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"None perhaps. But there as usual we are!" There they were yet again, accordingly, for two days more; when Strether, on being, at Mrs. Pocock's hotel, ushered into that lady's salon, found himself at first assuming a mistake on the part of the servant who had introduced him and retired.
Strether almost wondered at such a pace was he going if some divination of the influence of either party were what determined Madame de Vionnet's abstention.
They talked of him, the two others, as they drove, and Strether put Chad in possession of much of his own strained sense of things. He had already, a few days before, named to him the wire he was convinced their friend had pulled a confidence that had made on the young man's part quite hugely for curiosity and diversion.
Strether, face to face with Chad after the play, had sounded these words almost breathlessly, and with an effect at first positively disconcerting to himself alone. For Chad's receptive attitude was that of a person who had been gracefully quiet while the messenger at last reaching him has run a mile through the dust.
These things were enhanced for Miss Barrace by a succession of excellent cigarettes acknowledged, acclaimed, as a part of the wonderful supply left behind him by Chad in an almost equal absorption of which Strether found himself blindly, almost wildly pushing forward.
And to see that he doesn't miss it is, in a word, what I've come out for." She let it all sink in. "What you've come out for then is simply to render him an immense service." Well, poor Strether was willing to take it so. "Ah if you like." "He stands, as they say, if you succeed with him, to gain " "Oh a lot of advantages." Strether had them clearly at his fingers' ends.
"Oh," said Strether, "what I want is a thing I've ceased to measure or even to understand." But his friend none the less went on. "Do you want Mrs. Newsome after such a way of treating you?" It was a straighter mode of dealing with this lady than they had as yet such was their high form permitted themselves; but it seemed not wholly for this that he delayed a moment.
Miss Gostrey was such a woman of fashion as could make without a symptom of vulgar blinking an appointment for the Burlington Arcade. Mere discriminations about a pair of gloves could thus at any rate represent always for such sensitive ears as were in question possibilities of something that Strether could make a mark against only as the peril of apparent wantonness.
It affected Strether for thirty seconds as a relevant truth, a truth which, however, the next minute, had fallen into its relation. "Can't you imagine there being some questions," Chad asked, "that a fellow however much impressed by your charming way of stating things would like to put to you first?" "Oh yes easily. I'm here to answer everything.
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.
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