III
Madame de Vionnet, having meanwhile come in, was at present
close to them, and Miss Barrace hereupon, instead of risking a
rejoinder, became again with a look that measured her from top to
toe all mere long-handled appreciative tortoise-shell. She had
struck our friend, from the first of her appearing, as dressed for
a great occasion, and she met still more than on either of the
others the conception reawakened in him at their garden-party, the
idea of the femme du monde in her habit as she lived. Her bare
shoulders and arms were white and beautiful; the materials of her
dress, a mixture, as he supposed, of silk and crape, were of a
silvery grey so artfully composed as to give an impression of warm
splendour; and round her neck she wore a collar of large old
emeralds, the green note of which was more dimly repeated, at other
points of her apparel, in embroidery, in enamel, in satin, in
substances and textures vaguely rich. Her head, extremely fair and
exquisitely festal, was like a happy fancy, a notion of the
antique, on an old precious medal, some silver coin of the
Renaissance; while her slim lightness and brightness, her gaiety,
her expression, her decision, contributed to an effect that might
have been felt by a poet as half mythological and half conventional.
He could have compared her to a goddess still partly engaged
in a morning cloud, or to a sea-nymph waist-high in the summer surge.
Above all she suggested to him the reflexion that the femme du monde--
in these finest developments of the type--was, like Cleopatra
in the play, indeed various and multifold. She had aspects, characters,
days, nights--or had them at least, showed them by a mysterious law
of her own, when in addition to everything she happened also to be
a woman of genius. She was an obscure person, a muffled person one day,
and a showy person, an uncovered person the next. He thought of
Madame de Vionnet to-night as showy and uncovered, though he felt
the formula rough, because, thanks to one of the short-cuts of genius
she had taken all his categories by surprise. Twice during dinner
he had met Chad's eyes in a longish look; but these communications
had in truth only stirred up again old ambiguities--so little was it
clear from them whether they were an appeal or an admonition.
"You see how I'm fixed," was what they appeared to convey; yet how
he was fixed was exactly what Strether didn't see. However, perhaps
he should see now.
"Are you capable of the very great kindness of going to relieve
Newsome, for a few minutes, of the rather crushing responsibility
of Madame Gloriani, while I say a word, if he'll allow me, to
Mr. Strether, of whom I've a question to ask? Our host ought to talk
a bit to those other ladies, and I'll come back in a minute to your
rescue." She made this proposal to Miss Barrace as if her
consciousness of a special duty had just flickered-up, but that
lady's recognition of Strether's little start at it--as at a
betrayal on the speaker's part of a domesticated state--was as mute
as his own comment; and after an instant, when their fellow guest
had good-naturedly left them, he had been given something else to
think of. "Why has Maria so suddenly gone? Do you know?" That was
the question Madame de Vionnet had brought with her.
"I'm afraid I've no reason to give you but the simple reason I've
had from her in a note--the sudden obligation to join in the south
a sick friend who has got worse."
"Ah then she has been writing you?"
"Not since she went--I had only a brief explanatory word before she
started. I went to see her," Strether explained--"it was the day
after I called on you--but she was already on her way, and her
concierge told me that in case of my coming I was to be informed
she had written to me. I found her note when I got home."
Madame de Vionnet listened with interest and with her eyes on
Strether's face; then her delicately decorated head had a small
melancholy motion. "She didn't write to ME. I went to see her," she
added, "almost immediately after I had seen you, and as I assured
her I would do when I met her at Gloriani's. She hadn't then told
me she was to be absent, and I felt at her door as if I understood.
She's absent--with all respect to her sick friend, though I know
indeed she has plenty--so that I may not see her. She doesn't want
to meet me again. Well," she continued with a beautiful conscious
mildness, "I liked and admired her beyond every one in the old
time, and she knew it--perhaps that's precisely what has made her go--
and I dare say I haven't lost her for ever." Strether still said
nothing; he had a horror, as he now thought of himself, of being
in question between women--was in fact already quite enough on his
way to that, and there was moreover, as it came to him, perceptibly,
something behind these allusions and professions that, should he
take it in, would square but ill with his present resolve to simplify.
It was as if, for him, all the same, her softness and sadness
were sincere. He felt that not less when she soon went on:
"I'm extremely glad of her happiness." But it also left him mute--
sharp and fine though the imputation it conveyed. What it conveyed
was that HE was Maria Gostrey's happiness, and for the least little
instant he had the impulse to challenge the thought. He could have
done so however only by saying "What then do you suppose to be
between us?" and he was wonderfully glad a moment later not to have
spoken. He would rather seem stupid any day than fatuous, and he
drew back as well, with a smothered inward shudder, from the
consideration of what women--of highly-developed type in particular--
might think of each other. Whatever he had come out for he hadn't
come to go into that; so that he absolutely took up nothing his
interlocutress had now let drop. Yet, though he had kept away from her
for days, had laid wholly on herself the burden of their meeting again,
she hadn't a gleam of irritation to show him. "Well, about Jeanne now?"
she smiled--it had the gaiety with which she had originally come in.
He felt it on the instant to represent her motive and real errand.
But he had been schooling her of a truth to say much in proportion to
his little. "Do you make out that she has a sentiment? I mean for
Mr. Newsome."
Almost resentful, Strether could at last be prompt. "How can I make
out such things?"
She remained perfectly good-natured. "Ah but they're beautiful
little things, and you make out--don't pretend--everything in the
world. Haven't you," she asked, "been talking with her?"
"Yes, but not about Chad. At least not much."
"Oh you don't require 'much'!" she reassuringly declared. But she
immediately changed her ground. "I hope you remember your promise
of the other day."
"To 'save' you, as you called it?"
"I call it so still. You WILL?" she insisted. "You haven't repented?"
He wondered. "No--but I've been thinking what I meant."
She kept it up. "And not, a little, what I did?"
"No--that's not necessary. It will be enough if I know what I
meant myself."
"And don't you know," she asked, "by this time?"
Again he had a pause. "I think you ought to leave it to me.
But how long," he added, "do you give me?"
"It seems to me much more a question of how long you give ME.
Doesn't our friend here himself, at any rate," she went on,
"perpetually make me present to you?"
"Not," Strether replied, "by ever speaking of you to me."
"He never does that?"
"Never."
She considered, and, if the fact was disconcerting to her,
effectually concealed it. The next minute indeed she had recovered.
"No, he wouldn't. But do you NEED that?"
Her emphasis was wonderful, and though his eyes had been wandering
he looked at her longer now. "I see what you mean."
"Of course you see what I mean."
Her triumph was gentle, and she really had tones to make justice
weep. "I've before me what he owes you."
"Admit then that that's something," she said, yet still with the
same discretion in her pride.
He took in this note but went straight on. "You've made of him what
I see, but what I don't see is how in the world you've done it."
"Ah that's another question!" she smiled. "The point is of what use
is your declining to know me when to know Mr. Newsome--as you do me
the honour to find him--IS just to know me."
"I see," he mused, still with his eyes on her. "I shouldn't have
met you to-night."
She raised and dropped her linked hands. "It doesn't matter. If I
trust you why can't you a little trust me too? And why can't you
also," she asked in another tone, "trust yourself?" But she gave
him no time to reply. "Oh I shall be so easy for you! And I'm glad
at any rate you've seen my child."
"I'm glad too," he said; "but she does you no good."
"No good?"--Madame de Vionnet had a clear stare. "Why she's an
angel of light."
"That's precisely the reason. Leave her alone. Don't try to find
out. I mean," he explained, "about what you spoke to me of--
the way she feels."
His companion wondered. "Because one really won't?"
"Well, because I ask you, as a favour to myself, not to. She's the
most charming creature I've ever seen. Therefore don't touch her.
Don't know--don't want to know. And moreover--yes--you won't."
It was an appeal, of a sudden, and she took it in. "As a favour to you?"
"Well--since you ask me."
"Anything, everything you ask," she smiled. "I shan't know then--never.
Thank you," she added with peculiar gentleness as she turned away.
The sound of it lingered with him, making him fairly feel as if he
had been tripped up and had a fall. In the very act of arranging
with her for his independence he had, under pressure from a
particular perception, inconsistently, quite stupidly, committed
himself, and, with her subtlety sensitive on the spot to an
advantage, she had driven in by a single word a little golden nail,
the sharp intention of which he signally felt. He hadn't detached,
he had more closely connected himself, and his eyes, as he
considered with some intensity this circumstance, met another pair
which had just come within their range and which struck him as
reflecting his sense of what he had done. He recognised them at the
same moment as those of little Bilham, who had apparently drawn
near on purpose to speak to him, and little Bilham wasn't, in the
conditions, the person to whom his heart would be most closed.
They were seated together a minute later at the angle of the room
obliquely opposite the corner in which Gloriani was still engaged
with Jeanne de Vionnet, to whom at first and in silence their
attention had been benevolently given. "I can't see for my life,"
Strether had then observed, "how a young fellow of any spirit--such
a one as you for instance--can be admitted to the sight of that
young lady without being hard hit. Why don't you go in, little
Bilham?" He remembered the tone into which he had been betrayed on
the garden-bench at the sculptor's reception, and this might make
up for that by being much more the right sort of thing to say to a
young man worthy of any advice at all. "There WOULD be some
reason."
"Some reason for what?"
"Why for hanging on here."
"To offer my hand and fortune to Mademoiselle de Vionnet?"
"Well," Strether asked, "to what lovelier apparition COULD you
offer them? She's the sweetest little thing I've ever seen."
"She's certainly immense. I mean she's the real thing. I believe
the pale pink petals are folded up there for some wondrous
efflorescence in time; to open, that is, to some great golden sun.
I'M unfortunately but a small farthing candle. What chance in such
a field for a poor little painter-man?"
"Oh you're good enough," Strether threw out.
"Certainly I'm good enough. We're good enough, I consider, nous
autres, for anything. But she's TOO good. There's the difference.
They wouldn't look at me."
Strether, lounging on his divan and still charmed by the young
girl, whose eyes had consciously strayed to him, he fancied, with a
vague smile--Strether, enjoying the whole occasion as with dormant
pulses at last awake and in spite of new material thrust upon him,
thought over his companion's words. "Whom do you mean by 'they'?
She and her mother?"
"She and her mother. And she has a father too, who, whatever else
he may be, certainly can't be indifferent to the possibilities she
represents. Besides, there's Chad."
Strether was silent a little. "Ah but he doesn't care for her--not,
I mean, it appears, after all, in the sense I'm speaking of. He's
NOT in love with her."
"No--but he's her best friend; after her mother. He's very fond
of her. He has his ideas about what can be done for her."
"Well, it's very strange!" Strether presently remarked with a
sighing sense of fulness.
"Very strange indeed. That's just the beauty of it. Isn't it very
much the kind of beauty you had in mind," little Bilham went on,
"when you were so wonderful and so inspiring to me the other day?
Didn't you adjure me, in accents I shall never forget, to see,
while I've a chance, everything I can?--and REALLY to see, for it
must have been that only you meant. Well, you did me no end of
good, and I'm doing my best. I DO make it out a situation."
"So do I!" Strether went on after a moment. But he had the next minute
an inconsequent question. "How comes Chad so mixed up, anyway?"
"Ah, ah, ah!"--and little Bilham fell back on his cushions.
It reminded our friend of Miss Barrace, and he felt again the brush
of his sense of moving in a maze of mystic closed allusions. Yet he
kept hold of his thread. "Of course I understand really; only the
general transformation makes me occasionally gasp. Chad with such a
voice in the settlement of the future of a little countess--no,"
he declared, "it takes more time! You say moreover," he resumed, "that
we're inevitably, people like you and me, out of the running. The
curious fact remains that Chad himself isn't. The situation doesn't
make for it, but in a different one he could have her if he would."
"Yes, but that's only because he's rich and because there's a
possibility of his being richer. They won't think of anything but a
great name or a great fortune."
"Well," said Strether, "he'll have no great fortune on THESE lines.
He must stir his stumps."
"Is that," little Bilham enquired, "what you were saying to
Madame de Vionnet?"
"No--I don't say much to her. Of course, however," Strether
continued, "he can make sacrifices if he likes."
Little Bilham had a pause. "Oh he's not keen for sacrifices; or
thinks, that is, possibly, that he has made enough."
"Well, it IS virtuous," his companion observed with some decision.
"That's exactly," the young man dropped after a moment, "what I mean."
It kept Strether himself silent a little. "I've made it out for
myself," he then went on; "I've really, within the last half-hour,
got hold of it. I understand it in short at last; which at first--
when you originally spoke to me--I didn't. Nor when Chad originally
spoke to me either."
"Oh," said little Bilham, "I don't think that at that time you
believed me."
"Yes--I did; and I believed Chad too. It would have been odious and
unmannerly--as well as quite perverse--if I hadn't. What interest
have you in deceiving me?"
The young man cast about. "What interest have I?"
"Yes. Chad MIGHT have. But you?"
"Ah, ah, ah!" little Bilham exclaimed.
It might, on repetition, as a mystification, have irritated our
friend a little, but he knew, once more, as we have seen, where he
was, and his being proof against everything was only another
attestation that he meant to stay there. "I couldn't, without my
own impression, realise. She's a tremendously clever brilliant
capable woman, and with an extraordinary charm on top of it all--
the charm we surely all of us this evening know what to think of.
It isn't every clever brilliant capable woman that has it. In fact
it's rare with any woman. So there you are," Strether proceeded as
if not for little Bilham's benefit alone. "I understand what a
relation with such a woman--what such a high fine friendship--
may be. It can't be vulgar or coarse, anyway--and that's the point."
"Yes, that's the point," said little Bilham. "It can't be vulgar or
coarse. And, bless us and save us, it ISn't! It's, upon my word,
the very finest thing I ever saw in my life, and the most
distinguished."
Strether, from beside him and leaning back with him as he leaned,
dropped on him a momentary look which filled a short interval and
of which he took no notice. He only gazed before him with intent
participation. "Of course what it has done for him," Strether at
all events presently pursued, "of course what it has done for him--
that is as to HOW it has so wonderfully worked--isn't a thing I
pretend to understand. I've to take it as I find it. There he is."
"There he is!" little Bilham echoed. "And it's really and truly
she. I don't understand either, even with my longer and closer
opportunity. But I'm like you," he added; "I can admire and rejoice
even when I'm a little in the dark. You see I've watched it for
some three years, and especially for this last. He wasn't so bad
before it as I seem to have made out that you think--"
"Oh I don't think anything now!" Strether impatiently broke in:
"that is but what I DO think! I mean that originally, for her to
have cared for him--"
"There must have been stuff in him? Oh yes, there was stuff indeed,
and much more of it than ever showed, I dare say, at home. Still,
you know," the young man in all fairness developed, "there was room
for her, and that's where she came in. She saw her chance and took
it. That's what strikes me as having been so fine. But of course,"
he wound up, "he liked her first."
"Naturally," said Strether.
"I mean that they first met somehow and somewhere--I believe in
some American house--and she, without in the least then intending
it, made her impression. Then with time and opportunity he made
his; and after THAT she was as bad as he."
Strether vaguely took it up. "As 'bad'?"
"She began, that is, to care--to care very much. Alone, and in her
horrid position, she found it, when once she had started, an
interest. It was, it is, an interest, and it did--it continues to
do--a lot for herself as well. So she still cares. She cares in
fact," said little Bilham thoughtfully "more."
Strether's theory that it was none of his business was somehow not
damaged by the way he took this. "More, you mean, than he?" On
which his companion looked round at him, and now for an instant
their eyes met. "More than he?" he repeated.
Little Bilham, for as long, hung fire. "Will you never tell any
one?"
Strether thought. "Whom should I tell?"
"Why I supposed you reported regularly--"
"To people at home?"--Strether took him up. "Well, I won't tell
them this."
The young man at last looked away. "Then she does now care more
than he."
"Oh!" Strether oddly exclaimed.
But his companion immediately met it. "Haven't you after all had
your impression of it? That's how you've got hold of him."
"Ah but I haven't got hold of him!"
"Oh I say!" But it was all little Bilham said.
"It's at any rate none of my business. I mean," Strether explained,
"nothing else than getting hold of him is." It appeared, however,
to strike him as his business to add: "The fact remains
nevertheless that she has saved him."
Little Bilham just waited. "I thought that was what you were to do."
But Strether had his answer ready. "I'm speaking--in connexion with
her--of his manners and morals, his character and life. I'm
speaking of him as a person to deal with and talk with and live
with--speaking of him as a social animal."
"And isn't it as a social animal that you also want him?"
"Certainly; so that it's as if she had saved him FOR us."
"It strikes you accordingly then," the young man threw out, "as for
you all to save HER?"
"Oh for us 'all'--!" Strether could but laugh at that. It brought
him back, however, to the point he had really wished to make.
"They've accepted their situation--hard as it is. They're not free
--at least she's not; but they take what's left to them. It's a
friendship, of a beautiful sort; and that's what makes them so
strong. They're straight, they feel; and they keep each other up.
It's doubtless she, however, who, as you yourself have hinted,
feels it most."
Little Bilham appeared to wonder what he had hinted. "Feels most
that they're straight?"
"Well, feels that SHE is, and the strength that comes from it. She
keeps HIM up--she keeps the whole thing up. When people are able to
it's fine. She's wonderful, wonderful, as Miss Barrace says; and he
is, in his way, too; however, as a mere man, he may sometimes rebel
and not feel that he finds his account in it. She has simply given
him an immense moral lift, and what that can explain is prodigious.
That's why I speak of it as a situation. It IS one, if there ever
was." And Strether, with his head back and his eyes on the ceiling,
seemed to lose himself in the vision of it.
His companion attended deeply. "You state it much better than I
could."
"Oh you see it doesn't concern you."
Little Bilham considered. "I thought you said just now that it
doesn't concern you either."
"Well, it doesn't a bit as Madame de Vionnet's affair. But as we
were again saying just now, what did I come out for but to save
him?"
"Yes--to remove him."
"To save him by removal; to win him over to HIMSELF thinking it
best he shall take up business--thinking he must immediately do
therefore what's necessary to that end."
"Well," said little Bilham after a moment, "you HAVE won him over.
He does think it best. He has within a day or two again said to me
as much."
"And that," Strether asked, "is why you consider that he cares less
than she?"
"Cares less for her than she for him? Yes, that's one of the reasons.
But other things too have given me the impression. A man, don't
you think?" little Bilham presently pursued, "CAN'T, in such
conditions, care so much as a woman. It takes different conditions
to make him, and then perhaps he cares more. Chad," he wound up,
"has his possible future before him."
"Are you speaking of his business future?"
"No--on the contrary; of the other, the future of what you so
justly call their situation. M. de Vionnet may live for ever."
"So that they can't marry?"
The young man waited a moment. "Not being able to marry is all
they've with any confidence to look forward to. A woman--a
particular woman--may stand that strain. But can a man?" he
propounded.
Strether's answer was as prompt as if he had already, for himself,
worked it out. "Not without a very high ideal of conduct. But
that's just what we're attributing to Chad. And how, for that
matter," he mused, "does his going to America diminish the
particular strain? Wouldn't it seem rather to add to it?"
"Out of sight out of mind!" his companion laughed. Then more
bravely: "Wouldn't distance lessen the torment?" But before
Strether could reply, "The thing is, you see, Chad ought to marry!"
he wound up.
Strether, for a little, appeared to think of it. "If you talk of
torments you don't diminish mine!" he then broke out. The next
moment he was on his feet with a question. "He ought to marry
whom?"
Little Bilham rose more slowly. "Well, some one he CAN--some
thoroughly nice girl "
Strether's eyes, as they stood together, turned again to Jeanne.
"Do you mean HER?"
His friend made a sudden strange face. "After being in love with
her mother? No."
"But isn't it exactly your idea that he ISn't in love with her
mother?"
His friend once more had a pause. "Well, he isn't at any rate in
love with Jeanne."
"I dare say not."
"How CAN he be with any other woman?"
"Oh that I admit. But being in love isn't, you know, here"--little
Bilham spoke in friendly reminder--"thought necessary, in strictness,
for marriage."
"And what torment--to call a torment--can there ever possibly be
with a woman like that?" As if from the interest of his own
question Strether had gone on without hearing. "Is it for her to
have turned a man out so wonderfully, too, only for somebody else?"
He appeared to make a point of this, and little Bilham looked at
him now. "When it's for each other that people give things up they
don't miss them." Then he threw off as with an extravagance of
which he was conscious: "Let them face the future together!"
Little Bilham looked at him indeed. "You mean that after all he
shouldn't go back?"
"I mean that if he gives her up--!"
"Yes?"
"Well, he ought to be ashamed of himself." But Strether spoke with
a sound that might have passed for a laugh.
