第42章

"Of the sort I came out about?" Strether took a moment."How do Iknow? And what do I care?"

"Oh oh!"--and her laughter spread.He was struck in fact by the effect on her of his joke.He saw now how he meant it as a joke.

SHE saw, however, still other things, though in an instant she had hidden them."You've got at no facts at all?"He tried to muster them."Well, he has a lovely home.""Ah that, in Paris," she quickly returned, "proves nothing.That is rather it DISproves nothing.They may very well, you see, the people your mission is concerned with, have done it FOR him.""Exactly.And it was on the scene of their doings then that Waymarsh and I sat guzzling.""Oh if you forbore to guzzle here on scenes of doings," she replied, "you might easily die of starvation." With which she smiled at him."You've worse before you.""Ah I've EVERYTHING before me.But on our hypothesis, you know, they must be wonderful.""They ARE!" said Miss Gostrey."You're not therefore, you see,"she added, "wholly without facts.They've BEEN, in effect, wonderful."To have got at something comparatively definite appeared at last a little to help--a wave by which moreover, the next moment, recollection was washed."My young man does admit furthermore that they're our friend's great interest.""Is that the expression he uses?"

Strether more exactly recalled."No--not quite.""Something more vivid? Less?"

He had bent, with neared glasses, over a group of articles on a small stand; and at this he came up."It was a mere allusion, but, on the lookout as I was, it struck me.'Awful, you know, as Chad is'--those were Bilham's words.""'Awful, you know'--? Oh!"--and Miss Gostrey turned them over.She seemed, however, satisfied."Well, what more do you want?"He glanced once more at a bibelot or two, and everything sent him back."But it is all the same as if they wished to let me have it between the eyes."She wondered."Quoi donc?"

"Why what I speak of.The amenity.They can stun you with that as well as with anything else.""Oh," she answered, "you'll come round! I must see them each," she went on, "for myself.I mean Mr.Bilham and Mr.Newsome--Mr.

Bilham naturally first.Once only--once for each; that will do.

But face to face--for half an hour.What's Mr.Chad," she immediately pursued, "doing at Cannes? Decent men don't go to Cannes with the--well, with the kind of ladies you mean.""Don't they?" Strether asked with an interest in decent men that amused her.

"No, elsewhere, but not to Cannes.Cannes is different.Cannes is better.Cannes is best.I mean it's all people you know--when you do know them.And if HE does, why that's different too.He must have gone alone.She can't be with him.""I haven't," Strether confessed in his weakness, "the least idea." There seemed much in what she said, but he was able after a little to help her to a nearer impression.The meeting with little Bilham took place, by easy arrangement, in the great gallery of the Louvre; and when, standing with his fellow visitor before one of the splendid Titians--the overwhelming portrait of the young man with the strangely-shaped glove and the blue-grey eyes--he turned to see the third member of their party advance from the end of the waxed and gilded vista, he had a sense of having at last taken hold.He had agreed with Miss Gostrey--it dated even from Chester--for a morning at the Louvre, and he had embraced independently the same idea as thrown out by little Bilham, whom he had already accompanied to the museum of the Luxembourg.The fusion of these schemes presented no difficulty, and it was to strike him again that in little Bilham's company contrarieties in general dropped.

"Oh he's all right--he's one of US!" Miss Gostrey, after the first exchange, soon found a chance to murmur to her companion; and Strether, as they proceeded and paused and while a quick unanimity between the two appeared to have phrased itself in half a dozen remarks--Strether knew that he knew almost immediately what she meant, and took it as still another sign that he had got his job in hand.This was the more grateful to him that he could think of the intelligence now serving him as an acquisition positively new.

He wouldn't have known even the day before what she meant--that is if she meant, what he assumed, that they were intense Americans together.He had just worked round--and with a sharper turn of the screw than any yet--to the conception of an American intense as little Bilham was intense.The young man was his first specimen;the specimen had profoundly perplexed him; at present however there was light.It was by little Bilham's amazing serenity that he had at first been affected, but he had inevitably, in his circumspection, felt it as the trail of the serpent, the corruption, as he might conveniently have said, of Europe; whereas the promptness with which it came up for Miss Gostrey but as a special little form of the oldest thing they knew justified it at once to his own vision as well.He wanted to be able to like his specimen with a clear good conscience, and this fully permitted it.What had muddled him was precisely the small artist-man's way --it was so complete--of being more American than anybody.But it now for the time put Strether vastly at his ease to have this view of a new way.

The amiable youth then looked out, as it had first struck Strether, at a world in respect to which he hadn't a prejudice.

The one our friend most instantly missed was the usual one in favour of an occupation accepted.Little Bilham had an occupation, but it was only an occupation declined; and it was by his general exemption from alarm, anxiety or remorse on this score that the impression of his serenity was made.He had come out to Paris to paint--to fathom, that is, at large, that mystery; but study had been fatal to him so far as anything COULD be fatal, and his productive power faltered in proportion as his knowledge grew.