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It was, to Strether's mind, as if she sat on her own ground, the light honours of which, at an open gate, she thus easily did him, while all the vastness and mystery of the domain stretched off behind. When people were so completely in possession they could be extraordinarily civil; and our friend had indeed at this hour a kind of revelation of her heritage.
We weren't in the least bound to THAT. It was 'filling out' enough to miss you as we did." But Chad rather oddly insisted, though under the high lamp at their corner, where they paused, he had at first looked as if touched by Strether's allusion to the long sense, at home, of his absence. "What I mean is you must have imagined." "Imagined what?" "Well horrors."
There are moments when it strikes one that you haven't any other." "Any moral," little Bilham explained, watching serenely, across the garden, the several femmes du monde. "But Miss Barrace has a moral distinction," he kindly continued; speaking as if for Strether's benefit not less than for her own. "HAVE you?" Strether, scarce knowing what he was about, asked of her almost eagerly.
The most expressive, most enlightening part of Strether's story lies in the reverberating theatre of his mind, and as for Emma, the small exterior facts of her story are of very slight account.
All the other people in the book face towards him, and it is that aspect of them, and that only, which is shown to the reader; still more important, the beautiful picture of Paris and spring-time, the stir and shimmer of life in the Rue de Rivoli and the gardens of the Tuileries, is Strether's picture, his vision, rendered as the time and the place strike upon his senses.
"I should have had a month of it; and I'm having now, if you want to know," Strether continued, "enough to last me for the rest of my days." Chad looked amused and interested, yet still somewhat in the dark; partly perhaps because Strether's estimate of fun had required of him from the first a good deal of elucidation. "It wouldn't do if I left you ?" "Left me?" Strether remained blank.
It was one of the quiet instants that sometimes settle more matters than the outbreaks dear to the historic muse. The only qualification of the quietness was the synthetic "Oh hang it!" into which Strether's share of the silence soundlessly flowered. It represented, this mute ejaculation, a final impulse to burn his ships.
He had met again his companion's sufficiently searching look. "Are you tired of her?" Chad gave him in reply to this, with a movement of the head, the strangest slow smile he had ever had from him. "Never." It had immediately, on Strether's imagination, so deep and soft an effect that our friend could only for the moment keep it before him. "Never?" "Never," Chad obligingly and serenely repeated.
"Ces gens-la don't divorce, you know, any more than they emigrate or abjure they think it impious and vulgar"; a fact in the light of which they seemed but the more richly special. It was all special; it was all, for Strether's imagination, more or less rich.
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.
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