第80章

"He has wonderful taste, notre jeune homme": this was what Gloriani said to him on turning away from the inspection of a small picture suspended near the door of the room.The high celebrity in question had just come in, apparently in search of Mademoiselle de Vionnet, but while Strether had got up from beside her their fellow guest, with his eye sharply caught, had paused for a long look.The thing was a landscape, of no size, but of the French school, as our friend was glad to feel he knew, and also of a quality--which he liked to think he should also have guessed; its frame was large out of proportion to the canvas, and he had never seen a person look at anything, he thought, just as Gloriani, with his nose very near and quick movements of the head from side to side and bottom to top, examined this feature of Chad's collection.The artist used that word the next moment smiling courteously, wiping his nippers and looking round him further--paying the place in short by the very manner of his presence and by something Strether fancied he could make out in this particular glance, such a tribute as, to the latter's sense, settled many things once for all.Strether was conscious at this instant, for that matter, as he hadn't yet been, of how, round about him, quite without him, they WERE consistently settled.Gloriani's smile, deeply Italian, he considered, and finely inscrutable, had had for him, during dinner, at which they were not neighbours, an indefinite greeting; but the quality in it was gone that had appeared on the other occasion to turn him inside out; it was as if even the momentary link supplied by the doubt between them had snapped.He was conscious now of the final reality, which was that there wasn't so much a doubt as a difference altogether; all the more that over the difference the famous sculptor seemed to signal almost condolingly, yet oh how vacantly! as across some great flat sheet of water.He threw out the bridge of a charming hollow civility on which Strether wouldn't have trusted his own full weight a moment.That idea, even though but transient and perhaps belated, had performed the office of putting Strether more at his ease, and the blurred picture had already dropped--dropped with the sound of something else said and with his becoming aware, by another quick turn, that Gloriani was now on the sofa talking with Jeanne, while he himself had in his ears again the familiar friendliness and the elusive meaning of the "Oh, oh, oh!" that had made him, a fortnight before, challenge Miss Barrace in vain.She had always the air, this picturesque and original lady, who struck him, so oddly, as both antique and modern--she had always the air of taking up some joke that one had already had out with her.The point itself, no doubt, was what was antique, and the use she made of it what was modern.He felt just now that her good-natured irony did bear on something, and it troubled him a little that she wouldn't be more explicit only assuring him, with the pleasure of observation so visible in her, that she wouldn't tell him more for the world.He could take refuge but in asking her what she had done with Waymarsh, though it must be added that he felt himself a little on the way to a clue after she had answered that this personage was, in the other room, engaged in conversation with Madame de Vionnet.He stared a moment at the image of such a conjunction; then, for Miss Barrace's benefit, he wondered."Is she too then under the charm--?""No, not a bit"--Miss Barrace was prompt."She makes nothing of him.

She's bored.She won't help you with him.""Oh," Strether laughed, "she can't do everything.

"Of course not--wonderful as she is.Besides, he makes nothing of HER.She won't take him from me--though she wouldn't, no doubt, having other affairs in hand, even if she could.I've never," said Miss Barrace, "seen her fail with any one before.And to-night, when she's so magnificent, it would seem to her strange--if she minded.So at any rate I have him all.Je suis tranquille!''

Strether understood, so far as that went; but he was feeling for his clue."She strikes you to-night as particularly magnificent?""Surely.Almost as I've never seen her.Doesn't she you?

Why it's FOR you."

He persisted in his candour."'For' me--?""Oh, oh, oh!" cried Miss Barrace, who persisted in the opposite of that quality.

"Well," he acutely admitted, "she IS different.She's gay.""She's gay!" Miss Barrace laughed."And she has beautiful shoulders--though there's nothing different in that.""No," said Strether, "one was sure of her shoulders.

It isn't her shoulders."

His companion, with renewed mirth and the finest sense, between the puffs of her cigarette, of the drollery of things, appeared to find their conversation highly delightful."Yes, it isn't her shoulders.""What then is it?" Strether earnestly enquired.

"Why, it's SHE--simply.It's her mood.It's her charm.""Of course it's her charm, but we're speaking of the difference.""Well," Miss Barrace explained, "she's just brilliant, as we used to say.That's all.She's various.She's fifty women.""Ah but only one"--Strether kept it clear--"at a time.""Perhaps.But in fifty times--!"

"Oh we shan't come to that," our friend declared; and the next moment he had moved in another direction."Will you answer me a plain question? Will she ever divorce?"Miss Barrace looked at him through all her tortoise-shell."Why should she?"It wasn't what he had asked for, he signified; but he met it well enough."To marry Chad.""Why should she marry Chad?"