II
It really looked true moreover from the way Chad was to behave
after this. He was full of attentions to his mother's ambassador;
in spite of which, all the while, the latter's other relations
rather remarkably contrived to assert themselves. Strether's
sittings pen in hand with Mrs. Newsome up in his own room were
broken, yet they were richer; and they were more than ever
interspersed with the hours in which he reported himself, in a
different fashion, but with scarce less earnestness and fulness,
to Maria Gostrey. Now that, as he would have expressed it, he had
really something to talk about he found himself, in respect to any
oddity that might reside for him in the double connexion, at once
more aware and more indifferent. He had been fine to Mrs. Newsome
about his useful friend, but it had begun to haunt his imagination
that Chad, taking up again for her benefit a pen too long disused,
might possibly be finer. It wouldn't at all do, he saw, that
anything should come up for him at Chad's hand but what
specifically was to have come; the greatest divergence from which
would be precisely the element of any lubrication of their
intercourse by levity It was accordingly to forestall such an
accident that he frankly put before the young man the several
facts, just as they had occurred, of his funny alliance. He spoke
of these facts, pleasantly and obligingly, as "the whole story,"
and felt that he might qualify the alliance as funny if he
remained sufficiently grave about it. He flattered himself that he
even exaggerated the wild freedom of his original encounter with
the wonderful lady; he was scrupulously definite about the absurd
conditions in which they had made acquaintance--their having
picked each other up almost in the street; and he had (finest
inspiration of all!) a conception of carrying the war into the
enemy's country by showing surprise at the enemy's ignorance.
He had always had a notion that this last was the grand style of
fighting; the greater therefore the reason for it, as he couldn't
remember that he had ever before fought in the grand style. Every
one, according to this, knew Miss Gostrey: how came it Chad didn't
know her? The difficulty, the impossibility, was really to escape
it; Strether put on him, by what he took for granted, the burden
of proof of the contrary. This tone was so far successful as that
Chad quite appeared to recognise her as a person whose fame had
reached him, but against his acquaintance with whom much mischance
had worked. He made the point at the same time that his social
relations, such as they could be called, were perhaps not to the
extent Strether supposed with the rising flood of their
compatriots. He hinted at his having more and more given way to a
different principle of selection; the moral of which seemed to be
that he went about little in the "colony." For the moment
certainly he had quite another interest. It was deep, what he
understood, and Strether, for himself, could only so observe it.
He couldn't see as yet how deep. Might he not all too soon! For
there was really too much of their question that Chad had already
committed himself to liking. He liked, to begin with, his
prospective stepfather; which was distinctly what had not been on
the cards. His hating him was the untowardness for which Strether
had been best prepared; he hadn't expected the boy's actual form
to give him more to do than his imputed. It gave him more through
suggesting that he must somehow make up to himself for not being
sure he was sufficiently disagreeable. That had really been
present to him as his only way to be sure he was sufficiently
thorough. The point was that if Chad's tolerance of his
thoroughness were insincere, were but the best of devices for
gaining time, it none the less did treat everything as tacitly
concluded.
That seemed at the end of ten days the upshot of the abundant, the
recurrent talk through which Strether poured into him all it
concerned him to know, put him in full possession of facts and
figures. Never cutting these colloquies short by a minute, Chad
behaved, looked and spoke as if he were rather heavily, perhaps
even a trifle gloomily, but none the less fundamentally and
comfortably free. He made no crude profession of eagerness to
yield, but he asked the most intelligent questions, probed, at
moments, abruptly, even deeper than his friend's layer of
information, justified by these touches the native estimate of his
latent stuff, and had in every way the air of trying to live,
reflectively, into the square bright picture. He walked up and
down in front of this production, sociably took Strether's arm at
the points at which he stopped, surveyed it repeatedly from the
right and from the left, inclined a critical head to either
quarter, and, while he puffed a still more critical cigarette,
animadverted to his companion on this passage and that. Strether
sought relief--there were hours when he required it--in repeating
himself; it was in truth not to be blinked that Chad had a way.
The main question as yet was of what it was a way TO. It made
vulgar questions no more easy; but that was unimportant when all
questions save those of his own asking had dropped. That he was
free was answer enough, and it wasn't quite ridiculous that this
freedom should end by presenting itself as what was difficult to
move. His changed state, his lovely home, his beautiful things,
his easy talk, his very appetite for Strether, insatiable and,
when all was said, flattering--what were such marked matters all
but the notes of his freedom? He had the effect of making a
sacrifice of it just in these handsome forms to his visitor; which
was mainly the reason the visitor was privately, for the time, a
little out of countenance. Strether was at this period again and
again thrown back on a felt need to remodel somehow his plan. He
fairly caught himself shooting rueful glances, shy looks of
pursuit, toward the embodied influence, the definite adversary, who
had by a stroke of her own failed him and on a fond theory of
whose palpable presence he had, under Mrs. Newsome's inspiration,
altogether proceeded. He had once or twice, in secret, literally
expressed the irritated wish that SHE would come out and find her.
He couldn't quite yet force it upon Woollett that such a career,
such a perverted young life, showed after all a certain plausible
side, DID in the case before them flaunt something like an
impunity for the social man; but he could at least treat himself
to the statement that would prepare him for the sharpest echo.
This echo--as distinct over there in the dry thin air as some
shrill "heading" above a column of print--seemed to reach him even
as he wrote. "He says there's no woman," he could hear Mrs.
Newsome report, in capitals almost of newspaper size, to Mrs.
Pocock; and he could focus in Mrs. Pocock the response of the
reader of the journal. He could see in the younger lady's face the
earnestness of her attention and catch the full scepticism of her
but slightly delayed "What is there then?" Just so he could again
as little miss the mother's clear decision: "There's plenty of
disposition, no doubt, to pretend there isn't." Strether had,
after posting his letter, the whole scene out; and it was a scene
during which, coming and going, as befell, he kept his eye not
least upon the daughter. He had his fine sense of the conviction
Mrs. Pocock would take occasion to reaffirm--a conviction bearing,
as he had from the first deeply divined it to bear, on Mr.
Strether's essential inaptitude. She had looked him in his
conscious eyes even before he sailed, and that she didn't believe
HE would find the woman had been written in her book. [sic]
Hadn't she at the best but a scant faith in his ability to find women?
It wasn't even as if he had found her mother--so much more, to her
discrimination, had her mother performed the finding. Her mother
had, in a case her private judgement of which remained educative
of Mrs. Pocock's critical sense, found the man. The man owed his
unchallenged state, in general, to the fact that Mrs. Newsome's
discoveries were accepted at Woollett; but he knew in his bones,
our friend did, how almost irresistibly Mrs. Pocock would now be
moved to show what she thought of his own. Give HER a free hand,
would be the moral, and the woman would soon be found.
His impression of Miss Gostrey after her introduction to Chad was
meanwhile an impression of a person almost unnaturally on her
guard. He struck himself as at first unable to extract from her
what he wished; though indeed OF what he wished at this special
juncture he would doubtless have contrived to make but a crude
statement. It sifted and settled nothing to put to her, tout
betement, as she often said, "Do you like him, eh?"--thanks to his
feeling it actually the least of his needs to heap up the evidence
in the young man's favour. He repeatedly knocked at her door to
let her have it afresh that Chad's case--whatever else of minor
interest it might yield--was first and foremost a miracle almost
monstrous. It was the alteration of the entire man, and was so
signal an instance that nothing else, for the intelligent
observer, could--COULD it?--signify. "It's a plot," he declared--
"there's more in it than meets the eye." He gave the rein to his
fancy. "It's a plant!"
His fancy seemed to please her. "Whose then?"
"Well, the party responsible is, I suppose, the fate that waits
for one, the dark doom that rides. What I mean is that with such
elements one can't count. I've but my poor individual, my modest
human means. It isn't playing the game to turn on the uncanny. All
one's energy goes to facing it, to tracking it. One wants, confound
it, don't you see?" he confessed with a queer face--"one wants to
enjoy anything so rare. Call it then life"--he puzzled it out--
"call it poor dear old life simply that springs the surprise.
Nothing alters the fact that the surprise is paralysing, or at any
rate engrossing--all, practically, hang it, that one sees, that
one CAN see."
Her silences were never barren, nor even dull. "Is that what
you've written home?"
He tossed it off. "Oh dear, yes!"
She had another pause while, across her carpets, he had another
walk. "If you don't look out you'll have them straight over."
"Oh but I've said he'll go back."
"And WILL he?" Miss Gostrey asked.
The special tone of it made him, pulling up, look at her long.
"What's that but just the question I've spent treasures of
patience and ingenuity in giving you, by the sight of him--after
everything had led up--every facility to answer? What is it but
just the thing I came here to-day to get out of you? Will he?"
"No--he won't," she said at last. "He's not free."
The air of it held him. "Then you've all the while known--?"
"I've known nothing but what I've seen; and I wonder," she
declared with some impatience, that you didn't see as much. It was
enough to be with him there--"
"In the box? Yes," he rather blankly urged.
"Well--to feel sure."
"Sure of what?"
She got up from her chair, at this, with a nearer approach than
she had ever yet shown to dismay at his dimness. She even, fairly
pausing for it, spoke with a shade of pity. "Guess!"
It was a shade, fairly, that brought a flush into his face; so
that for a moment, as they waited together, their difference was
between them. "You mean that just your hour with him told you so
much of his story? Very good; I'm not such a fool, on my side, as
that I don't understand you, or as that I didn't in some degree
understand HIM. That he has done what he liked most isn't, among
any of us, a matter the least in dispute. There's equally little
question at this time of day of what it is he does like most. But
I'm not talking," he reasonably explained, "of any mere wretch he
may still pick up. I'm talking of some person who in his present
situation may have held her own, may really have counted."
"That's exactly what I am!" said Miss Gostrey. But she as quickly
made her point. "I thought you thought--or that they think at
Woollett--that that's what mere wretches necessarily do. Mere
wretches necessarily DON'T!" she declared with spirit. "There
must, behind every appearance to the contrary, still be somebody--
somebody who's not a mere wretch, since we accept the miracle.
What else but such a somebody can such a miracle be?"
He took it in. "Because the fact itself IS the woman?"
"A woman. Some woman or other. It's one of the things that HAVE to
be."
"But you mean then at least a good one."
"A good woman?" She threw up her arms with a laugh. "I should call
her excellent!"
"Then why does he deny her?"
Miss Gostrey thought a moment. "Because she's too good to admit!
Don't you see," she went on, "how she accounts for him?"
Strether clearly, more and more, did see; yet it made him also see
other things. "But isn't what we want that he shall account for
HER?"
"Well, he does. What you have before you is his way. You must
forgive him if it isn't quite outspoken. In Paris such debts are
tacit."
Strether could imagine; but still--! "Even when the woman's good?"
Again she laughed out. "Yes, and even when the man is! There's
always a caution in such cases," she more seriously explained--
"for what it may seem to show. There's nothing that's taken as
showing so much here as sudden unnatural goodness."
"Ah then you're speaking now," Strether said, "of people who are
NOT nice."
"I delight," she replied, "in your classifications. But do you
want me," she asked, "to give you in the matter, on this ground,
the wisest advice I'm capable of? Don't consider her, don't judge
her at all in herself. Consider her and judge her only in Chad."
He had the courage at least of his companion's logic. "Because
then I shall like her?" He almost looked, with his quick imagination
as if he already did, though seeing at once also the full extent
of how little it would suit his book. "But is that what I came
out for?"
She had to confess indeed that it wasn't. But there was something
else. "Don't make up your mind. There are all sorts of things. You
haven't seen him all."
This on his side Strether recognised; but his acuteness none the
less showed him the danger. "Yes, but if the more I see the better
he seems?"
Well, she found something. "That may be--but his disavowal of her
isn't, all the same, pure consideration. There's a hitch." She
made it out. "It's the effort to sink her."
Strether winced at the image. "To 'sink'--?"
"Well, I mean there's a struggle, and a part of it is just what he
hides. Take time--that's the only way not to make some mistake
that you'll regret. Then you'll see. He does really want to shake
her off."
Our friend had by this time so got into the vision that he almost
gasped. "After all she has done for him?"
Miss Gostrey gave him a look which broke the next moment into a
wonderful smile. "He's not so good as you think!"
They remained with him, these words, promising him, in their
character of warning, considerable help; but the support he tried
to draw from them found itself on each renewal of contact with
Chad defeated by something else. What could it be, this
disconcerting force, he asked himself, but the sense, constantly
renewed, that Chad WAS--quite in fact insisted on being--as good
as he thought? It seemed somehow as if he couldn't BUT be as good
from the moment he wasn't as bad. There was a succession of days
at all events when contact with him--and in its immediate effect,
as if it could produce no other--elbowed out of Strether's
consciousness everything but itself. Little Bilham once more
pervaded the scene, but little Bilham became even in a higher
degree than he had originally been one of the numerous forms of
the inclusive relation; a consequence promoted, to our friend's
sense, by two or three incidents with which we have yet to make
acquaintance. Waymarsh himself, for the occasion, was drawn into
the eddy; it absolutely, though but temporarily, swallowed him
down, and there were days when Strether seemed to bump against him
as a sinking swimmer might brush a submarine object. The
fathomless medium held them--Chad's manner was the fathomless
medium; and our friend felt as if they passed each other, in their
deep immersion, with the round impersonal eye of silent fish. It
was practically produced between them that Waymarsh was giving him
then his chance; and the shade of discomfort that Strether drew
from the allowance resembled not a little the embarrassment he had
known at school, as a boy, when members of his family had been
present at exhibitions. He could perform before strangers, but
relatives were fatal, and it was now as if, comparatively,
Waymarsh were a relative. He seemed to hear him say "Strike up
then!" and to enjoy a foretaste of conscientious domestic
criticism. He HAD struck up, so far as he actually could; Chad
knew by this time in profusion what he wanted; and what vulgar
violence did his fellow pilgrim expect of him when he had really
emptied his mind? It went somehow to and fro that what poor
Waymarsh meant was "I told you so--that you'd lose your immortal
soul!" but it was also fairly explicit that Strether had his own
challenge and that, since they must go to the bottom of things, he
wasted no more virtue in watching Chad than Chad wasted in
watching him. His dip for duty's sake--where was it worse than
Waymarsh's own? For HE needn't have stopped resisting and
refusing, needn't have parleyed, at that rate, with the foe.
The strolls over Paris to see something or call somewhere were
accordingly inevitable and natural, and the late sessions in the
wondrous troisieme, the lovely home, when men dropped in and the
picture composed more suggestively through the haze of tobacco, of
music more or less good and of talk more or less polyglot, were on
a principle not to be distinguished from that of the mornings and
the afternoons. Nothing, Strether had to recognise as he leaned
back and smoked, could well less resemble a scene of violence than
even the liveliest of these occasions. They were occasions of
discussion, none the less, and Strether had never in his life
heard so many opinions on so many subjects. There were opinions at
Woollett, but only on three or four. The differences were there to
match; if they were doubtless deep, though few, they were quiet--
they were, as might be said, almost as shy as if people had been
ashamed of them. People showed little diffidence about such
things, on the other hand, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, and were
so far from being ashamed of them--or indeed of anything else--
that they often seemed to have invented them to avert those
agreements that destroy the taste of talk. No one had ever done that
at Woollett, though Strether could remember times when he himself had
been tempted to it without quite knowing why. He saw why at present
--he had but wanted to promote intercourse.
These, however, were but parenthetic memories, and the turn taken
by his affair on the whole was positively that if his nerves were
on the stretch it was because he missed violence. When he asked
himself if none would then, in connexion with it, ever come at
all, he might almost have passed as wondering how to provoke it.
It would be too absurd if such a vision as THAT should have to be
invoked for relief; it was already marked enough as absurd that he
should actually have begun with flutters and dignities on the
score of a single accepted meal. What sort of a brute had he
expected Chad to be, anyway?--Strether had occasion to make the
enquiry but was careful to make it in private. He could himself,
comparatively recent as it was--it was truly but the fact of a few
days since--focus his primal crudity; but he would on the
approach of an observer, as if handling an illicit possession,
have slipped the reminiscence out of sight. There were echoes of
it still in Mrs. Newsome's letters, and there were moments when
these echoes made him exclaim on her want of tact. He blushed of
course, at once, still more for the explanation than for the
ground of it: it came to him in time to save his manners that she
couldn't at the best become tactful as quickly as he. Her tact had
to reckon with the Atlantic Ocean, the General Post-Office and the
extravagant curve of the globe. Chad had one day offered tea at
the Boulevard Malesherbes to a chosen few, a group again including
the unobscured Miss Barrace; and Strether had on coming out walked
away with the acquaintance whom in his letters to Mrs. Newsome he
always spoke of as the little artist-man. He had had full occasion
to mention him as the other party, so oddly, to the only close
personal alliance observation had as yet detected in Chad's
existence. Little Bilham's way this afternoon was not Strether's,
but he had none the less kindly come with him, and it was somehow
a part of his kindness that as it had sadly begun to rain they
suddenly found themselves seated for conversation at a cafe in
which they had taken refuge. He had passed no more crowded hour in
Chad's society than the one just ended; he had talked with Miss
Barrace, who had reproached him with not having come to see her,
and he had above all hit on a happy thought for causing Waymarsh's
tension to relax. Something might possibly be extracted for the
latter from the idea of his success with that lady, whose quick
apprehension of what might amuse her had given Strether a free
hand. What had she meant if not to ask whether she couldn't help
him with his splendid encumbrance, and mightn't the sacred rage at
any rate be kept a little in abeyance by thus creating for his
comrade's mind even in a world of irrelevance the possibility of a
relation? What was it but a relation to be regarded as so
decorative and, in especial, on the strength of it, to be whirled
away, amid flounces and feathers, in a coupe lined, by what
Strether could make out, with dark blue brocade? He himself had
never been whirled away--never at least in a coupe and behind a
footman; he had driven with Miss Gostrey in cabs, with Mrs.
Pocock, a few times, in an open buggy, with Mrs. Newsome in a
four-seated cart and, occasionally up at the mountains, on a
buckboard; but his friend's actual adventure transcended his
personal experience. He now showed his companion soon enough
indeed how inadequate, as a general monitor, this last queer
quantity could once more feel itself.
"What game under the sun is he playing?" He signified the next
moment that his allusion was not to the fat gentleman immersed in
dominoes on whom his eyes had begun by resting, but to their host
of the previous hour, as to whom, there on the velvet bench, with
a final collapse of all consistency, he treated himself to the
comfort of indiscretion. "Where do you see him come out?"
Little Bilham, in meditation, looked at him with a kindness almost
paternal. "Don't you like it over here?"
Strether laughed out--for the tone was indeed droll; he let
himself go. "What has that to do with it? The only thing I've any
business to like is to feel that I'm moving him. That's why I ask
you whether you believe I AM? Is the creature"--and he did his
best to show that he simply wished to ascertain--"honest?"
His companion looked responsible, but looked it through a small
dim smile. "What creature do you mean?"
It was on this that they did have for a little a mute interchange.
"Is it untrue that he's free? How then," Strether asked wondering
"does he arrange his life?"
"Is the creature you mean Chad himself?" little Bilham said.
Strether here, with a rising hope, just thought, "We must take one
of them at a time." But his coherence lapsed. "IS there some
woman? Of whom he's really afraid of course I mean--or who does
with him what she likes."
"It's awfully charming of you," Bilham presently remarked, "not to
have asked me that before."
"Oh I'm not fit for my job!"
The exclamation had escaped our friend, but it made little Bilham
more deliberate. "Chad's a rare case!" he luminously observed.
"He's awfully changed," he added.
"Then you see it too?"
"The way he has improved? Oh yes--I think every one must see it.
But I'm not sure," said little Bilham, "that I didn't like him
about as well in his other state."
"Then this IS really a new state altogether?"
"Well," the young man after a moment returned, "I'm not sure he
was really meant by nature to be quite so good. It's like the new
edition of an old book that one has been fond of--revised and
amended, brought up to date, but not quite the thing one knew and
loved. However that may be at all events," he pursued, "I don't
think, you know, that he's really playing, as you call it, any
game. I believe he really wants to go back and take up a career.
He's capable of one, you know, that will improve and enlarge him
still more. He won't then," little Bilham continued to remark, "be
my pleasant well-rubbed old-fashioned volume at all. But of course
I'm beastly immoral. I'm afraid it would be a funny world
altogether--a world with things the way I like them. I ought, I
dare say, to go home and go into business myself. Only I'd simply
rather die--simply. And I've not the least difficulty in making
up my mind not to, and in knowing exactly why, and in defending my
ground against all comers. All the same," he wound up, "I assure
you I don't say a word against it--for himself, I mean--to Chad. I
seem to see it as much the best thing for him. You see he's not
happy."
"DO I?"--Strether stared. "I've been supposing I see just the
opposite--an extraordinary case of the equilibrium arrived at and
assured."
"Oh there's a lot behind it."
"Ah there you are!" Strether exclaimed. "That's just what I want
to get at. You speak of your familiar volume altered out of
recognition. Well, who's the editor?"
Little Bilham looked before him a minute in silence. "He ought to
get married. THAT would do it. And he wants to."
"Wants to marry her?"
Again little Bilham waited, and, with a sense that he had
information, Strether scarce knew what was coming. "He wants to be
free. He isn't used, you see," the young man explained in his
lucid way, "to being so good."
Strether hesitated. "Then I may take it from you that he IS good?"
His companion matched his pause, but making it up with a quiet
fulness. "DO take it from me."
"Well then why isn't he free? He swears to me he is, but meanwhile
does nothing--except of course that he's so kind to me--to prove
it; and couldn't really act much otherwise if he weren't. My
question to you just now was exactly on this queer impression of
his diplomacy: as if instead of really giving ground his line were
to keep me on here and set me a bad example."
As the half-hour meanwhile had ebbed Strether paid his score, and
the waiter was presently in the act of counting out change. Our
friend pushed back to him a fraction of it, with which, after an
emphatic recognition, the personage in question retreated. "You
give too much," little Bilham permitted himself benevolently to
observe.
"Oh I always give too much!" Strether helplessly sighed. "But you
don't," he went on as if to get quickly away from the contemplation
of that doom, "answer my question. Why isn't he free?"
Little Bilham had got up as if the transaction with the waiter had
been a signal, and had already edged out between the table and the
divan. The effect of this was that a minute later they had quitted
the place, the gratified waiter alert again at the open door.
Strether had found himself deferring to his companion's abruptness
as to a hint that he should be answered as soon as they were more
isolated. This happened when after a few steps in the outer air
they had turned the next comer. There our friend had kept it up.
"Why isn't he free if he's good?"
Little Bilham looked him full in the face. "Because it's a
virtuous attachment."
This had settled the question so effectually for the time--that is
for the next few days--that it had given Strether almost a new
lease of life. It must be added however that, thanks to his
constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the
wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees
rising as usual into his draught. His imagination had in other
words already dealt with his young friend's assertion; of which it
had made something that sufficiently came out on the very next
occasion of his seeing Maria Gostrey. This occasion moreover had
been determined promptly by a new circumstance--a circumstance he
was the last man to leave her for a day in ignorance of. "When I
said to him last night," he immediately began, "that without some
definite word from him now that will enable me to speak to them
over there of our sailing--or at least of mine, giving them some
sort of date--my responsibility becomes uncomfortable and my
situation awkward; when I said that to him what do you think was
his reply?" And then as she this time gave it up: "Why that he has
two particular friends, two ladies, mother and daughter, about to
arrive in Paris--coming back from an absence; and that he wants
me so furiously to meet them, know them and like them, that I
shall oblige him by kindly not bringing our business to a crisis
till he has had a chance to see them again himself. Is that,"
Strether enquired, "the way he's going to try to get off? These
are the people," he explained, "that he must have gone down to see
before I arrived. They're the best friends he has in the world,
and they take more interest than any one else in what concerns
him. As I'm his next best he sees a thousand reasons why we should
comfortably meet. He hasn't broached the question sooner because
their return was uncertain--seemed in fact for the present
impossible. But he more than intimates that--if you can believe
it--their desire to make my acquaintance has had to do with their
surmounting difficulties."
"They're dying to see you?" Miss Gostrey asked.
"Dying. Of course," said Strether, "they're the virtuous attachment."
He had already told her about that--had seen her the day after
his talk with little Bilham; and they had then threshed out
together the bearing of the revelation. She had helped him to put
into it the logic in which little Bilham had left it slightly
deficient Strether hadn't pressed him as to the object of the
preference so unexpectedly described; feeling in the presence of
it, with one of his irrepressible scruples, a delicacy from which
he had in the quest of the quite other article worked himself
sufficiently free. He had held off, as on a small principle of
pride, from permitting his young friend to mention a name; wishing
to make with this the great point that Chad's virtuous attachments
were none of his business. He had wanted from the first not to
think too much of his dignity, but that was no reason for not
allowing it any little benefit that might turn up. He had often
enough wondered to what degree his interference might pass for
interested; so that there was no want of luxury in letting it be
seen whenever he could that he didn't interfere. That had of
course at the same time not deprived him of the further luxury of
much private astonishment; which however he had reduced to some
order before communicating his knowledge. When he had done this at
last it was with the remark that, surprised as Miss Gostrey might,
like himself, at first be, she would probably agree with him on
reflexion that such an account of the matter did after all fit the
confirmed appearances. Nothing certainly, on all the indications,
could have been a greater change for him than a virtuous
attachment, and since they had been in search of the "word" as the
French called it, of that change, little Bilham's announcement--
though so long and so oddly delayed--would serve as well as
another. She had assured Strether in fact after a pause that the
more she thought of it the more it did serve; and yet her
assurance hadn't so weighed with him as that before they parted he
hadn't ventured to challenge her sincerity. Didn't she believe the
attachment was virtuous?--he had made sure of her again with the
aid of that question. The tidings he brought her on this second
occasion were moreover such as would help him to make surer still.
She showed at first none the less as only amused. "You say there
are two? An attachment to them both then would, I suppose, almost
necessarily be innocent."
Our friend took the point, but he had his clue. "Mayn't he be
still in the stage of not quite knowing which of them, mother or
daughter, he likes best?"
She gave it more thought. "Oh it must be the daughter--at his
age."
"Possibly. Yet what do we know," Strether asked, "about hers? She
may be old enough."
"Old enough for what?"
"Why to marry Chad. That may be, you know, what they want. And if
Chad wants it too, and little Bilham wants it, and even we, at a
pinch, could do with it--that is if she doesn't prevent repatriation
--why it may be plain sailing yet."
It was always the case for him in these counsels that each of his
remarks, as it came, seemed to drop into a deeper well. He had at
all events to wait a moment to hear the slight splash of this one.
"I don't see why if Mr. Newsome wants to marry the young lady he
hasn't already done it or hasn't been prepared with some statement
to you about it. And if he both wants to marry her and is on good
terms with them why isn't he 'free'?"
Strether, responsively, wondered indeed. "Perhaps the girl herself
doesn't like him."
"Then why does he speak of them to you as he does?"
Strether's mind echoed the question, but also again met it. "Perhaps
it's with the mother he's on good terms."
"As against the daughter?"
"Well, if she's trying to persuade the daughter to consent to him,
what could make him like the mother more? Only," Strether threw
out, "why shouldn't the daughter consent to him?"
"Oh," said Miss Gostrey, "mayn't it be that every one else isn't
quite so struck with him as you?"
"Doesn't regard him you mean as such an 'eligible' young man? Is
that what I've come to?" he audibly and rather gravely sought to
know. "However," he went on, "his marriage is what his mother most
desires--that is if it will help. And oughtn't ANY marriage to
help? They must want him"--he had already worked it out--"to be
better off. Almost any girl he may marry will have a direct
interest in his taking up his chances. It won't suit HER at least
that he shall miss them."
Miss Gostrey cast about. "No--you reason well! But of course on
the other hand there's always dear old Woollett itself."
"Oh yes," he mused--"there's always dear old Woollett itself."
She waited a moment. "The young lady mayn't find herself able to
swallow THAT quantity. She may think it's paying too much; she may
weigh one thing against another."
Strether, ever restless in such debates, took a vague turn "It
will all depend on who she is. That of course--the proved ability
to deal with dear old Woollett, since I'm sure she does deal with
it--is what makes so strongly for Mamie."
"Mamie?"
He stopped short, at her tone, before her; then, though seeing
that it represented not vagueness, but a momentary embarrassed
fulness, let his exclamation come. "You surely haven't forgotten
about Mamie!"
"No, I haven't forgotten about Mamie," she smiled. "There's no
doubt whatever that there's ever so much to be said for her.
Mamie's MY girl!" she roundly declared.
Strether resumed for a minute his walk. "She's really perfectly
lovely, you know. Far prettier than any girl I've seen over here
yet."
"That's precisely on what I perhaps most build." And she mused a
moment in her friend's way. "I should positively like to take her
in hand!"
He humoured the fancy, though indeed finally to deprecate it. "Oh
but don't, in your zeal, go over to her! I need you most and
can't, you know, be left."
But she kept it up. "I wish they'd send her out to me!"
"If they knew you," he returned, "they would "
"Ah but don't they?--after all that, as I've understood you you've
told them about me?"
He had paused before her again, but he continued his course "They
WILL--before, as you say, I've done." Then he came out with the
point he had wished after all most to make. "It seems to give away
now his game. This is what he has been doing--keeping me along
for. He has been waiting for them."
Miss Gostrey drew in her lips. "You see a good deal in it!"
"I doubt if I see as much as you. Do you pretend," he went on,
"that you don't see--?"
"Well, what?"--she pressed him as he paused.
"Why that there must be a lot between them--and that it has been
going on from the first; even from before I came."
She took a minute to answer. "Who are they then--if it's so
grave?"
"It mayn't be grave--it may be gay. But at any rate it's marked.
Only I don't know," Strether had to confess, "anything about them.
Their name for instance was a thing that, after little Bilham's
information, I found it a kind of refreshment not to feel obliged
to follow up."
"Oh," she returned, "if you think you've got off--!"
Her laugh produced in him a momentary gloom. "I don't think I've
got off. I only think I'm breathing for about five minutes. I dare
say I SHALL have, at the best, still to get on." A look, over it
all, passed between them, and the next minute he had come back to
good humour. "I don't meanwhile take the smallest interest in
their name."
"Nor in their nationality?--American, French, English, Polish?"
"I don't care the least little 'hang,'" he smiled, "for their
nationality. It would be nice if they're Polish!" he almost
immediately added.
"Very nice indeed." The transition kept up her spirits. "So you
see you do care."
He did this contention a modified justice. "I think I should if
they WERE Polish. Yes," he thought--"there might be joy in THAT."
"Let us then hope for it." But she came after this nearer to the
question. "If the girl's of the right age of course the mother
can't be. I mean for the virtuous attachment. If the girl's
twenty--and she can't be less--the mother must be at least forty.
So it puts the mother out. SHE'S too old for him."
Strether, arrested again, considered and demurred. "Do you think
so? Do you think any one would be too old for him? I'M eighty, and
I'm too young. But perhaps the girl," he continued, "ISn't twenty.
Perhaps she's only ten--but such a little dear that Chad finds
himself counting her in as an attraction of the acquaintance.
Perhaps she's only five. Perhaps the mother's but five-and-twenty
--a charming young widow."
Miss Gostrey entertained the suggestion. "She IS a widow then?"
"I haven't the least idea!" They once more, in spite of this
vagueness, exchanged a look--a look that was perhaps the longest
yet. It seemed in fact, the next thing, to require to explain
itself; which it did as it could. "I only feel what I've told you
--that he has some reason."
Miss Gostrey's imagination had taken its own flight. "Perhaps
she's NOT a widow."
Strether seemed to accept the possibility with reserve. Still he
accepted it. "Then that's why the attachment--if it's to her--is
virtuous."
But she looked as if she scarce followed. "Why is it virtuous if--
since she's free--there's nothing to impose on it any condition?"
He laughed at her question. "Oh I perhaps don't mean as virtuous
as THAT! Your idea is that it can be virtuous--in any sense worthy
of the name--only if she's NOT free? But what does it become
then," he asked, "for HER?"
"Ah that's another matter." He said nothing for a moment, and she
soon went on. "I dare say you're right, at any rate, about
Mr. Newsome's little plan. He HAS been trying you--has been
reporting on you to these friends."
Strether meanwhile had had time to think more. "Then where's his
straightness?"
"Well, as we say, it's struggling up, breaking out, asserting itself
as it can. We can be on the side, you see, of his straightness.
We can help him. But he has made out," said Miss Gostrey, "that
you'll do."
"Do for what?"
"Why, for THEM--for ces dames. He has watched you, studied you,
liked you--and recognised that THEY must. It's a great compliment
to you, my dear man; for I'm sure they're particular. You came out
for a success. Well," she gaily declared, "you're having it!"
He took it from her with momentary patience and then turned
abruptly away. It was always convenient to him that there were so
many fine things in her room to look at. But the examination of
two or three of them appeared soon to have determined a speech
that had little to do with them. "You don't believe in it!"
"In what?"
"In the character of the attachment. In its innocence."
But she defended herself. "I don't pretend to know anything about
it. Everything's possible. We must see."
"See?" he echoed with a groan. "Haven't we seen enough?"
"I haven't," she smiled.
"But do you suppose then little Bilham has lied?"
"You must find out."
It made him almost turn pale. "Find out any MORE?"
He had dropped on a sofa for dismay; but she seemed, as she stood
over him, to have the last word. "Wasn't what you came out for to
find out ALL?"
