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