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