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!”