In Chad’s lovely home, however, one evening ten days later, he felt
himself present at the collapse of the question of Jeanne de Vionnet’s
shy secret. He had been dining there in the company of that young lady and her
mother, as well as of other persons, and he had gone into the petit
salon, at Chad’s request, on purpose to talk with her. The young man
had put this to him as a favour—“I should like so awfully to know
what you think of her. It will really be a chance for you,” he had said,
“to see the jeune fille—I mean the type—as she
actually is, and I don’t think that, as an observer of manners,
it’s a thing you ought to miss. It will be an impression
that—whatever else you take—you can carry home with you, where
you’ll find again so much to compare it with.”
Strether knew well enough with what Chad wished him to compare it, and though
he entirely assented he hadn’t yet somehow been so deeply reminded that
he was being, as he constantly though mutely expressed it, used. He was as far
as ever from making out exactly to what end; but he was none the less
constantly accompanied by a sense of the service he rendered. He conceived only
that this service was highly agreeable to those who profited by it; and he was
indeed still waiting for the moment at which he should catch it in the act of
proving disagreeable, proving in some degree intolerable, to himself. He failed
quite to see how his situation could clear up at all logically except by some
turn of events that would give him the pretext of disgust. He was building from
day to day on the possibility of disgust, but each day brought forth meanwhile
a new and more engaging bend of the road. That possibility was now ever so much
further from sight than on the eve of his arrival, and he perfectly felt that,
should it come at all, it would have to be at best inconsequent and violent. He
struck himself as a little nearer to it only when he asked himself what
service, in such a life of utility, he was after all rendering Mrs. Newsome.
When he wished to help himself to believe that he was still all right he
reflected—and in fact with wonder—on the unimpaired frequency of
their correspondence; in relation to which what was after all more natural than
that it should become more frequent just in proportion as their problem became
more complicated?
Certain it is at any rate that he now often brought himself balm by the
question, with the rich consciousness of yesterday’s letter, “Well,
what can I do more than that—what can I do more than tell her
everything?” To persuade himself that he did tell her, had told her,
everything, he used to try to think of particular things he hadn’t told
her. When at rare moments and in the watches of the night he pounced on one it
generally showed itself to be—to a deeper scrutiny—not quite truly
of the essence. When anything new struck him as coming up, or anything already
noted as reappearing, he always immediately wrote, as if for fear that if he
didn’t he would miss something; and also that he might be able to say to
himself from time to time “She knows it now—even while I
worry.” It was a great comfort to him in general not to have left past
things to be dragged to light and explained; not to have to produce at so late
a stage anything not produced, or anything even veiled and attenuated, at the
moment. She knew it now: that was what he said to himself to-night in relation
to the fresh fact of Chad’s acquaintance with the two ladies—not to
speak of the fresher one of his own. Mrs. Newsome knew in other words that very
night at Woollett that he himself knew Madame de Vionnet and that he had
conscientiously been to see her; also that he had found her remarkably
attractive and that there would probably be a good deal more to tell. But she
further knew, or would know very soon, that, again conscientiously, he
hadn’t repeated his visit; and that when Chad had asked him on the
Countess’s behalf—Strether made her out vividly, with a thought at
the back of his head, a Countess—if he wouldn’t name a day for
dining with her, he had replied lucidly: “Thank you very
much—impossible.” He had begged the young man would present his
excuses and had trusted him to understand that it couldn’t really strike
one as quite the straight thing. He hadn’t reported to Mrs. Newsome that
he had promised to “save” Madame de Vionnet; but, so far as he was
concerned with that reminiscence, he hadn’t at any rate promised to haunt
her house. What Chad had understood could only, in truth, be inferred from
Chad’s behaviour, which had been in this connexion as easy as in every
other. He was easy, always, when he understood; he was easier still, if
possible, when he didn’t; he had replied that he would make it all right;
and he had proceeded to do this by substituting the present occasion—as
he was ready to substitute others—for any, for every occasion as to which
his old friend should have a funny scruple.
“Oh but I’m not a little foreign girl; I’m just as English as
I can be,” Jeanne de Vionnet had said to him as soon as, in the petit
salon, he sank, shyly enough on his own side, into the place near her
vacated by Madame Gloriani at his approach. Madame Gloriani, who was in black
velvet, with white lace and powdered hair, and whose somewhat massive majesty
melted, at any contact, into the graciousness of some incomprehensible tongue,
moved away to make room for the vague gentleman, after benevolent greetings to
him which embodied, as he believed, in baffling accents, some recognition of
his face from a couple of Sundays before. Then he had remarked—making the
most of the advantage of his years—that it frightened him quite enough to
find himself dedicated to the entertainment of a little foreign girl. There
were girls he wasn’t afraid of—he was quite bold with little
Americans. Thus it was that she had defended herself to the end—“Oh
but I’m almost American too. That’s what mamma has wanted me to
be—I mean like that; for she has wanted me to have lots of
freedom. She has known such good results from it.”
She was fairly beautiful to him—a faint pastel in an oval frame: he
thought of her already as of some lurking image in a long gallery, the portrait
of a small old-time princess of whom nothing was known but that she had died
young. Little Jeanne wasn’t, doubtless, to die young, but one
couldn’t, all the same, bear on her lightly enough. It was bearing hard,
it was bearing as he, in any case, wouldn’t bear, to concern
himself, in relation to her, with the question of a young man. Odious really
the question of a young man; one didn’t treat such a person as a
maid-servant suspected of a “follower.” And then young men, young
men—well, the thing was their business simply, or was at all events hers.
She was fluttered, fairly fevered—to the point of a little glitter that
came and went in her eyes and a pair of pink spots that stayed in her
cheeks—with the great adventure of dining out and with the greater one
still, possibly, of finding a gentleman whom she must think of as very, very
old, a gentleman with eye-glasses, wrinkles, a long grizzled moustache. She
spoke the prettiest English, our friend thought, that he had ever heard spoken,
just as he had believed her a few minutes before to be speaking the prettiest
French. He wondered almost wistfully if such a sweep of the lyre didn’t
react on the spirit itself; and his fancy had in fact, before he knew it, begun
so to stray and embroider that he finally found himself, absent and
extravagant, sitting with the child in a friendly silence. Only by this time he
felt her flutter to have fortunately dropped and that she was more at her ease.
She trusted him, liked him, and it was to come back to him afterwards that she
had told him things. She had dipped into the waiting medium at last and found
neither surge nor chill—nothing but the small splash she could herself
make in the pleasant warmth, nothing but the safety of dipping and dipping
again. At the end of the ten minutes he was to spend with her his
impression—with all it had thrown off and all it had taken in—was
complete. She had been free, as she knew freedom, partly to show him that,
unlike other little persons she knew, she had imbibed that ideal. She was
delightfully quaint about herself, but the vision of what she had imbibed was
what most held him. It really consisted, he was soon enough to feel, in just
one great little matter, the fact that, whatever her nature, she was
thoroughly—he had to cast about for the word, but it came—bred. He
couldn’t of course on so short an acquaintance speak for her nature, but
the idea of breeding was what she had meanwhile dropped into his mind. He had
never yet known it so sharply presented. Her mother gave it, no doubt; but her
mother, to make that less sensible, gave so much else besides, and on neither
of the two previous occasions, extraordinary woman, Strether felt, anything
like what she was giving tonight. Little Jeanne was a case, an exquisite case
of education; whereas the Countess, whom it so amused him to think of by that
denomination, was a case, also exquisite, of—well, he didn’t know
what.
“He has wonderful taste, notre jeune homme”: this was what
Gloriani said to him on turning away from the inspection of a small picture
suspended near the door of the room. The high celebrity in question had just
come in, apparently in search of Mademoiselle de Vionnet, but while Strether
had got up from beside her their fellow guest, with his eye sharply caught, had
paused for a long look. The thing was a landscape, of no size, but of the
French school, as our friend was glad to feel he knew, and also of a
quality—which he liked to think he should also have guessed; its frame
was large out of proportion to the canvas, and he had never seen a person look
at anything, he thought, just as Gloriani, with his nose very near and quick
movements of the head from side to side and bottom to top, examined this
feature of Chad’s collection. The artist used that word the next moment
smiling courteously, wiping his nippers and looking round him
further—paying the place in short by the very manner of his presence and
by something Strether fancied he could make out in this particular glance, such
a tribute as, to the latter’s sense, settled many things once for all.
Strether was conscious at this instant, for that matter, as he hadn’t yet
been, of how, round about him, quite without him, they were consistently
settled. Gloriani’s smile, deeply Italian, he considered, and finely
inscrutable, had had for him, during dinner, at which they were not neighbours,
an indefinite greeting; but the quality in it was gone that had appeared on the
other occasion to turn him inside out; it was as if even the momentary link
supplied by the doubt between them had snapped. He was conscious now of the
final reality, which was that there wasn’t so much a doubt as a
difference altogether; all the more that over the difference the famous
sculptor seemed to signal almost condolingly, yet oh how vacantly! as across
some great flat sheet of water. He threw out the bridge of a charming hollow
civility on which Strether wouldn’t have trusted his own full weight a
moment. That idea, even though but transient and perhaps belated, had performed
the office of putting Strether more at his ease, and the blurred picture had
already dropped—dropped with the sound of something else said and with
his becoming aware, by another quick turn, that Gloriani was now on the sofa
talking with Jeanne, while he himself had in his ears again the familiar
friendliness and the elusive meaning of the “Oh, oh, oh!” that had
made him, a fortnight before, challenge Miss Barrace in vain. She had always
the air, this picturesque and original lady, who struck him, so oddly, as both
antique and modern—she had always the air of taking up some joke that one
had already had out with her. The point itself, no doubt, was what was antique,
and the use she made of it what was modern. He felt just now that her
good-natured irony did bear on something, and it troubled him a little that she
wouldn’t be more explicit only assuring him, with the pleasure of
observation so visible in her, that she wouldn’t tell him more for the
world. He could take refuge but in asking her what she had done with Waymarsh,
though it must be added that he felt himself a little on the way to a clue
after she had answered that this personage was, in the other room, engaged in
conversation with Madame de Vionnet. He stared a moment at the image of such a
conjunction; then, for Miss Barrace’s benefit, he wondered. “Is she
too then under the charm—?”
“No, not a bit”—Miss Barrace was prompt. “She makes
nothing of him. She’s bored. She won’t help you with him.”
“Oh,” Strether laughed, “she can’t do everything.
“Of course not—wonderful as she is. Besides, he makes nothing of
her. She won’t take him from me—though she wouldn’t,
no doubt, having other affairs in hand, even if she could. I’ve
never,” said Miss Barrace, “seen her fail with any one before. And
to-night, when she’s so magnificent, it would seem to her
strange—if she minded. So at any rate I have him all. Je suis
tranquille!”
Strether understood, so far as that went; but he was feeling for his clue.
“She strikes you to-night as particularly magnificent?”
“Surely. Almost as I’ve never seen her. Doesn’t she you? Why
it’s for you.”
He persisted in his candour. “‘For’ me—?”
“Oh, oh, oh!” cried Miss Barrace, who persisted in the opposite of
that quality.
“Well,” he acutely admitted, “she is different.
She’s gay.”
“She’s gay!” Miss Barrace laughed. “And she has
beautiful shoulders—though there’s nothing different in
that.”
“No,” said Strether, “one was sure of her shoulders. It
isn’t her shoulders.”
His companion, with renewed mirth and the finest sense, between the puffs of
her cigarette, of the drollery of things, appeared to find their conversation
highly delightful. “Yes, it isn’t her shoulders.”
“What then is it?” Strether earnestly enquired.
“Why, it’s she—simply. It’s her mood. It’s
her charm.”
“Of course it’s her charm, but we’re speaking of the
difference.” “Well,” Miss Barrace explained,
“she’s just brilliant, as we used to say. That’s all.
She’s various. She’s fifty women.”
“Ah but only one”—Strether kept it clear—“at a
time.”
“Perhaps. But in fifty times—!”
“Oh we shan’t come to that,” our friend declared; and the
next moment he had moved in another direction. “Will you answer me a
plain question? Will she ever divorce?”
Miss Barrace looked at him through all her tortoise-shell. “Why should
she?”
It wasn’t what he had asked for, he signified; but he met it well enough.
“To marry Chad.”
“Why should she marry Chad?”
“Because I’m convinced she’s very fond of him. She has done
wonders for him.”
“Well then, how could she do more? Marrying a man, or woman
either,” Miss Barrace sagely went on, “is never the wonder for any
Jack and Jill can bring that off. The wonder is their doing such things
without marrying.”
Strether considered a moment this proposition. “You mean it’s so
beautiful for our friends simply to go on so?”
But whatever he said made her laugh. “Beautiful.”
He nevertheless insisted. “And that because it’s
disinterested?”
She was now, however, suddenly tired of the question. “Yes
then—call it that. Besides, she’ll never divorce. Don’t,
moreover,” she added, “believe everything you hear about her
husband.”
“He’s not then,” Strether asked, “a wretch?”
“Oh yes. But charming.”
“Do you know him?”
“I’ve met him. He’s bien aimable.”
“To every one but his wife?”
“Oh for all I know, to her too—to any, to every woman. I hope you
at any rate,” she pursued with a quick change, “appreciate the care
I take of Mr. Waymarsh.”
“Oh immensely.” But Strether was not yet in line. “At all
events,” he roundly brought out, “the attachment’s an
innocent one.”
“Mine and his? Ah,” she laughed, “don’t rob it of
all interest!”
“I mean our friend’s here—to the lady we’ve been
speaking of.” That was what he had settled to as an indirect but none the
less closely involved consequence of his impression of Jeanne. That was where
he meant to stay. “It’s innocent,” he repeated—“I
see the whole thing.”
Mystified by his abrupt declaration, she had glanced over at Gloriani as at the
unnamed subject of his allusion, but the next moment she had understood; though
indeed not before Strether had noticed her momentary mistake and wondered what
might possibly be behind that too. He already knew that the sculptor admired
Madame de Vionnet; but did this admiration also represent an attachment of
which the innocence was discussable? He was moving verily in a strange air and
on ground not of the firmest. He looked hard for an instant at Miss Barrace,
but she had already gone on. “All right with Mr. Newsome? Why of course
she is!”—and she got gaily back to the question of her own good
friend. “I dare say you’re surprised that I’m not worn out
with all I see—it being so much!—of Sitting Bull. But I’m
not, you know—I don’t mind him; I bear up, and we get on
beautifully. I’m very strange; I’m like that; and often I
can’t explain. There are people who are supposed interesting or
remarkable or whatever, and who bore me to death; and then there are others as
to whom nobody can understand what anybody sees in them—in whom I see no
end of things.” Then after she had smoked a moment, “He’s
touching, you know,” she said.
“‘Know’?” Strether echoed—“don’t I,
indeed? We must move you almost to tears.”
“Oh but I don’t mean you!” she laughed.
“You ought to then, for the worst sign of all—as I must have it for
you—is that you can’t help me. That’s when a woman
pities.”
“Ah but I do help you!” she cheerfully insisted.
Again he looked at her hard, and then after a pause: “No you
don’t!”
Her tortoise-shell, on its long chain, rattled down. “I help you with
Sitting Bull. That’s a good deal.”
“Oh that, yes.” But Strether hesitated. “Do you mean he talks
of me?”
“So that I have to defend you? No, never.’
“I see,” Strether mused. “It’s too deep.”
“That’s his only fault,” she returned—“that
everything, with him, is too deep. He has depths of silence—which he
breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark. And when the remark comes
it’s always something he has seen or felt for himself—never a bit
banal. That would be what one might have feared and what would kill me.
But never.” She smoked again as she thus, with amused complacency,
appreciated her acquisition. “And never about you. We keep clear of you.
We’re wonderful. But I’ll tell you what he does do,” she
continued: “he tries to make me presents.”
“Presents?” poor Strether echoed, conscious with a pang that
he hadn’t yet tried that in any quarter.
“Why you see,” she explained, “he’s as fine as ever in
the victoria; so that when I leave him, as I often do almost for hours—he
likes it so—at the doors of shops, the sight of him there helps me, when
I come out, to know my carriage away off in the rank. But sometimes, for a
change, he goes with me into the shops, and then I’ve all I can do to
prevent his buying me things.”
“He wants to ‘treat’ you?” Strether almost gasped at
all he himself hadn’t thought of. He had a sense of admiration. “Oh
he’s much more in the real tradition than I. Yes,” he mused,
“it’s the sacred rage.”
“The sacred rage, exactly!”—and Miss Barrace, who
hadn’t before heard this term applied, recognised its bearing with a clap
of her gemmed hands. “Now I do know why he’s not banal. But I do
prevent him all the same—and if you saw what he sometimes
selects—from buying. I save him hundreds and hundreds. I only take
flowers.”
“Flowers?” Strether echoed again with a rueful reflexion. How many
nosegays had her present converser sent?
“Innocent flowers,” she pursued, “as much as he likes. And he
sends me splendours; he knows all the best places—he has found them for
himself; he’s wonderful.”
“He hasn’t told them to me,” her friend smiled,
“he has a life of his own.” But Strether had swung back to the
consciousness that for himself after all it never would have done. Waymarsh
hadn’t Mrs. Waymarsh in the least to consider, whereas Lambert Strether
had constantly, in the inmost honour of his thoughts, to consider Mrs. Newsome.
He liked moreover to feel how much his friend was in the real tradition. Yet he
had his conclusion. “What a rage it is!” He had worked it
out. “It’s an opposition.”
She followed, but at a distance. “That’s what I feel. Yet to
what?”
“Well, he thinks, you know, that I’ve a life of my own. And
I haven’t!”
“You haven’t?” She showed doubt, and her laugh confirmed it.
“Oh, oh, oh!”
“No—not for myself. I seem to have a life only for other
people.”
“Ah for them and with them! Just now for instance
with—”
“Well, with whom?” he asked before she had had time to say.
His tone had the effect of making her hesitate and even, as he guessed, speak
with a difference. “Say with Miss Gostrey. What do you do for
her?” It really made him wonder. “Nothing at all!”
