第77章
She looked graver."None, you believe, really?"Strether debated."She didn't send me out to 'like' you.""Oh," she charmingly contended, "she sent you out to face the facts."He admitted after an instant that there was something in that."But how can I face them till I know what they are? Do you want him," he then braced himself to ask, "to marry your daughter?"She gave a headshake as noble as it was prompt."No--not that.""And he really doesn't want to himself?"
She repeated the movement, but now with a strange light in her face."He likes her too much."Strether wondered."To be willing to consider, you mean, the question of taking her to America?""To be willing to do anything with her but be immensely kind and nice--really tender of her.We watch over her, and you must help us.You must see her again."Strether felt awkward."Ah with pleasure--she's so remarkably attractive."The mother's eagerness with which Madame de Vionnet jumped at this was to come back to him later as beautiful in its grace."The dear thing DID please you?" Then as he met it with the largest "Oh!" of enthusiasm: "She's perfect.She's my joy.""Well, I'm sure that--if one were near her and saw more of her--she'd be mine."
"Then," said Madame de Vionnet, "tell Mrs.Newsome that!"He wondered the more."What good will that do you?" As she appeared unable at once to say, however, he brought out something else."Is your daughter in love with our friend?""Ah," she rather startlingly answered, "I wish you'd find out!"He showed his surprise."I? A stranger?""Oh you won't be a stranger--presently.You shall see her quite, Iassure you, as if you weren't."
It remained for him none the less an extraordinary notion."It seems to me surely that if her mother can't--""Ah little girls and their mothers to-day!" she rather inconsequently broke in.But she checked herself with something she seemed to give out as after all more to the point."Tell her I've been good for him.Don't you think I have?"It had its effect on him--more than at the moment he quite measured.
Yet he was consciously enough touched."Oh if it's all you--!""Well, it may not be 'all,'" she interrupted, "but it's to a great extent.Really and truly," she added in a tone that was to take its place with him among things remembered.
"Then it's very wonderful." He smiled at her from a face that he felt as strained, and her own face for a moment kept him so.At last she also got up."Well, don't you think that for that--""I ought to save you?" So it was that the way to meet her--and the way, as well, in a manner, to get off--came over him.He heard himself use the exorbitant word, the very sound of which helped to determine his flight."I'll save you if I can."II
In Chad's lovely home, however, one evening ten days later, he felt himself present at the collapse of the question of Jeanne de Vionnet's shy secret.He had been dining there in the company of that young lady and her mother, as well as of other persons, and he had gone into the petit salon, at Chad's request, on purpose to talk with her.
The young man had put this to him as a favour--"I should like so awfully to know what you think of her.It will really be a chance for you," he had said, "to see the jeune fille--I mean the type--as she actually is, and I don't think that, as an observer of manners, it's a thing you ought to miss.It will be an impression that--whatever else you take--you can carry home with you, where you'll find again so much to compare it with."Strether knew well enough with what Chad wished him to compare it, and though he entirely assented he hadn't yet somehow been so deeply reminded that he was being, as he constantly though mutely expressed it, used.He was as far as ever from making out exactly to what end; but he was none the less constantly accompanied by a sense of the service he rendered.He conceived only that this service was highly agreeable to those who profited by it; and he was indeed still waiting for the moment at which he should catch it in the act of proving disagreeable, proving in some degree intolerable, to himself.He failed quite to see how his situation could clear up at all logically except by some turn of events that would give him the pretext of disgust.He was building from day to day on the possibility of disgust, but each day brought forth meanwhile a new and more engaging bend of the road.That possibility was now ever so much further from sight than on the eve of his arrival, and he perfectly felt that, should it come at all, it would have to be at best inconsequent and violent.He struck himself as a little nearer to it only when he asked himself what service, in such a life of utility, he was after all rendering Mrs.Newsome.When he wished to help himself to believe that he was still all right he reflected--and in fact with wonder--on the unimpaired frequency of their correspondence; in relation to which what was after all more natural than that it should become more frequent just in proportion as their problem became more complicated?