“If you mean,” she went on, “that she was from the first for you the most charming woman in the world, nothing’s more simple. Only that was an odd foundation.”
“For what I reared on it?”
“For what you didn’t!”
“Well, it was all not a fixed quantity. And it had for me—it has still—such elements of strangeness. Her greater age than his, her different world, traditions, association; her other opportunities, liabilities, standards.”
His friend listened with respect to his enumeration of these disparities; then she disposed of them at a stroke. “Those things are nothing when a woman’s hit. It’s very awful. She was hit.”
Strether, on his side, did justice to that plea. “Oh of course I saw she was hit. That she was hit was what we were busy with; that she was hit was our great affair. But somehow I couldn’t think of her as down in the dust. And as put there by our little Chad!”
“Yet wasn’t ‘your’ little Chad just your miracle?”
Strether admitted it. “Of course I moved among miracles. It was all phantasmagoric. But the great fact was that so much of it was none of my business—as I saw my business. It isn’t even now.”
His companion turned away on this, and it might well have been yet again with the sharpness of a fear of how little his philosophy could bring her personally. “I wish she could hear you!”
“Mrs. Newsome?”
“No—not Mrs. Newsome; since I understand you that it doesn’t matter now what Mrs. Newsome hears. Hasn’t she heard everything?”
“Practically—yes.” He had thought a moment, but he went on. “You wish Madame de Vionnet could hear me?”
“Madame de Vionnet.” She had come back to him. “She thinks just the contrary of what you say. That you distinctly judge her.”
He turned over the scene as the two women thus placed together for him seemed to give it. “She might have known—!”
“Might have known you don’t?” Miss Gostrey asked as he let it drop. “She was sure of it at first,” she pursued as he said nothing; “she took it for granted, at least, as any woman in her position would. But after that she changed her mind; she believed you believed—”
“Well?”—he was curious.
“Why in her sublimity. And that belief had remained with her, I make out, till the accident of the other day opened your eyes. For that it did,” said Maria, “open them—”
“She can’t help”—he had taken it up—“being aware? No,” he mused; “I suppose she thinks of that even yet.”
“Then they were closed? There you are! However, if you see her as the most charming woman in the world it comes to the same thing. And if you’d like me to tell her that you do still so see her—!” Miss Gostrey, in short, offered herself for service to the end.
It was an offer he could temporarily entertain; but he decided. “She knows perfectly how I see her.”
“Not favourably enough, she mentioned to me, to wish ever to see her again. She told me you had taken a final leave of her. She says you’ve done with her.”
“So I have.”
Maria had a pause; then she spoke as if for conscience. “She wouldn’t have done with you. She feels she has lost you—yet that she might have been better for you.”
“Oh she has been quite good enough!” Strether laughed.
“She thinks you and she might at any rate have been friends.”
“We might certainly. That’s just”—he continued to laugh—“why I’m going.”
It was as if Maria could feel with this then at last that she had done her best for each. But she had still an idea. “Shall I tell her that?”
“No. Tell her nothing.”
“Very well then.” To which in the next breath Miss Gostrey added: “Poor dear thing!”
Her friend wondered; then with raised eyebrows: “Me?”
“Oh no. Marie de Vionnet.”
He accepted the correction, but he wondered still. “Are you so sorry for her as that?”
It made her think a moment—made her even speak with a smile. But she didn’t really retract. “I’m sorry for us all!”
IV
He was to delay no longer to reestablish communication with Chad, and we have just seen that he had spoken to Miss Gostrey of this intention on hearing from her of the young man’s absence. It was not moreover only the assurance so given that prompted him; it was the need of causing his conduct to square with another profession still—the motive he had described to her as his sharpest for now getting away. If he was to get away because of some of the relations involved in staying, the cold attitude toward them might look pedantic in the light of lingering on. He must do both things; he must see Chad, but he must go. The more he thought of the former of these duties the more he felt himself make a subject of insistence of the latter. They were alike intensely present to him as he sat in front of a quiet little café into which he had dropped on quitting Maria’s entresol. The rain that had spoiled his evening with her was over; for it was still to him as if his evening had been spoiled—though it mightn’t have been wholly the rain. It was late when he left the café, yet not too late; he couldn’t in any case go straight to bed, and he would walk round by the Boulevard Malesherbes—rather far round—on his way home. Present enough always was the small circumstance that had originally pressed for him the spring of so big a difference—the accident of little Bilham’s appearance on the balcony of the mystic troisième at the moment of his first visit, and the effect of it on his sense of what was then before him. He recalled his watch, his wait, and the recognition that had proceeded from the young stranger, that had played frankly into the air and had presently brought him up—things smoothing the way for his first straight step. He had since had occasion, a few
