I
It wasn’t the first time Strether had sat alone in the great dim
church—still less was it the first of his giving himself up, so far as
conditions permitted, to its beneficent action on his nerves. He had
been to Notre Dame with Waymarsh, he had been there with Miss Gostrey,
he had been there with Chad Newsome, and had found the place, even in
company, such a refuge from the obsession of his problem that, with
renewed pressure from that source, he had not unnaturally recurred to a
remedy meeting the case, for the moment, so indirectly, no doubt, but
so relievingly. He was conscious enough that it was only for the
moment, but good moments—if he could call them good—still had their
value for a man who by this time struck himself as living almost
disgracefully from hand to mouth. Having so well learnt the way, he had
lately made the pilgrimage more than once by himself—had quite stolen
off, taking an unnoticed chance and making no point of speaking of the
adventure when restored to his friends.
His great friend, for that matter, was still absent, as well as
remarkably silent; even at the end of three weeks Miss Gostrey hadn’t
come back. She wrote to him from Mentone, admitting that he must judge
her grossly inconsequent—perhaps in fact for the time odiously
faithless; but asking for patience, for a deferred sentence, throwing
herself in short on his generosity. For her too, she could assure him,
life was complicated—more complicated than he could have guessed; she
had moreover made certain of him—certain of not wholly missing him on
her return—before her disappearance. If furthermore she didn’t burden
him with letters it was frankly because of her sense of the other great
commerce he had to carry on. He himself, at the end of a fortnight, had
written twice, to show how his generosity could be trusted; but he
reminded himself in each case of Mrs. Newsome’s epistolary manner at
the times when Mrs. Newsome kept off delicate ground. He sank his
problem, he talked of Waymarsh and Miss Barrace, of little Bilham and
the set over the river, with whom he had again had tea, and he was
easy, for convenience, about Chad and Madame de Vionnet and Jeanne. He
admitted that he continued to see them, he was decidedly so confirmed a
haunter of Chad’s premises and that young man’s practical intimacy with
them was so undeniably great; but he had his reason for not attempting
to render for Miss Gostrey’s benefit the impression of these last days.
That would be to tell her too much about himself—it being at present
just from himself he was trying to escape.
This small struggle sprang not a little, in its way, from the same
impulse that had now carried him across to Notre Dame; the impulse to
let things be, to give them time to justify themselves or at least to
pass. He was aware of having no errand in such a place but the desire
not to be, for the hour, in certain other places; a sense of safety, of
simplification, which each time he yielded to it he amused himself by
thinking of as a private concession to cowardice. The great church had
no altar for his worship, no direct voice for his soul; but it was none
the less soothing even to sanctity; for he could feel while there what
he couldn’t elsewhere, that he was a plain tired man taking the holiday
he had earned. He was tired, but he wasn’t plain—that was the pity and
the trouble of it; he was able, however, to drop his problem at the
door very much as if it had been the copper piece that he deposited, on
the threshold, in the receptacle of the inveterate blind beggar. He
trod the long dim nave, sat in the splendid choir, paused before the
cluttered chapels of the east end, and the mighty monument laid upon
him its spell. He might have been a student under the charm of a
museum—which was exactly what, in a foreign town, in the afternoon of
life, he would have liked to be free to be. This form of sacrifice did
at any rate for the occasion as well as another; it made him quite
sufficiently understand how, within the precinct, for the real refugee,
the things of the world could fall into abeyance. That was the
cowardice, probably—to dodge them, to beg the question, not to deal
with it in the hard outer light; but his own oblivions were too brief,
too vain, to hurt any one but himself, and he had a vague and fanciful
kindness for certain persons whom he met, figures of mystery and
anxiety, and whom, with observation for his pastime, he ranked as those
who were fleeing from justice. Justice was outside, in the hard light,
and injustice too; but one was as absent as the other from the air of
the long aisles and the brightness of the many altars.
Thus it was at all events that, one morning some dozen days after the
dinner in the Boulevard Malesherbes at which Madame de Vionnet had been
present with her daughter, he was called upon to play his part in an
encounter that deeply stirred his imagination. He had the habit, in
these contemplations, of watching a fellow visitant, here and there,
from a respectable distance, remarking some note of behaviour, of
penitence, of prostration, of the absolved, relieved state; this was
the manner in which his vague tenderness took its course, the degree of
demonstration to which it naturally had to confine itself. It hadn’t
indeed so felt its responsibility as when on this occasion he suddenly
measured the suggestive effect of a lady whose supreme stillness, in
the shade of one of the chapels, he had two or three times noticed as
he made, and made once more, his slow circuit. She wasn’t prostrate—not
in any degree bowed, but she was strangely fixed, and her prolonged
immobility showed her, while he passed and paused, as wholly given up
to the need, whatever it was, that had brought her there. She only sat
and gazed before her, as he himself often sat; but she had placed
herself, as he never did, within the focus of the shrine, and she had
lost herself, he could easily see, as he would only have liked to do.
She was not a wandering alien, keeping back more than she gave, but one
of the familiar, the intimate, the fortunate, for whom these dealings
had a method and a meaning. She reminded our friend—since it was the
way of nine tenths of his current impressions to act as recalls of
things imagined—of some fine firm concentrated heroine of an old story,
something he had heard, read, something that, had he had a hand for
drama, he might himself have written, renewing her courage, renewing
her clearness, in splendidly-protected meditation. Her back, as she
sat, was turned to him, but his impression absolutely required that she
should be young and interesting, and she carried her head moreover,
even in the sacred shade, with a discernible faith in herself, a kind
of implied conviction of consistency, security, impunity. But what had
such a woman come for if she hadn’t come to pray? Strether’s reading of
such matters was, it must be owned, confused; but he wondered if her
attitude were some congruous fruit of absolution, of “indulgence.” He
knew but dimly what indulgence, in such a place, might mean; yet he
had, as with a soft sweep, a vision of how it might indeed add to the
zest of active rites. All this was a good deal to have been denoted by
a mere lurking figure who was nothing to him; but, the last thing
before leaving the church, he had the surprise of a still deeper
quickening.
He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in the
museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft, to
reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms of
Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once in a way
to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes, a
miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the shopman, at
the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked, doubtless, while he
played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms, sufficiently rapt in
reverence; but what his thought had finally bumped against was the
question of where, among packed accumulations, so multiform a wedge
would be able to enter. Were seventy volumes in red-and-gold to be
perhaps what he should most substantially have to show at Woollett as
the fruit of his mission? It was a possibility that held him a
minute—held him till he happened to feel that some one, unnoticed, had
approached him and paused. Turning, he saw that a lady stood there as
for a greeting, and he sprang up as he next took her, securely, for
Madame de Vionnet, who appeared to have recognised him as she passed
near him on her way to the door. She checked, quickly and gaily, a
certain confusion in him, came to meet it, turned it back, by an art of
her own; the confusion having threatened him as he knew her for the
person he had lately been observing. She was the lurking figure of the
dim chapel; she had occupied him more than she guessed; but it came to
him in time, luckily, that he needn’t tell her and that no harm, after
all, had been done. She herself, for that matter, straightway showing
she felt their encounter as the happiest of accidents, had for him a
“You come here too?” that despoiled surprise of every awkwardness.
“I come often,” she said. “I love this place, but I’m terrible, in
general, for churches. The old women who live in them all know me; in
fact I’m already myself one of the old women. It’s like that, at all
events, that I foresee I shall end.” Looking about for a chair, so that
he instantly pulled one nearer, she sat down with him again to the
sound of an “Oh, I like so much your also being fond—!”
He confessed the extent of his feeling, though she left the object
vague; and he was struck with the tact, the taste of her vagueness,
which simply took for granted in him a sense of beautiful things. He
was conscious of how much it was affected, this sense, by something
subdued and discreet in the way she had arranged herself for her
special object and her morning walk—he believed her to have come on
foot; the way her slightly thicker veil was drawn—a mere touch, but
everything; the composed gravity of her dress, in which, here and
there, a dull wine-colour seemed to gleam faintly through black; the
charming discretion of her small compact head; the quiet note, as she
sat, of her folded, grey-gloved hands. It was, to Strether’s mind, as
if she sat on her own ground, the light honours of which, at an open
gate, she thus easily did him, while all the vastness and mystery of
the domain stretched off behind. When people were so completely in
possession they could be extraordinarily civil; and our friend had
indeed at this hour a kind of revelation of her heritage. She was
romantic for him far beyond what she could have guessed, and again he
found his small comfort in the conviction that, subtle though she was,
his impression must remain a secret from her. The thing that, once
more, made him uneasy for secrets in general was this particular
patience she could have with his own want of colour; albeit that on the
other hand his uneasiness pretty well dropped after he had been for ten
minutes as colourless as possible and at the same time as responsive.
The moments had already, for that matter, drawn their deepest tinge
from the special interest excited in him by his vision of his
companion’s identity with the person whose attitude before the
glimmering altar had so impressed him. This attitude fitted admirably
into the stand he had privately taken about her connexion with Chad on
the last occasion of his seeing them together. It helped him to stick
fast at the point he had then reached; it was there he had resolved
that he _would_ stick, and at no moment since had it seemed as easy to
do so. Unassailably innocent was a relation that could make one of the
parties to it so carry herself. If it wasn’t innocent why did she haunt
the churches?—into which, given the woman he could believe he made out,
she would never have come to flaunt an insolence of guilt. She haunted
them for continued help, for strength, for peace—sublime support which,
if one were able to look at it so, she found from day to day. They
talked, in low easy tones and with lifted lingering looks, about the
great monument and its history and its beauty—all of which, Madame de
Vionnet professed, came to her most in the other, the outer view.
“We’ll presently, after we go,” she said, “walk round it again if you
like. I’m not in a particular hurry, and it will be pleasant to look at
it well with you.” He had spoken of the great romancer and the great
romance, and of what, to his imagination, they had done for the whole,
mentioning to her moreover the exorbitance of his purchase, the seventy
blazing volumes that were so out of proportion.
“Out of proportion to what?”
“Well, to any other plunge.” Yet he felt even as he spoke how at that
instant he was plunging. He had made up his mind and was impatient to
get into the air; for his purpose was a purpose to be uttered outside,
and he had a fear that it might with delay still slip away from him.
She however took her time; she drew out their quiet gossip as if she
had wished to profit by their meeting, and this confirmed precisely an
interpretation of her manner, of her mystery. While she rose, as he
would have called it, to the question of Victor Hugo, her voice itself,
the light low quaver of her deference to the solemnity about them,
seemed to make her words mean something that they didn’t mean openly.
Help, strength, peace, a sublime support—she hadn’t found so much of
these things as that the amount wouldn’t be sensibly greater for any
scrap his appearance of faith in her might enable her to feel in her
hand. Every little, in a long strain, helped, and if he happened to
affect her as a firm object she could hold on by, he wouldn’t jerk
himself out of her reach. People in difficulties held on by what was
nearest, and he was perhaps after all not further off than sources of
comfort more abstract. It was as to this he had made up his mind; he
had made it up, that is, to give her a sign. The sign would be
that—though it was her own affair—he understood; the sign would be
that—though it was her own affair—she was free to clutch. Since she
took him for a firm object—much as he might to his own sense appear at
times to rock—he would do his best to _be_ one.
The end of it was that half an hour later they were seated together for
an early luncheon at a wonderful, a delightful house of entertainment
on the left bank—a place of pilgrimage for the knowing, they were both
aware, the knowing who came, for its great renown, the homage of
restless days, from the other end of the town. Strether had already
been there three times—first with Miss Gostrey, then with Chad, then
with Chad again and with Waymarsh and little Bilham, all of whom he had
himself sagaciously entertained; and his pleasure was deep now on
learning that Madame de Vionnet hadn’t yet been initiated. When he had
said as they strolled round the church, by the river, acting at last on
what, within, he had made up his mind to, “Will you, if you have time,
come to déjeuner with me somewhere? For instance, if you know it, over
there on the other side, which is so easy a walk”—and then had named
the place; when he had done this she stopped short as for quick
intensity, and yet deep difficulty, of response. She took in the
proposal as if it were almost too charming to be true; and there had
perhaps never yet been for her companion so unexpected a moment of
pride—so fine, so odd a case, at any rate, as his finding himself thus
able to offer to a person in such universal possession a new, a rare
amusement. She had heard of the happy spot, but she asked him in reply
to a further question how in the world he could suppose her to have
been there. He supposed himself to have supposed that Chad might have
taken her, and she guessed this the next moment to his no small
discomfort.
“Ah, let me explain,” she smiled, “that I don’t go about with him in
public; I never have such chances—not having them otherwise—and it’s
just the sort of thing that, as a quiet creature living in my hole, I
adore.” It was more than kind of him to have thought of it—though,
frankly, if he asked whether she had time she hadn’t a single minute.
That however made no difference—she’d throw everything over. Every duty
at home, domestic, maternal, social, awaited her; but it was a case for
a high line. Her affairs would go to smash, but hadn’t one a right to
one’s snatch of scandal when one was prepared to pay? It was on this
pleasant basis of costly disorder, consequently, that they eventually
seated themselves, on either side of a small table, at a window
adjusted to the busy quay and the shining barge-burdened Seine; where,
for an hour, in the matter of letting himself go, of diving deep,
Strether was to feel he had touched bottom. He was to feel many things
on this occasion, and one of the first of them was that he had
travelled far since that evening in London, before the theatre, when
his dinner with Maria Gostrey, between the pink-shaded candles, had
struck him as requiring so many explanations. He had at that time
gathered them in, the explanations—he had stored them up; but it was at
present as if he had either soared above or sunk below them—he couldn’t
tell which; he could somehow think of none that didn’t seem to leave
the appearance of collapse and cynicism easier for him than lucidity.
How could he wish it to be lucid for others, for any one, that he, for
the hour, saw reasons enough in the mere way the bright clean ordered
water-side life came in at the open window?—the mere way Madame de
Vionnet, opposite him over their intensely white table-linen, their
_omelette aux tomates_, their bottle of straw-coloured Chablis, thanked
him for everything almost with the smile of a child, while her grey
eyes moved in and out of their talk, back to the quarter of the warm
spring air, in which early summer had already begun to throb, and then
back again to his face and their human questions.
Their human questions became many before they had done—many more, as
one after the other came up, than our friend’s free fancy had at all
foreseen. The sense he had had before, the sense he had had repeatedly,
the sense that the situation was running away with him, had never been
so sharp as now; and all the more that he could perfectly put his
finger on the moment it had taken the bit in its teeth. That accident
had definitely occurred, the other evening, after Chad’s dinner; it had
occurred, as he fully knew, at the moment when he interposed between
this lady and her child, when he suffered himself so to discuss with
her a matter closely concerning them that her own subtlety, marked by
its significant “Thank you!” instantly sealed the occasion in her
favour. Again he had held off for ten days, but the situation had
continued out of hand in spite of that; the fact that it was running so
fast being indeed just _why_ he had held off. What had come over him as
he recognised her in the nave of the church was that holding off could
be but a losing game from the instant she was worked for not only by
her subtlety, but by the hand of fate itself. If all the accidents were
to fight on her side—and by the actual showing they loomed large—he
could only give himself up. This was what he had done in privately
deciding then and there to propose she should breakfast with him. What
did the success of his proposal in fact resemble but the smash in which
a regular runaway properly ends? The smash was their walk, their
déjeuner, their omelette, the Chablis, the place, the view, their
present talk and his present pleasure in it—to say nothing, wonder of
wonders, of her own. To this tune and nothing less, accordingly, was
his surrender made good. It sufficiently lighted up at least the folly
of holding off. Ancient proverbs sounded, for his memory, in the tone
of their words and the clink of their glasses, in the hum of the town
and the plash of the river. It _was_ clearly better to suffer as a
sheep than as a lamb. One might as well perish by the sword as by
famine.
“Maria’s still away?”—that was the first thing she had asked him; and
when he had found the frankness to be cheerful about it in spite of the
meaning he knew her to attach to Miss Gostrey’s absence, she had gone
on to enquire if he didn’t tremendously miss her. There were reasons
that made him by no means sure, yet he nevertheless answered
“Tremendously”; which she took in as if it were all she had wished to
prove. Then, “A man in trouble _must_ be possessed somehow of a woman,”
she said; “if she doesn’t come in one way she comes in another.”
“Why do you call me a man in trouble?”
“Ah because that’s the way you strike me.” She spoke ever so gently and
as if with all fear of wounding him while she sat partaking of his
bounty. “_Aren’t_ you in trouble?”
He felt himself colour at the question, and then hated that—hated to
pass for anything so idiotic as woundable. Woundable by Chad’s lady, in
respect to whom he had come out with such a fund of indifference—was he
already at that point? Perversely, none the less, his pause gave a
strange air of truth to her supposition; and what was he in fact but
disconcerted at having struck her just in the way he had most dreamed
of not doing? “I’m not in trouble yet,” he at last smiled. “I’m not in
trouble now.”
“Well, I’m always so. But that you sufficiently know.” She was a woman
who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.
It was a posture unknown to Mrs. Newsome, but it was easy for a _femme
du monde_. “Yes—I am ‘now’!”
“There was a question you put to me,” he presently returned, “the night
of Chad’s dinner. I didn’t answer it then, and it has been very
handsome of you not to have sought an occasion for pressing me about it
since.”
She was instantly all there. “Of course I know what you allude to. I
asked you what you had meant by saying, the day you came to see me,
just before you left me, that you’d save me. And you then said—at our
friend’s—that you’d have really to wait to see, for yourself, what you
did mean.”
“Yes, I asked for time,” said Strether. “And it sounds now, as you put
it, like a very ridiculous speech.”
“Oh!” she murmured—she was full of attenuation. But she had another
thought. “If it does sound ridiculous why do you deny that you’re in
trouble?”
“Ah if I were,” he replied, “it wouldn’t be the trouble of fearing
ridicule. I don’t fear it.”
“What then do you?”
“Nothing—now.” And he leaned back in his chair.
“I like your ‘now’!” she laughed across at him.
“Well, it’s precisely that it fully comes to me at present that I’ve
kept you long enough. I know by this time, at any rate, what I meant by
my speech; and I really knew it the night of Chad’s dinner.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it was difficult at the moment. I had already at that moment
done something for you, in the sense of what I had said the day I went
to see you; but I wasn’t then sure of the importance I might represent
this as having.”
She was all eagerness. “And you’re sure now?”
“Yes; I see that, practically, I’ve done for you—had done for you when
you put me your question—all that it’s as yet possible to me to do. I
feel now,” he went on, “that it may go further than I thought. What I
did after my visit to you,” he explained, “was to write straight off to
Mrs. Newsome about you, and I’m at last, from one day to the other,
expecting her answer. It’s this answer that will represent, as I
believe, the consequences.”
Patient and beautiful was her interest. “I see—the consequences of your
speaking for me.” And she waited as if not to hustle him.
He acknowledged it by immediately going on. “The question, you
understand, was _how_ I should save you. Well, I’m trying it by thus
letting her know that I consider you worth saving.”
“I see—I see.” Her eagerness broke through.
“How can I thank you enough?” He couldn’t tell her that, however, and
she quickly pursued. “You do really, for yourself, consider it?”
His only answer at first was to help her to the dish that had been
freshly put before them. “I’ve written to her again since then—I’ve
left her in no doubt of what I think. I’ve told her all about you.”
“Thanks—not so much. ‘All about’ me,” she went on—“yes.”
“All it seems to me you’ve done for him.”
“Ah and you might have added all it seems to _me!_” She laughed again,
while she took up her knife and fork, as in the cheer of these
assurances. “But you’re not sure how she’ll take it.”
“No, I’ll not pretend I’m sure.”
“Voilà.” And she waited a moment. “I wish you’d tell me about her.”
“Oh,” said Strether with a slightly strained smile, “all that need
concern you about her is that she’s really a grand person.”
Madame de Vionnet seemed to demur. “Is that all that need concern me
about her?”
But Strether neglected the question. “Hasn’t Chad talked to you?”
“Of his mother? Yes, a great deal—immensely. But not from your point of
view.”
“He can’t,” our friend returned, “have said any ill of her.”
“Not the least bit. He has given me, like you, the assurance that she’s
really grand. But her being really grand is somehow just what hasn’t
seemed to simplify our case. Nothing,” she continued, “is further from
me than to wish to say a word against her; but of course I feel how
little she can like being told of her owing me anything. No woman ever
enjoys such an obligation to another woman.”
This was a proposition Strether couldn’t contradict. “And yet what
other way could I have expressed to her what I felt? It’s what there
was most to say about you.”
“Do you mean then that she _will_ be good to me?”
“It’s what I’m waiting to see. But I’ve little doubt she would,” he
added, “if she could comfortably see you.”
It seemed to strike her as a happy, a beneficent thought. “Oh then
couldn’t that be managed? Wouldn’t she come out? Wouldn’t she if you so
put it to her? _Did_ you by any possibility?” she faintly quavered.
“Oh no”—he was prompt. “Not that. It would be, much more, to give an
account of you that—since there’s no question of _your_ paying the
visit—I should go home first.”
It instantly made her graver. “And are you thinking of that?”
“Oh all the while, naturally.”
“Stay with us—stay with us!” she exclaimed on this. “That’s your only
way to make sure.”
“To make sure of what?”
“Why that he doesn’t break up. You didn’t come out to do that to him.”
“Doesn’t it depend,” Strether returned after a moment, “on what you
mean by breaking up?”
“Oh you know well enough what I mean!”
His silence seemed again for a little to denote an understanding. “You
take for granted remarkable things.”
“Yes, I do—to the extent that I don’t take for granted vulgar ones.
You’re perfectly capable of seeing that what you came out for wasn’t
really at all to do what you’d now have to do.”
“Ah it’s perfectly simple,” Strether good-humouredly pleaded. “I’ve had
but one thing to do—to put our case before him. To put it as it could
only be put here on the spot—by personal pressure. My dear lady,” he
lucidly pursued, “my work, you see, is really done, and my reasons for
staying on even another day are none of the best. Chad’s in possession
of our case and professes to do it full justice. What remains is with
himself. I’ve had my rest, my amusement and refreshment; I’ve had, as
we say at Woollett, a lovely time. Nothing in it has been more lovely
than this happy meeting with you—in these fantastic conditions to which
you’ve so delightfully consented. I’ve a sense of success. It’s what I
wanted. My getting all this good is what Chad has waited for, and I
gather that if I’m ready to go he’s the same.”
She shook her head with a finer deeper wisdom. “You’re not ready. If
you’re ready why did you write to Mrs. Newsome in the sense you’ve
mentioned to me?”
Strether considered. “I shan’t go before I hear from her. You’re too
much afraid of her,” he added.
It produced between them a long look from which neither shrank. “I
don’t think you believe that—believe I’ve not really reason to fear
her.”
“She’s capable of great generosity,” Strether presently stated.
“Well then let her trust me a little. That’s all I ask. Let her
recognise in spite of everything what I’ve done.”
“Ah remember,” our friend replied, “that she can’t effectually
recognise it without seeing it for herself. Let Chad go over and show
her what you’ve done, and let him plead with her there for it and, as
it were, for _you_.”
She measured the depth of this suggestion. “Do you give me your word of
honour that if she once has him there she won’t do her best to marry
him?”
It made her companion, this enquiry, look again a while out at the
view; after which he spoke without sharpness. “When she sees for
herself what he is—”
But she had already broken in. “It’s when she sees for herself what he
is that she’ll want to marry him most.”
Strether’s attitude, that of due deference to what she said, permitted
him to attend for a minute to his luncheon. “I doubt if that will come
off. It won’t be easy to make it.”
“It will be easy if he remains there—and he’ll remain for the money.
The money appears to be, as a probability, so hideously much.”
“Well,” Strether presently concluded, “nothing _could_ really hurt you
but his marrying.”
She gave a strange light laugh. “Putting aside what may really hurt
_him_.”
But her friend looked at her as if he had thought of that too. “The
question will come up, of course, of the future that you yourself offer
him.”
She was leaning back now, but she fully faced him. “Well, let it come
up!”
“The point is that it’s for Chad to make of it what he can. His being
proof against marriage will show what he does make.”
“If he _is_ proof, yes”—she accepted the proposition. “But for myself,”
she added, “the question is what _you_ make.”
“Ah I make nothing. It’s not my affair.”
“I beg your pardon. It’s just there that, since you’ve taken it up and
are committed to it, it most intensely becomes yours. You’re not saving
me, I take it, for your interest in myself, but for your interest in
our friend. The one’s at any rate wholly dependent on the other. You
can’t in honour not see me through,” she wound up, “because you can’t
in honour not see _him_.”
Strange and beautiful to him was her quiet soft acuteness. The thing
that most moved him was really that she was so deeply serious. She had
none of the portentous forms of it, but he had never come in contact,
it struck him, with a force brought to so fine a head. Mrs. Newsome,
goodness knew, was serious; but it was nothing to this. He took it all
in, he saw it all together. “No,” he mused, “I can’t in honour not see
him.”
Her face affected him as with an exquisite light. “You _will_ then?”
“I will.”
At this she pushed back her chair and was the next moment on her feet.
“Thank you!” she said with her hand held out to him across the table
and with no less a meaning in the words than her lips had so
particularly given them after Chad’s dinner. The golden nail she had
then driven in pierced a good inch deeper. Yet he reflected that he
himself had only meanwhile done what he had made up his mind to on the
same occasion. So far as the essence of the matter went he had simply
stood fast on the spot on which he had then planted his feet.