” As she appeared
unable at once to say, however, he brought out something else. “Is your
daughter in love with our friend?”
“Ah,” she rather startlingly answered, “I wish you’d find out!”
He showed his surprise. “I? A stranger?”
“Oh you won’t be a stranger—presently. You shall see her quite, I
assure you, as if you weren’t.”
It remained for him none the less an extraordinary notion. “It seems to
me surely that if her mother can’t—”
“Ah little girls and their mothers to-day!” she rather inconsequently
broke in. But she checked herself with something she seemed to give out
as after all more to the point. “Tell her I’ve been good for him. Don’t
you think I have?”
It had its effect on him—more than at the moment he quite measured. Yet
he was consciously enough touched. “Oh if it’s all _you_—!”
“Well, it may not be ‘all,’” she interrupted, “but it’s to a great
extent. Really and truly,” she added in a tone that was to take its
place with him among things remembered.
“Then it’s very wonderful.” He smiled at her from a face that he felt
as strained, and her own face for a moment kept him so. At last she
also got up. “Well, don’t you think that for that—”
“I ought to save you?” So it was that the way to meet her—and the way,
as well, in a manner, to get off—came over him. He heard himself use
the exorbitant word, the very sound of which helped to determine his
flight. “I’ll save you if I can.”