第71章

This made her ten years older than Chad--though ten years, also, if Strether liked, older than she looked; the least, at any rate, that a prospective mother-in-law could be expected to do with.She would be of all mothers-in-law the most charming; unless indeed, through some perversity as yet insupposeable, she should utterly belie herself in that relation.There was none surely in which, as Maria remembered her, she mustn't be charming; and this frankly in spite of the stigma of failure in the tie where failure always most showed.It was no test there--when indeed WAS it a test there?--for Monsieur de Vionnet had been a brute.She had lived for years apart from him--which was of course always a horrid position; but Miss Gostrey's impression of the matter had been that she could scarce have made a better thing of it had she done it on purpose to show she was amiable.She was so amiable that nobody had had a word to say; which was luckily not the case for her husband.He was so impossible that she had the advantage of all her merits.

It was still history for Strether that the Comte de Vionnet--it being also history that the lady in question was a Countess--should now, under Miss Gostrey's sharp touch, rise before him as a high distinguished polished impertinent reprobate, the product of a mysterious order; it was history, further, that the charming girl so freely sketched by his companion should have been married out of hand by a mother, another figure of striking outline, full of dark personal motive; it was perhaps history most of all that this company was, as a matter of course, governed by such considerations as put divorce out of the question."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.The girl at the Genevese school, an isolated interesting attaching creature, then both sensitive and violent, audacious but always forgiven, was the daughter of a French father and an English mother who, early left a widow, had married again--tried afresh with a foreigner; in her career with whom she had apparently given her child no example of comfort.All these people--the people of the English mother's side--had been of condition more or less eminent; yet with oddities and disparities that had often since made Maria, thinking them over, wonder what they really quite rhymed to.It was in any case her belief that the mother, interested and prone to adventure, had been without conscience, had only thought of ridding herself most quickly of a possible, an actual encumbrance.The father, by her impression, a Frenchman with a name one knew, had been a different matter, leaving his child, she clearly recalled, a memory all fondness, as well as an assured little fortune which was unluckily to make her more or less of a prey later on.She had been in particular, at school, dazzlingly, though quite booklessly, clever; as polyglot as a little Jewess (which she wasn't, oh no!) and chattering French, English, German, Italian, anything one would, in a way that made a clean sweep, if not of prizes and parchments, at least of every "part," whether memorised or improvised, in the curtained costumed school repertory, and in especial of all mysteries of race and vagueness of reference, all swagger about "home," among their variegated mates.

It would doubtless be difficult to-day, as between French and English, to name her and place her; she would certainly show, on knowledge, Miss Gostrey felt, as one of those convenient types who don't keep you explaining--minds with doors as numerous as the many-tongued cluster of confessionals at Saint Peter's.You might confess to her with confidence in Roumelian, and even Roumelian sins.Therefore--! But Strether's narrator covered her implication with a laugh; a laugh by which his betrayal of a sense of the lurid in the picture was also perhaps sufficiently protected.He had a moment of wondering, while his friend went on, what sins might be especially Roumelian.She went on at all events to the mention of her having met the young thing--again by some Swiss lake--in her first married state, which had appeared for the few intermediate years not at least violently disturbed.She had been lovely at that moment, delightful to HER, full of responsive emotion, of amused recognitions and amusing reminders, and then once more, much later, after a long interval, equally but differently charming--touching and rather mystifying for the five minutes of an encounter at a railway-station en province, during which it had come out that her life was all changed.Miss Gostrey had understood enough to see, essentially, what had happened, and yet had beautifully dreamed that she was herself faultless.There were doubtless depths in her, but she was all right; Strether would see if she wasn't.She was another person however--that had been promptly marked--from the small child of nature at the Geneva school, a little person quite made over (as foreign women WERE, compared with American) by marriage.Her situation too had evidently cleared itself up; there would have been--all that was possible--a judicial separation.She had settled in Paris, brought up her daughter, steered her boat.It was no very pleasant boat--especially there--to be in; but Marie de Vionnet would have headed straight.She would have friends, certainly--and very good ones.There she was at all events--and it was very interesting.Her knowing Mr.Chad didn't in the least prove she hadn't friends; what it proved was what good ones HE had.

"I saw that," said Miss Gostrey, "that night at the Francais; it came out for me in three minutes.I saw HER--or somebody like her.