I
Strether occupied beside little Bilham, three evenings after his
interview with Mamie Pocock, the same deep divan they had enjoyed
together on the first occasion of our friend’s meeting Madame de
Vionnet and her daughter in the apartment of the Boulevard Malesherbes,
where his position affirmed itself again as ministering to an easy
exchange of impressions. The present evening had a different stamp; if
the company was much more numerous, so, inevitably, were the ideas set
in motion. It was on the other hand, however, now strongly marked that
the talkers moved, in respect to such matters, round an inner, a
protected circle. They knew at any rate what really concerned them
to-night, and Strether had begun by keeping his companion close to it.
Only a few of Chad’s guests had dined—that is fifteen or twenty, a few
compared with the large concourse offered to sight by eleven o’clock;
but number and mass, quantity and quality, light, fragrance, sound, the
overflow of hospitality meeting the high tide of response, had all from
the first pressed upon Strether’s consciousness, and he felt himself
somehow part and parcel of the most festive scene, as the term was, in
which he had ever in his life been engaged. He had perhaps seen, on
Fourths of July and on dear old domestic Commencements, more people
assembled, but he had never seen so many in proportion to the space, or
had at all events never known so great a promiscuity to show so
markedly as picked. Numerous as was the company, it had still been made
so by selection, and what was above all rare for Strether was that, by
no fault of his own, he was in the secret of the principle that had
worked. He hadn’t enquired, he had averted his head, but Chad had put
him a pair of questions that themselves smoothed the ground. He hadn’t
answered the questions, he had replied that they were the young man’s
own affair; and he had then seen perfectly that the latter’s direction
was already settled.
Chad had applied for counsel only by way of intimating that he knew
what to do; and he had clearly never known it better than in now
presenting to his sister the whole circle of his society. This was all
in the sense and the spirit of the note struck by him on that lady’s
arrival; he had taken at the station itself a line that led him without
a break, and that enabled him to lead the Pococks—though dazed a
little, no doubt, breathless, no doubt, and bewildered—to the uttermost
end of the passage accepted by them perforce as pleasant. He had made
it for them violently pleasant and mercilessly full; the upshot of
which was, to Strether’s vision, that they had come all the way without
discovering it to be really no passage at all. It was a brave blind
alley, where to pass was impossible and where, unless they stuck fast,
they would have—which was always awkward—publicly to back out. They
were touching bottom assuredly tonight; the whole scene represented the
terminus of the _cul-de-sac_. So could things go when there was a hand
to keep them consistent—a hand that pulled the wire with a skill at
which the elder man more and more marvelled. The elder man felt
responsible, but he also felt successful, since what had taken place
was simply the issue of his own contention, six weeks before, that they
properly should wait to see what their friends would have really to
say. He had determined Chad to wait, he had determined him to see; he
was therefore not to quarrel with the time given up to the business. As
much as ever, accordingly, now that a fortnight had elapsed, the
situation created for Sarah, and against which she had raised no
protest, was that of her having accommodated herself to her adventure
as to a pleasure-party surrendered perhaps even somewhat in excess to
bustle and to “pace.” If her brother had been at any point the least
bit open to criticism it might have been on the ground of his spicing
the draught too highly and pouring the cup too full. Frankly treating
the whole occasion of the presence of his relatives as an opportunity
for amusement, he left it, no doubt, but scant margin as an opportunity
for anything else. He suggested, invented, abounded—yet all the while
with the loosest easiest rein. Strether, during his own weeks, had
gained a sense of knowing Paris; but he saw it afresh, and with fresh
emotion, in the form of the knowledge offered to his colleague.
A thousand unuttered thoughts hummed for him in the air of these
observations; not the least frequent of which was that Sarah might well
of a truth not quite know whither she was drifting. She was in no
position not to appear to expect that Chad should treat her handsomely;
yet she struck our friend as privately stiffening a little each time
she missed the chance of marking the great _nuance_. The great _nuance_
was in brief that of course her brother must treat her handsomely—she
should like to see him not; but that treating her handsomely, none the
less, wasn’t all in all—treating her handsomely buttered no parsnips;
and that in fine there were moments when she felt the fixed eyes of
their admirable absent mother fairly screw into the flat of her back.
Strether, watching, after his habit, and overscoring with thought,
positively had moments of his own in which he found himself sorry for
her—occasions on which she affected him as a person seated in a runaway
vehicle and turning over the question of a possible jump. _Would_ she
jump, could she, would _that_ be a safe place?—this question, at such
instants, sat for him in her lapse into pallor, her tight lips, her
conscious eyes. It came back to the main point at issue: would she be,
after all, to be squared? He believed on the whole she would jump; yet
his alternations on this subject were the more especial stuff of his
suspense. One thing remained well before him—a conviction that was in
fact to gain sharpness from the impressions of this evening: that if
she _should_ gather in her skirts, close her eyes and quit the carriage
while in motion, he would promptly enough become aware. She would
alight from her headlong course more or less directly upon him; it
would be appointed to him, unquestionably, to receive her entire
weight. Signs and portents of the experience thus in reserve for him
had as it happened, multiplied even through the dazzle of Chad’s party.
It was partly under the nervous consciousness of such a prospect that,
leaving almost every one in the two other rooms, leaving those of the
guests already known to him as well as a mass of brilliant strangers of
both sexes and of several varieties of speech, he had desired five
quiet minutes with little Bilham, whom he always found soothing and
even a little inspiring, and to whom he had actually moreover something
distinct and important to say.
He had felt of old—for it already seemed long ago—rather humiliated at
discovering he could learn in talk with a personage so much his junior
the lesson of a certain moral ease; but he had now got used to
that—whether or no the mixture of the fact with other humiliations had
made it indistinct, whether or no directly from little Bilham’s
example, the example of his being contentedly just the obscure and
acute little Bilham he was. It worked so for him, Strether seemed to
see; and our friend had at private hours a wan smile over the fact that
he himself, after so many more years, was still in search of something
that would work. However, as we have said, it worked just now for them
equally to have found a corner a little apart. What particularly kept
it apart was the circumstance that the music in the salon was
admirable, with two or three such singers as it was a privilege to hear
in private. Their presence gave a distinction to Chad’s entertainment,
and the interest of calculating their effect on Sarah was actually so
sharp as to be almost painful. Unmistakeably, in her single person, the
motive of the composition and dressed in a splendour of crimson which
affected Strether as the sound of a fall through a skylight, she would
now be in the forefront of the listening circle and committed by it up
to her eyes. Those eyes during the wonderful dinner itself he hadn’t
once met; having confessedly—perhaps a little pusillanimously—arranged
with Chad that he should be on the same side of the table. But there
was no use in having arrived now with little Bilham at an unprecedented
point of intimacy unless he could pitch everything into the pot. “You
who sat where you could see her, what does she make of it all? By which
I mean on what terms does she take it?”
“Oh she takes it, I judge, as proving that the claim of his family is
more than ever justified.”
“She isn’t then pleased with what he has to show?”
“On the contrary; she’s pleased with it as with his capacity to do this
kind of thing—more than she has been pleased with anything for a long
time. But she wants him to show it _there_. He has no right to waste it
on the likes of us.”
Strether wondered. “She wants him to move the whole thing over?”
“The whole thing—with an important exception. Everything he has ‘picked
up’—and the way he knows how. She sees no difficulty in that. She’d run
the show herself, and she’ll make the handsome concession that Woollett
would be on the whole in some ways the better for it. Not that it
wouldn’t be also in some ways the better for Woollett. The people there
are just as good.”
“Just as good as you and these others? Ah that may be. But such an
occasion as this, whether or no,” Strether said, “isn’t the people.
It’s what has made the people possible.”
“Well then,” his friend replied, “there you are; I give you my
impression for what it’s worth. Mrs. Pocock has _seen_, and that’s
to-night how she sits there. If you were to have a glimpse of her face
you’d understand me. She has made up her mind—to the sound of expensive
music.”
Strether took it freely in. “Ah then I shall have news of her.”
“I don’t want to frighten you, but I think that likely. However,”
little Bilham continued, “if I’m of the least use to you to hold on
by—!”
“You’re not of the least!”—and Strether laid an appreciative hand on
him to say it. “No one’s of the least.” With which, to mark how gaily
he could take it, he patted his companion’s knee. “I must meet my fate
alone, and I _shall_—oh you’ll see! And yet,” he pursued the next
moment, “you _can_ help me too. You once said to me”—he followed this
further—“that you held Chad should marry. I didn’t see then so well as
I know now that you meant he should marry Miss Pocock. Do you still
consider that he should? Because if you do”—he kept it up—“I want you
immediately to change your mind. You can help me that way.”
“Help you by thinking he should _not_ marry?”
“Not marry at all events Mamie.”
“And who then?”
“Ah,” Strether returned, “that I’m not obliged to say. But Madame de
Vionnet—I suggest—when he can.’
“Oh!” said little Bilham with some sharpness.
“Oh precisely! But he needn’t marry at all—I’m at any rate not obliged
to provide for it. Whereas in your case I rather feel that I _am_.”
Little Bilham was amused. “Obliged to provide for my marrying?”
“Yes—after all I’ve done to you!”
The young man weighed it. “Have you done as much as that?”
“Well,” said Strether, thus challenged, “of course I must remember what
you’ve also done to _me_. We may perhaps call it square. But all the
same,” he went on, “I wish awfully you’d marry Mamie Pocock yourself.”
Little Bilham laughed out. “Why it was only the other night, in this
very place, that you were proposing to me a different union
altogether.”
“Mademoiselle de Vionnet?” Well, Strether easily confessed it. “That, I
admit, was a vain image. _This_ is practical politics. I want to do
something good for both of you—I wish you each so well; and you can see
in a moment the trouble it will save me to polish you off by the same
stroke. She likes you, you know. You console her. And she’s splendid.”
Little Bilham stared as a delicate appetite stares at an overheaped
plate. “What do I console her for?”
It just made his friend impatient. “Oh come, you know!”
“And what proves for you that she likes me?”
“Why the fact that I found her three days ago stopping at home alone
all the golden afternoon on the mere chance that you’d come to her, and
hanging over her balcony on that of seeing your cab drive up. I don’t
know what you want more.”
Little Bilham after a moment found it. “Only just to know what proves
to you that I like _her_.”
“Oh if what I’ve just mentioned isn’t enough to make you do it, you’re
a stony-hearted little fiend. Besides”—Strether encouraged his fancy’s
flight—“you showed your inclination in the way you kept her waiting,
kept her on purpose to see if she cared enough for you.”
His companion paid his ingenuity the deference of a pause. “I didn’t
keep her waiting. I came at the hour. I wouldn’t have kept her waiting
for the world,” the young man honourably declared.
“Better still—then there you are!” And Strether, charmed, held him the
faster. “Even if you didn’t do her justice, moreover,” he continued, “I
should insist on your immediately coming round to it. I want awfully to
have worked it. I want”—and our friend spoke now with a yearning that
was really earnest—“at least to have done _that_.”
“To have married me off—without a penny?”
“Well, I shan’t live long; and I give you my word, now and here, that
I’ll leave you every penny of my own. I haven’t many, unfortunately,
but you shall have them all. And Miss Pocock, I think, has a few. I
want,” Strether went on, “to have been at least to that extent
constructive even expiatory. I’ve been sacrificing so to strange gods
that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my fidelity—fundamentally
unchanged after all—to our own. I feel as if my hands were embrued with
the blood of monstrous alien altars—of another faith altogether. There
it is—it’s done.” And then he further explained. “It took hold of me
because the idea of getting her quite out of the way for Chad helps to
clear my ground.”
The young man, at this, bounced about, and it brought them face to face
in admitted amusement. “You want me to marry as a convenience to Chad?”
“No,” Strether debated—“_he_ doesn’t care whether you marry or not.
It’s as a convenience simply to my own plan _for_ him.”
“‘Simply’!”—and little Bilham’s concurrence was in itself a lively
comment. “Thank you. But I thought,” he continued, “you had exactly
_no_ plan ‘for’ him.”
“Well then call it my plan for myself—which may be well, as you say, to
have none. His situation, don’t you see? is reduced now to the bare
facts one has to recognise. Mamie doesn’t want him, and he doesn’t want
Mamie: so much as that these days have made clear. It’s a thread we can
wind up and tuck in.”
But little Bilham still questioned. “_You_ can—since you seem so much
to want to. But why should I?”
Poor Strether thought it over, but was obliged of course to admit that
his demonstration did superficially fail. “Seriously, there _is_ no
reason. It’s my affair—I must do it alone. I’ve only my fantastic need
of making my dose stiff.”
Little Bilham wondered. “What do you call your dose?”
“Why what I have to swallow. I want my conditions unmitigated.”
He had spoken in the tone of talk for talk’s sake, and yet with an
obscure truth lurking in the loose folds; a circumstance presently not
without its effect on his young friend. Little Bilham’s eyes rested on
him a moment with some intensity; then suddenly, as if everything had
cleared up, he gave a happy laugh. It seemed to say that if pretending,
or even trying, or still even hoping, to be able to care for Mamie
would be of use, he was all there for the job. “I’ll do anything in the
world for you!”
“Well,” Strether smiled, “anything in the world is all I want. I don’t
know anything that pleased me in her more,” he went on, “than the way
that, on my finding her up there all alone, coming on her unawares and
feeling greatly for her being so out of it, she knocked down my tall
house of cards with her instant and cheerful allusion to the next young
man. It was somehow so the note I needed—her staying at home to receive
him.”
“It was Chad of course,” said little Bilham, “who asked the next young
man—I like your name for me!—to call.”
“So I supposed—all of which, thank God, is in our innocent and natural
manners. But do you know,” Strether asked, “if Chad knows—?” And then
as this interlocutor seemed at a loss: “Why where she has come out.”
Little Bilham, at this, met his face with a conscious look—it was as
if, more than anything yet, the allusion had penetrated. “Do you know
yourself?”
Strether lightly shook his head. “There I stop. Oh, odd as it may
appear to you, there _are_ things I don’t know. I only got the sense
from her of something very sharp, and yet very deep down, that she was
keeping all to herself. That is I had begun with the belief that she
_had_ kept it to herself; but face to face with her there I soon made
out that there was a person with whom she would have shared it. I had
thought she possibly might with _me_—but I saw then that I was only
half in her confidence. When, turning to me to greet me—for she was on
the balcony and I had come in without her knowing it—she showed me she
had been expecting _you_ and was proportionately disappointed, I got
hold of the tail of my conviction. Half an hour later I was in
possession of all the rest of it. You know what has happened.” He
looked at his young friend hard—then he felt sure. “For all you say,
you’re up to your eyes. So there you are.”
Little Bilham after an instant pulled half round. “I assure you she
hasn’t told me anything.”
“Of course she hasn’t. For what do you suggest that I suppose her to
take you? But you’ve been with her every day, you’ve seen her freely,
you’ve liked her greatly—I stick to that—and you’ve made your profit of
it. You know what she has been through as well as you know that she has
dined here to-night—which must have put her, by the way, through a good
deal more.”
The young man faced this blast; after which he pulled round the rest of
the way. “I haven’t in the least said she hasn’t been nice to me. But
she’s proud.”
“And quite properly. But not too proud for that.”
“It’s just her pride that has made her. Chad,” little Bilham loyally
went on, “has really been as kind to her as possible. It’s awkward for
a man when a girl’s in love with him.”
“Ah but she isn’t—now.”
Little Bilham sat staring before him; then he sprang up as if his
friend’s penetration, recurrent and insistent, made him really after
all too nervous. “No—she isn’t now. It isn’t in the least,” he went on,
“Chad’s fault. He’s really all right. I mean he would have been
willing. But she came over with ideas. Those she had got at home. They
had been her motive and support in joining her brother and his wife.
She was to _save_ our friend.”
“Ah like me, poor thing?” Strether also got to his feet.
“Exactly—she had a bad moment. It was very soon distinct to her, to
pull her up, to let her down, that, alas, he was, he _is_, saved.
There’s nothing left for her to do.”
“Not even to love him?”
“She would have loved him better as she originally believed him.”
Strether wondered. “Of course one asks one’s self what notion a little
girl forms, where a young man’s in question, of such a history and such
a state.”
“Well, this little girl saw them, no doubt, as obscure, but she saw
them practically as wrong. The wrong for her _was_ the obscure. Chad
turns out at any rate right and good and disconcerting, while what she
was all prepared for, primed and girded and wound up for, was to deal
with him as the general opposite.”
“Yet wasn’t her whole point”—Strether weighed it—“that he was to be,
that he _could_ be, made better, redeemed?”
Little Bilham fixed it all a moment, and then with a small headshake
that diffused a tenderness: “She’s too late. Too late for the miracle.”
“Yes”—his companion saw enough. “Still, if the worst fault of his
condition is that it may be all there for her to profit by—?”
“Oh she doesn’t want to ‘profit,’ in that flat way. She doesn’t want to
profit by another woman’s work—she wants the miracle to have been her
own miracle. _That’s_ what she’s too late for.”
Strether quite felt how it all fitted, yet there seemed one loose
piece. “I’m bound to say, you know, that she strikes one, on these
lines, as fastidious—what you call here _difficile_.”
Little Bilham tossed up his chin. “Of course she’s _difficile_—on any
lines! What else in the world _are_ our Mamies—the real, the right
ones?”
“I see, I see,” our friend repeated, charmed by the responsive wisdom
he had ended by so richly extracting. “Mamie is one of the real and the
right.”
“The very thing itself.”
“And what it comes to then,” Strether went on, “is that poor awful Chad
is simply too good for her.”
“Ah too good was what he was after all to be; but it was she herself,
and she herself only, who was to have made him so.”
It hung beautifully together, but with still a loose end. “Wouldn’t he
do for her even if he should after all break—”
“With his actual influence?” Oh little Bilham had for this enquiry the
sharpest of all his controls. “How can he ‘do’—on any terms
whatever—when he’s flagrantly spoiled?”
Strether could only meet the question with his passive, his receptive
pleasure. “Well, thank goodness, _you’re_ not! _You_ remain for her to
save, and I come back, on so beautiful and full a demonstration, to my
contention of just now—that of your showing distinct signs of her
having already begun.”
The most he could further say to himself—as his young friend turned
away—was that the charge encountered for the moment no renewed denial.
Little Bilham, taking his course back to the music, only shook his
good-natured ears an instant, in the manner of a terrier who has got
wet; while Strether relapsed into the sense—which had for him in these
days most of comfort—that he was free to believe in anything that from
hour to hour kept him going. He had positively motions and flutters of
this conscious hour-to-hour kind, temporary surrenders to irony, to
fancy, frequent instinctive snatches at the growing rose of
observation, constantly stronger for him, as he felt, in scent and
colour, and in which he could bury his nose even to wantonness. This
last resource was offered him, for that matter, in the very form of his
next clear perception—the vision of a prompt meeting, in the doorway of
the room, between little Bilham and brilliant Miss Barrace, who was
entering as Bilham withdrew. She had apparently put him a question, to
which he had replied by turning to indicate his late interlocutor;
toward whom, after an interrogation further aided by a resort to that
optical machinery which seemed, like her other ornaments, curious and
archaic, the genial lady, suggesting more than ever for her fellow
guest the old French print, the historic portrait, directed herself
with an intention that Strether instantly met. He knew in advance the
first note she would sound, and took in as she approached all her need
of sounding it. Nothing yet had been so “wonderful” between them as the
present occasion; and it was her special sense of this quality in
occasions that she was there, as she was in most places, to feed. That
sense had already been so well fed by the situation about them that she
had quitted the other room, forsaken the music, dropped out of the
play, abandoned, in a word, the stage itself, that she might stand a
minute behind the scenes with Strether and so perhaps figure as one of
the famous augurs replying, behind the oracle, to the wink of the
other. Seated near him presently where little Bilham had sat, she
replied in truth to many things; beginning as soon as he had said to
her—what he hoped he said without fatuity—“All you ladies are
extraordinarily kind to me.”
She played her long handle, which shifted her observation; she saw in
an instant all the absences that left them free. “How can we be
anything else? But isn’t that exactly your plight? ‘We ladies’—oh we’re
nice, and you must be having enough of us! As one of us, you know, I
don’t pretend I’m crazy about us. But Miss Gostrey at least to-night
has left you alone, hasn’t she?” With which she again looked about as
if Maria might still lurk.
“Oh yes,” said Strether; “she’s only sitting up for me at home.” And
then as this elicited from his companion her gay “Oh, oh, oh!” he
explained that he meant sitting up in suspense and prayer. “We thought
it on the whole better she shouldn’t be present; and either way of
course it’s a terrible worry for her.” He abounded in the sense of his
appeal to the ladies, and they might take their choice of his doing so
from humility or from pride. “Yet she inclines to believe I shall come
out.”
“Oh I incline to believe too you’ll come out!”—Miss Barrace, with her
laugh, was not to be behind. “Only the question’s about _where_, isn’t
it? However,” she happily continued, “if it’s anywhere at all it must
be very far on, mustn’t it? To do us justice, I think, you know,” she
laughed, “we do, among us all, want you rather far on. Yes, yes,” she
repeated in her quick droll way; “we want you very, _very_ far on!”
After which she wished to know why he had thought it better Maria
shouldn’t be present.
“Oh,” he replied, “it was really her own idea. I should have wished it.
But she dreads responsibility.”
“And isn’t that a new thing for her?”
“To dread it? No doubt—no doubt. But her nerve has given way.”
Miss Barrace looked at him a moment. “She has too much at stake.” Then
less gravely: “Mine, luckily for me, holds out.”
“Luckily for me too”—Strether came back to that. “My own isn’t so firm,
_my_ appetite for responsibility isn’t so sharp, as that I haven’t felt
the very principle of this occasion to be ‘the more the merrier.’ If we
_are_ so merry it’s because Chad has understood so well.”
“He has understood amazingly,” said Miss Barrace.
“It’s wonderful—Strether anticipated for her.
“It’s wonderful!” she, to meet it, intensified; so that, face to face
over it, they largely and recklessly laughed. But she presently added:
“Oh I see the principle. If one didn’t one would be lost. But when once
one has got hold of it—”
“It’s as simple as twice two! From the moment he had to do something—”
“A crowd”—she took him straight up—“was the only thing? Rather, rather:
a rumpus of sound,” she laughed, “or nothing. Mrs. Pocock’s built in,
or built out—whichever you call it; she’s packed so tight she can’t
move. She’s in splendid isolation”—Miss Barrace embroidered the theme.
Strether followed, but scrupulous of justice. “Yet with every one in
the place successively introduced to her.”
“Wonderfully—but just so that it does build her out. She’s bricked up,
she’s buried alive!”
Strether seemed for a moment to look at it; but it brought him to a
sigh. “Oh but she’s not dead! It will take more than this to kill her.”
His companion had a pause that might have been for pity. “No, I can’t
pretend I think she’s finished—or that it’s for more than to-night.”
She remained pensive as if with the same compunction. “It’s only up to
her chin.” Then again for the fun of it: “She can breathe.”
“She can breathe!”—he echoed it in the same spirit. “And do you know,”
he went on, “what’s really all this time happening to me?—through the
beauty of music, the gaiety of voices, the uproar in short of our revel
and the felicity of your wit? The sound of Mrs. Pocock’s respiration
drowns for me, I assure you, every other. It’s literally all I hear.”
She focussed him with her clink of chains. “Well—!” she breathed ever
so kindly.
“Well, what?”
“She _is_ free from her chin up,” she mused; “and that _will_ be enough
for her.”
“It will be enough for me!” Strether ruefully laughed. “Waymarsh has
really,” he then asked, “brought her to see you?”
“Yes—but that’s the worst of it. I could do you no good. And yet I
tried hard.”
Strether wondered. “And how did you try?”
“Why I didn’t speak of you.”
“I see. That was better.”
“Then what would have been worse? For speaking or silent,” she lightly
wailed, “I somehow ‘compromise.’ And it has never been any one but
you.”
“That shows”—he was magnanimous—“that it’s something not in you, but in
one’s self. It’s _my_ fault.”
She was silent a little. “No, it’s Mr. Waymarsh’s. It’s the fault of
his having brought her.”
“Ah then,” said Strether good-naturedly, “why _did_ he bring her?”
“He couldn’t afford not to.”
“Oh you were a trophy—one of the spoils of conquest? But why in that
case, since you do ‘compromise’—”
“Don’t I compromise _him_ as well? I do compromise him as well,” Miss
Barrace smiled. “I compromise him as hard as I can. But for Mr.
Waymarsh it isn’t fatal. It’s—so far as his wonderful relation with
Mrs. Pocock is concerned—favourable.” And then, as he still seemed
slightly at sea: “The man who had succeeded with _me_, don’t you see?
For her to get him from me was such an added incentive.”
Strether saw, but as if his path was still strewn with surprises. “It’s
‘from’ you then that she has got him?”
She was amused at his momentary muddle. “You can fancy my fight! She
believes in her triumph. I think it has been part of her joy.
“Oh her joy!” Strether sceptically murmured.
“Well, she thinks she has had her own way. And what’s to-night for her
but a kind of apotheosis? Her frock’s really good.”
“Good enough to go to heaven in? For after a real apotheosis,” Strether
went on, “there’s nothing _but_ heaven. For Sarah there’s only
to-morrow.”
“And you mean that she won’t find to-morrow heavenly?”
“Well, I mean that I somehow feel to-night—on her behalf—too good to be
true. She has had her cake; that is she’s in the act now of having it,
of swallowing the largest and sweetest piece. There won’t be another
left for her. Certainly _I_ haven’t one. It can only, at the best, be
Chad.” He continued to make it out as for their common entertainment.
“He may have one, as it were, up his sleeve; yet it’s borne in upon me
that if he had—”
“He wouldn’t”—she quite understood—“have taken all _this_ trouble? I
dare say not, and, if I may be quite free and dreadful, I very much
hope he won’t take any more. Of course I won’t pretend now,” she added,
“not to know what it’s a question of.”
“Oh every one must know now,” poor Strether thoughtfully admitted; “and
it’s strange enough and funny enough that one should feel everybody
here at this very moment to be knowing and watching and waiting.”
“Yes—isn’t it indeed funny?” Miss Barrace quite rose to it. “That’s the
way we _are_ in Paris.” She was always pleased with a new contribution
to that queerness. “It’s wonderful! But, you know,” she declared, “it
all depends on you. I don’t want to turn the knife in your vitals, but
that’s naturally what you just now meant by our all being on top of
you. We know you as the hero of the drama, and we’re gathered to see
what you’ll do.”
Strether looked at her a moment with a light perhaps slightly obscured.
“I think that must be why the hero has taken refuge in this corner.
He’s scared at his heroism—he shrinks from his part.”
“Ah but we nevertheless believe he’ll play it. That’s why,” Miss
Barrace kindly went on, “we take such an interest in you. We feel
you’ll come up to the scratch.” And then as he seemed perhaps not quite
to take fire: “Don’t let him do it.”
“Don’t let Chad go?”
“Yes, keep hold of him. With all this”—and she indicated the general
tribute—“he has done enough. We love him here—he’s charming.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Strether, “the way you all can simplify when you
will.”
But she gave it to him back. “It’s nothing to the way _you_ will when
you must.”
He winced at it as at the very voice of prophecy, and it kept him a
moment quiet. He detained her, however, on her appearing about to leave
him alone in the rather cold clearance their talk had made. “There
positively isn’t a sign of a hero to-night; the hero’s dodging and
shirking, the hero’s ashamed. Therefore, you know, I think, what you
must all _really_ be occupied with is the heroine.”
Miss Barrace took a minute. “The heroine?”
“The heroine. I’ve treated her,” said Strether, “not a bit like a hero.
Oh,” he sighed, “I don’t do it well!”
She eased him off. “You do it as you can.” And then after another
hesitation: “I think she’s satisfied.”
But he remained compunctious. “I haven’t been near her. I haven’t
looked at her.”
“Ah then you’ve lost a good deal!”
He showed he knew it. “She’s more wonderful than ever?”
“Than ever. With Mr. Pocock.”
Strether wondered. “Madame de Vionnet—with Jim?”
“Madame de Vionnet—with ‘Jim.’” Miss Barrace was historic.
“And what’s she doing with him?”
“Ah you must ask _him!_”
Strether’s face lighted again at the prospect. “It _will_ be amusing to
do so.” Yet he continued to wonder. “But she must have some idea.”
“Of course she has—she has twenty ideas. She has in the first place,”
said Miss Barrace, swinging a little her tortoise-shell, “that of doing
her part. Her part is to help _you_.”
It came out as nothing had come yet; links were missing and connexions
unnamed, but it was suddenly as if they were at the heart of their
subject. “Yes; how much more she does it,” Strether gravely reflected,
“than I help _her!_” It all came over him as with the near presence of
the beauty, the grace, the intense, dissimulated spirit with which he
had, as he said, been putting off contact. “_She_ has courage.”
“Ah she has courage!” Miss Barrace quite agreed; and it was as if for a
moment they saw the quantity in each other’s face.
But indeed the whole thing was present. “How much she must care!”
“Ah there it is. She does care. But it isn’t, is it,” Miss Barrace
considerately added, “as if you had ever had any doubt of that?”
Strether seemed suddenly to like to feel that he really never had. “Why
of course it’s the whole point.”
“Voilà!” Miss Barrace smiled.
“It’s why one came out,” Strether went on. “And it’s why one has stayed
so long. And it’s also”—he abounded—“why one’s going home. It’s why,
it’s why—”
“It’s why everything!” she concurred. “It’s why she might be
to-night—for all she looks and shows, and for all your friend ‘Jim’
does—about twenty years old. That’s another of her ideas; to be for
him, and to be quite easily and charmingly, as young as a little girl.”
Strether assisted at his distance. “‘For him’? For Chad—?”
“For Chad, in a manner, naturally, always. But in particular to-night
for Mr. Pocock.” And then as her friend still stared: “Yes, it _is_ of
a bravery! But that’s what she has: her high sense of duty.” It was
more than sufficiently before them. “When Mr. Newsome has his hands so
embarrassed with his sister—”
“It’s quite the least”—Strether filled it out—“that she should take his
sister’s husband? Certainly—quite the least. So she has taken him.”
“She has taken him.” It was all Miss Barrace had meant.
Still it remained enough. “It must be funny.”
“Oh it _is_ funny.” That of course essentially went with it.
But it brought them back. “How indeed then she must care!” In answer to
which Strether’s entertainer dropped a comprehensive “Ah!” expressive
perhaps of some impatience for the time he took to get used to it. She
herself had got used to it long before.