Madame de Vionnet, having meanwhile come in, was at present close to
them, and Miss Barrace hereupon, instead of risking a rejoinder, became
again with a look that measured her from top to toe all mere
long-handled appreciative tortoise-shell. She had struck our friend,
from the first of her appearing, as dressed for a great occasion, and
she met still more than on either of the others the conception
reawakened in him at their garden-party, the idea of the _femme du
monde_ in her habit as she lived. Her bare shoulders and arms were
white and beautiful; the materials of her dress, a mixture, as he
supposed, of silk and crape, were of a silvery grey so artfully
composed as to give an impression of warm splendour; and round her neck
she wore a collar of large old emeralds, the green note of which was
more dimly repeated, at other points of her apparel, in embroidery, in
enamel, in satin, in substances and textures vaguely rich. Her head,
extremely fair and exquisitely festal, was like a happy fancy, a notion
of the antique, on an old precious medal, some silver coin of the
Renaissance; while her slim lightness and brightness, her gaiety, her
expression, her decision, contributed to an effect that might have been
felt by a poet as half mythological and half conventional. He could
have compared her to a goddess still partly engaged in a morning cloud,
or to a sea-nymph waist-high in the summer surge. Above all she
suggested to him the reflexion that the _femme du monde_—in these
finest developments of the type—was, like Cleopatra in the play, indeed
various and multifold. She had aspects, characters, days, nights—or had
them at least, showed them by a mysterious law of her own, when in
addition to everything she happened also to be a woman of genius. She
was an obscure person, a muffled person one day, and a showy person, an
uncovered person the next. He thought of Madame de Vionnet to-night as
showy and uncovered, though he felt the formula rough, because, thanks
to one of the short-cuts of genius she had taken all his categories by
surprise. Twice during dinner he had met Chad’s eyes in a longish look;
but these communications had in truth only stirred up again old
ambiguities—so little was it clear from them whether they were an
appeal or an admonition. “You see how I’m fixed,” was what they
appeared to convey; yet how he was fixed was exactly what Strether
didn’t see. However, perhaps he should see now.
“Are you capable of the very great kindness of going to relieve
Newsome, for a few minutes, of the rather crushing responsibility of
Madame Gloriani, while I say a word, if he’ll allow me, to Mr.
Strether, of whom I’ve a question to ask? Our host ought to talk a bit
to those other ladies, and I’ll come back in a minute to your rescue.”
She made this proposal to Miss Barrace as if her consciousness of a
special duty had just flickered-up, but that lady’s recognition of
Strether’s little start at it—as at a betrayal on the speaker’s part of
a domesticated state—was as mute as his own comment; and after an
instant, when their fellow guest had good-naturedly left them, he had
been given something else to think of. “Why has Maria so suddenly gone?
Do you know?” That was the question Madame de Vionnet had brought with
her.
“I’m afraid I’ve no reason to give you but the simple reason I’ve had
from her in a note—the sudden obligation to join in the south a sick
friend who has got worse.”
“Ah then she has been writing you?”
“Not since she went—I had only a brief explanatory word before she
started. I went to see her,” Strether explained—“it was the day after I
called on you—but she was already on her way, and her concierge told me
that in case of my coming I was to be informed she had written to me. I
found her note when I got home.”
Madame de Vionnet listened with interest and with her eyes on
Strether’s face; then her delicately decorated head had a small
melancholy motion. “She didn’t write to _me_. I went to see her,” she
added, “almost immediately after I had seen you, and as I assured her I
would do when I met her at Gloriani’s. She hadn’t then told me she was
to be absent, and I felt at her door as if I understood. She’s
absent—with all respect to her sick friend, though I know indeed she
has plenty—so that I may not see her. She doesn’t want to meet me
again. Well,” she continued with a beautiful conscious mildness, “I
liked and admired her beyond every one in the old time, and she knew
it—perhaps that’s precisely what has made her go—and I dare say I
haven’t lost her for ever.” Strether still said nothing; he had a
horror, as he now thought of himself, of being in question between
women—was in fact already quite enough on his way to that, and there
was moreover, as it came to him, perceptibly, something behind these
allusions and professions that, should he take it in, would square but
ill with his present resolve to simplify. It was as if, for him, all
the same, her softness and sadness were sincere. He felt that not less
when she soon went on: “I’m extremely glad of her happiness.” But it
also left him mute—sharp and fine though the imputation it conveyed.
What it conveyed was that _he_ was Maria Gostrey’s happiness, and for
the least little instant he had the impulse to challenge the thought.
He could have done so however only by saying “What then do you suppose
to be between us?” and he was wonderfully glad a moment later not to
have spoken. He would rather seem stupid any day than fatuous, and he
drew back as well, with a smothered inward shudder, from the
consideration of what women—of highly-developed type in
particular—might think of each other. Whatever he had come out for he
hadn’t come to go into that; so that he absolutely took up nothing his
interlocutress had now let drop. Yet, though he had kept away from her
for days, had laid wholly on herself the burden of their meeting again,
she hadn’t a gleam of irritation to show him. “Well, about Jeanne now?”
she smiled—it had the gaiety with which she had originally come in. He
felt it on the instant to represent her motive and real errand. But he
had been schooling her of a truth to say much in proportion to his
little. “_Do_ you make out that she has a sentiment? I mean for Mr.
Newsome.”
Almost resentful, Strether could at last be prompt. “How can I make out
such things?”
She remained perfectly good-natured. “Ah but they’re beautiful little
things, and you make out—don’t pretend—everything in the world. Haven’t
you,” she asked, “been talking with her?”
“Yes, but not about Chad. At least not much.”
“Oh you don’t require ‘much’!” she reassuringly declared. But she
immediately changed her ground. “I hope you remember your promise of
the other day.”
“To ‘save’ you, as you called it?”
“I call it so still. You _will?_” she insisted. “You haven’t repented?”
He wondered. “No—but I’ve been thinking what I meant.”
She kept it up. “And not, a little, what _I_ did?”
“No—that’s not necessary. It will be enough if I know what I meant
myself.”
“And don’t you know,” she asked, “by this time?”
Again he had a pause. “I think you ought to leave it to me. But how
long,” he added, “do you give me?”
“It seems to me much more a question of how long you give _me_. Doesn’t
our friend here himself, at any rate,” she went on, “perpetually make
me present to you?”
“Not,” Strether replied, “by ever speaking of you to me.”
“He never does that?”
“Never.”
She considered, and, if the fact was disconcerting to her, effectually
concealed it. The next minute indeed she had recovered. “No, he
wouldn’t. But do you _need_ that?”
Her emphasis was wonderful, and though his eyes had been wandering he
looked at her longer now. “I see what you mean.”
“Of course you see what I mean.”
Her triumph was gentle, and she really had tones to make justice weep.
“I’ve before me what he owes you.”
“Admit then that that’s something,” she said, yet still with the same
discretion in her pride.
He took in this note but went straight on. “You’ve made of him what I
see, but what I don’t see is how in the world you’ve done it.”
“Ah that’s another question!” she smiled. “The point is of what use is
your declining to know me when to know Mr. Newsome—as you do me the
honour to find him—_is_ just to know me.”
“I see,” he mused, still with his eyes on her. “I shouldn’t have met
you to-night.”
She raised and dropped her linked hands. “It doesn’t matter. If I trust
you why can’t you a little trust me too? And why can’t you also,” she
asked in another tone, “trust yourself?” But she gave him no time to
reply. “Oh I shall be so easy for you! And I’m glad at any rate you’ve
seen my child.”
“I’m glad too,” he said; “but she does you no good.”
“No good?”—Madame de Vionnet had a clear stare. “Why she’s an angel of
light.”
“That’s precisely the reason. Leave her alone. Don’t try to find out. I
mean,” he explained, “about what you spoke to me of—the way she feels.”
His companion wondered. “Because one really won’t?”
“Well, because I ask you, as a favour to myself, not to. She’s the most
charming creature I’ve ever seen. Therefore don’t touch her. Don’t
know—don’t want to know. And moreover—yes—you _won’t_.”
It was an appeal, of a sudden, and she took it in. “As a favour to
you?”
“Well—since you ask me.”
“Anything, everything you ask,” she smiled. “I shan’t know then—never.
Thank you,” she added with peculiar gentleness as she turned away.
The sound of it lingered with him, making him fairly feel as if he had
been tripped up and had a fall. In the very act of arranging with her
for his independence he had, under pressure from a particular
perception, inconsistently, quite stupidly, committed himself, and,
with her subtlety sensitive on the spot to an advantage, she had driven
in by a single word a little golden nail, the sharp intention of which
he signally felt. He hadn’t detached, he had more closely connected
himself, and his eyes, as he considered with some intensity this
circumstance, met another pair which had just come within their range
and which struck him as reflecting his sense of what he had done. He
recognised them at the same moment as those of little Bilham, who had
apparently drawn near on purpose to speak to him, and little Bilham
wasn’t, in the conditions, the person to whom his heart would be most
closed. They were seated together a minute later at the angle of the
room obliquely opposite the corner in which Gloriani was still engaged
with Jeanne de Vionnet, to whom at first and in silence their attention
had been benevolently given. “I can’t see for my life,” Strether had
then observed, “how a young fellow of any spirit—such a one as you for
instance—can be admitted to the sight of that young lady without being
hard hit. Why don’t you go in, little Bilham?” He remembered the tone
into which he had been betrayed on the garden-bench at the sculptor’s
reception, and this might make up for that by being much more the right
sort of thing to say to a young man worthy of any advice at all. “There
_would_ be some reason.”
“Some reason for what?”
“Why for hanging on here.”
“To offer my hand and fortune to Mademoiselle de Vionnet?”
“Well,” Strether asked, “to what lovelier apparition _could_ you offer
them? She’s the sweetest little thing I’ve ever seen.”
“She’s certainly immense. I mean she’s the real thing. I believe the
pale pink petals are folded up there for some wondrous efflorescence in
time; to open, that is, to some great golden sun. _I’m_ unfortunately
but a small farthing candle. What chance in such a field for a poor
little painter-man?”
“Oh you’re good enough,” Strether threw out.
“Certainly I’m good enough. We’re good enough, I consider, _nous
autres_, for anything. But she’s _too_ good. There’s the difference.
They wouldn’t look at me.”
Strether, lounging on his divan and still charmed by the young girl,
whose eyes had consciously strayed to him, he fancied, with a vague
smile—Strether, enjoying the whole occasion as with dormant pulses at
last awake and in spite of new material thrust upon him, thought over
his companion’s words. “Whom do you mean by ‘they’? She and her
mother?”
“She and her mother. And she has a father too, who, whatever else he
may be, certainly can’t be indifferent to the possibilities she
represents. Besides, there’s Chad.”
Strether was silent a little. “Ah but he doesn’t care for her—not, I
mean, it appears, after all, in the sense I’m speaking of. He’s _not_
in love with her.”
“No—but he’s her best friend; after her mother. He’s very fond of her.
He has his ideas about what can be done for her.”
“Well, it’s very strange!” Strether presently remarked with a sighing
sense of fulness.
“Very strange indeed. That’s just the beauty of it. Isn’t it very much
the kind of beauty you had in mind,” little Bilham went on, “when you
were so wonderful and so inspiring to me the other day? Didn’t you
adjure me, in accents I shall never forget, to see, while I’ve a
chance, everything I can?—and _really_ to see, for it must have been
that only you meant. Well, you did me no end of good, and I’m doing my
best. I _do_ make it out a situation.”
“So do I!” Strether went on after a moment. But he had the next minute
an inconsequent question. “How comes Chad so mixed up, anyway?”
“Ah, ah, ah!”—and little Bilham fell back on his cushions.
It reminded our friend of Miss Barrace, and he felt again the brush of
his sense of moving in a maze of mystic closed allusions. Yet he kept
hold of his thread. “Of course I understand really; only the general
transformation makes me occasionally gasp. Chad with such a voice in
the settlement of the future of a little countess—no,” he declared, “it
takes more time! You say moreover,” he resumed, “that we’re inevitably,
people like you and me, out of the running. The curious fact remains
that Chad himself isn’t. The situation doesn’t make for it, but in a
different one he could have her if he would.”
“Yes, but that’s only because he’s rich and because there’s a
possibility of his being richer. They won’t think of anything but a
great name or a great fortune.”
“Well,” said Strether, “he’ll have no great fortune on _these_ lines.
He must stir his stumps.”
“Is that,” little Bilham enquired, “what you were saying to Madame de
Vionnet?”
“No—I don’t say much to her. Of course, however,” Strether continued,
“he can make sacrifices if he likes.”
Little Bilham had a pause. “Oh he’s not keen for sacrifices; or thinks,
that is, possibly, that he has made enough.”
“Well, it _is_ virtuous,” his companion observed with some decision.
“That’s exactly,” the young man dropped after a moment, “what I mean.”
It kept Strether himself silent a little. “I’ve made it out for
myself,” he then went on; “I’ve really, within the last half-hour, got
hold of it. I understand it in short at last; which at first—when you
originally spoke to me—I didn’t. Nor when Chad originally spoke to me
either.”
“Oh,” said little Bilham, “I don’t think that at that time you believed
me.”
“Yes—I did; and I believed Chad too. It would have been odious and
unmannerly—as well as quite perverse—if I hadn’t. What interest have
you in deceiving me?”
The young man cast about. “What interest have I?”
“Yes. Chad _might_ have. But you?”
“Ah, ah, ah!” little Bilham exclaimed.
It might, on repetition, as a mystification, have irritated our friend
a little, but he knew, once more, as we have seen, where he was, and
his being proof against everything was only another attestation that he
meant to stay there. “I couldn’t, without my own impression, realise.
She’s a tremendously clever brilliant capable woman, and with an
extraordinary charm on top of it all—the charm we surely all of us this
evening know what to think of. It isn’t every clever brilliant capable
woman that has it. In fact it’s rare with any woman. So there you are,”
Strether proceeded as if not for little Bilham’s benefit alone. “I
understand what a relation with such a woman—what such a high fine
friendship—may be. It can’t be vulgar or coarse, anyway—and that’s the
point.”
“Yes, that’s the point,” said little Bilham. “It can’t be vulgar or
coarse. And, bless us and save us, it _isn’t!_ It’s, upon my word, the
very finest thing I ever saw in my life, and the most distinguished.”
Strether, from beside him and leaning back with him as he leaned,
dropped on him a momentary look which filled a short interval and of
which he took no notice. He only gazed before him with intent
participation. “Of course what it has done for him,” Strether at all
events presently pursued, “of course what it has done for him—that is
as to _how_ it has so wonderfully worked—isn’t a thing I pretend to
understand. I’ve to take it as I find it. There he is.”
“There he is!” little Bilham echoed. “And it’s really and truly she. I
don’t understand either, even with my longer and closer opportunity.
But I’m like you,” he added; “I can admire and rejoice even when I’m a
little in the dark. You see I’ve watched it for some three years, and
especially for this last. He wasn’t so bad before it as I seem to have
made out that you think—”
“Oh I don’t think anything now!” Strether impatiently broke in: “that
is but what I _do_ think! I mean that originally, for her to have cared
for him—”
“There must have been stuff in him? Oh yes, there was stuff indeed, and
much more of it than ever showed, I dare say, at home. Still, you
know,” the young man in all fairness developed, “there was room for
her, and that’s where she came in. She saw her chance and took it.
That’s what strikes me as having been so fine. But of course,” he wound
up, “he liked her first.”
“Naturally,” said Strether.
“I mean that they first met somehow and somewhere—I believe in some
American house—and she, without in the least then intending it, made
her impression. Then with time and opportunity he made his; and after
_that_ she was as bad as he.”
Strether vaguely took it up. “As ‘bad’?”
“She began, that is, to care—to care very much. Alone, and in her
horrid position, she found it, when once she had started, an interest.
It was, it is, an interest, and it did—it continues to do—a lot for
herself as well. So she still cares. She cares in fact,” said little
Bilham thoughtfully “more.”
Strether’s theory that it was none of his business was somehow not
damaged by the way he took this. “More, you mean, than he?” On which
his companion looked round at him, and now for an instant their eyes
met. “More than he?” he repeated.
Little Bilham, for as long, hung fire. “Will you never tell any one?”
Strether thought. “Whom should I tell?”
“Why I supposed you reported regularly—”
“To people at home?”—Strether took him up. “Well, I won’t tell them
this.”
The young man at last looked away. “Then she does now care more than
he.”
“Oh!” Strether oddly exclaimed.
But his companion immediately met it. “Haven’t you after all had your
impression of it? That’s how you’ve got hold of him.”
“Ah but I haven’t got hold of him!”
“Oh I say!” But it was all little Bilham said.
“It’s at any rate none of my business. I mean,” Strether explained,
“nothing else than getting hold of him is.” It appeared, however, to
strike him as his business to add: “The fact remains nevertheless that
she has saved him.”
Little Bilham just waited. “I thought that was what _you_ were to do.”
But Strether had his answer ready. “I’m speaking—in connexion with
her—of his manners and morals, his character and life. I’m speaking of
him as a person to deal with and talk with and live with—speaking of
him as a social animal.”
“And isn’t it as a social animal that you also want him?”
“Certainly; so that it’s as if she had saved him _for_ us.”
“It strikes you accordingly then,” the young man threw out, “as for you
all to save _her?_”
“Oh for us ‘all’—!” Strether could but laugh at that. It brought him
back, however, to the point he had really wished to make. “They’ve
accepted their situation—hard as it is. They’re not free—at least she’s
not; but they take what’s left to them. It’s a friendship, of a
beautiful sort; and that’s what makes them so strong. They’re straight,
they feel; and they keep each other up. It’s doubtless she, however,
who, as you yourself have hinted, feels it most.”
Little Bilham appeared to wonder what he had hinted. “Feels most that
they’re straight?”
“Well, feels that _she_ is, and the strength that comes from it. She
keeps _him_ up—she keeps the whole thing up. When people are able to
it’s fine. She’s wonderful, wonderful, as Miss Barrace says; and he is,
in his way, too; however, as a mere man, he may sometimes rebel and not
feel that he finds his account in it. She has simply given him an
immense moral lift, and what that can explain is prodigious. That’s why
I speak of it as a situation. It _is_ one, if there ever was.” And
Strether, with his head back and his eyes on the ceiling, seemed to
lose himself in the vision of it.
His companion attended deeply. “You state it much better than I could.”
“Oh you see it doesn’t concern you.”
Little Bilham considered. “I thought you said just now that it doesn’t
concern you either.”
“Well, it doesn’t a bit as Madame de Vionnet’s affair. But as we were
again saying just now, what did I come out for but to save him?”
“Yes—to remove him.”
“To save him _by_ removal; to win him over to _himself_ thinking it
best he shall take up business—thinking he must immediately do
therefore what’s necessary to that end.”
“Well,” said little Bilham after a moment, “you _have_ won him over. He
does think it best. He has within a day or two again said to me as
much.”
“And that,” Strether asked, “is why you consider that he cares less
than she?”
“Cares less for her than she for him? Yes, that’s one of the reasons.
But other things too have given me the impression. A man, don’t you
think?” little Bilham presently pursued, “_Can’t_, in such conditions,
care so much as a woman. It takes different conditions to make him, and
then perhaps he cares more. Chad,” he wound up, “has his possible
future before him.”
“Are you speaking of his business future?”
“No—on the contrary; of the other, the future of what you so justly
call their situation. M. de Vionnet may live for ever.”
“So that they can’t marry?”
The young man waited a moment. “Not being able to marry is all they’ve
with any confidence to look forward to. A woman—a particular woman—may
stand that strain. But can a man?” he propounded.
Strether’s answer was as prompt as if he had already, for himself,
worked it out. “Not without a very high ideal of conduct. But that’s
just what we’re attributing to Chad. And how, for that matter,” he
mused, “does his going to America diminish the particular strain?
Wouldn’t it seem rather to add to it?”
“Out of sight out of mind!” his companion laughed. Then more bravely:
“Wouldn’t distance lessen the torment?” But before Strether could
reply, “The thing is, you see, Chad ought to marry!” he wound up.
Strether, for a little, appeared to think of it. “If you talk of
torments you don’t diminish mine!” he then broke out. The next moment
he was on his feet with a question. “He ought to marry whom?”
Little Bilham rose more slowly. “Well, some one he _can_—some
thoroughly nice girl.”
Strether’s eyes, as they stood together, turned again to Jeanne. “Do
you mean _her?_”
His friend made a sudden strange face. “After being in love with her
mother? No.”
“But isn’t it exactly your idea that he _isn’t_ in love with her
mother?”
His friend once more had a pause. “Well, he isn’t at any rate in love
with Jeanne.”
“I dare say not.”
“How _can_ he be with any other woman?”
“Oh that I admit. But being in love isn’t, you know, here”—little
Bilham spoke in friendly reminder—“thought necessary, in strictness,
for marriage.”
“And what torment—to call a torment—can there ever possibly be with a
woman like that?” As if from the interest of his own question Strether
had gone on without hearing. “Is it for her to have turned a man out so
wonderfully, too, only for somebody else?” He appeared to make a point
of this, and little Bilham looked at him now. “When it’s for each other
that people give things up they don’t miss them.” Then he threw off as
with an extravagance of which he was conscious: “Let them face the
future together!”
Little Bilham looked at him indeed. “You mean that after all he
shouldn’t go back?”
“I mean that if he gives her up—!”
“Yes?”
“Well, he ought to be ashamed of himself.” But Strether spoke with a
sound that might have passed for a laugh.