If they were ALL going to see nothing!—Strether knew, as this came back to him, that he was also letting Pocock represent for him what Mrs. Newsome wouldn't see.
He went on disliking, in the light of Jim's commonness, to talk to him about that lady; yet just before the cab pulled up he knew the extent of his desire for the real word from Woollett.
"Has Mrs. Newsome at all given way—?"
"'Given way'?"—Jim echoed it with the practical derision of his sense of a long past.
"Under the strain, I mean, of hope deferred, of disappointment repeated and thereby intensified."
"Oh is she prostrate, you mean?"—he had his categories in hand.
"Why yes, she's prostrate—just as Sally is.
But they're never so lively, you know, as when they're prostrate."
"Ah Sarah's prostrate?" Strether vaguely murmured.
"It's when they're prostrate that they most sit up." "And Mrs. Newsome's sitting up?"
"All night, my boy—for YOU!"
And Jim fetched him, with a vulgar little guffaw, a thrust that gave relief to the picture. But he had got what he wanted.
He felt on the spot that this WAS the real word from Woollett.
"So don't you go home!" Jim added while he alighted and while his friend, letting him profusely pay the cabman, sat on in a momentary muse.
Strether wondered if that were the real word too.
III
As the door of Mrs. Pocock's salon was pushed open for him, the next day, well before noon, he was reached by a voice with a charming sound that made him just falter before crossing the threshold.
Madame de Vionnet was already on the field, and this gave the drama a quicker pace than he felt it as yet—though his suspense had increased—in the power of any act of his own to do.
He had spent the previous evening with all his old friends together yet he would still have described himself as quite in the dark in respect to a forecast of their influence on his situation.
It was strange now, none the less, that in the light of this unexpected note of her presence he felt Madame de Vionnet a part of that situation as she hadn't even yet been.
She was alone, he found himself assuming, with Sarah, and there was a bearing in that—somehow beyond his control—on his personal fate.
Yet she was only saying something quite easy and independent—the thing she had come, as a good friend of Chad's, on purpose to say.
"There isn't anything at all—?
I should be so delighted."
It was clear enough, when they were there before him, how she had been received.
He saw this, as Sarah got up to greet him, from something fairly hectic in Sarah's face.
He saw furthermore that they weren't, as had first come to him, alone together; he was at no loss as to the identity of the broad high back presented to him in the embrasure of the window furthest from the door.
Waymarsh, whom he had to-day not yet seen, whom he only knew to have left the hotel before him, and who had taken part, the night previous, on Mrs. Pocock's kind invitation, conveyed by Chad, in the entertainment, informal but cordial, promptly offered by that lady—Waymarsh had anticipated him even as Madame de Vionnet had done, and, with his hands in his pockets and his attitude unaffected by Strether's entrance, was looking out, in marked detachment, at the Rue de Rivoli.
The latter felt it in the air—it was immense how Waymarsh could mark things—-that he had remained deeply dissociated from the overture to their hostess that we have recorded on Madame de Vionnet's side.
He had, conspicuously, tact, besides a stiff general view; and this was why he had left Mrs. Pocock to struggle alone.
He would outstay the visitor; he would unmistakeably wait; to what had he been doomed for months past but waiting?
Therefore she was to feel that she had him in reserve.
What support she drew from this was still to be seen, for, although Sarah was vividly bright, she had given herself up for the moment to an ambiguous flushed formalism.
She had had to reckon more quickly than she expected; but it concerned her first of all to signify that she was not to be taken unawares.
Strether arrived precisely in time for her showing it.
"Oh you're too good; but I don't think I feel quite helpless.
I have my brother—and these American friends.
And then you know I've been to Paris.
I KNOW Paris," said Sally Pocock in a tone that breathed a certain chill on Strether's heart.
"Ah but a woman, in this tiresome place where everything's always changing, a woman of good will," Madame de Vionnet threw off, "can always help a woman.
I'm sure you 'know'—but we know perhaps different things."
She too, visibly, wished to make no mistake; but it was a fear of a different order and more kept out of sight.
She smiled in welcome at Strether; she greeted him more familiarly than Mrs. Pocock; she put out her hand to him without moving from her place; and it came to him in the course of a minute and in the oddest way that—yes, positively—she was giving him over to ruin.
She was all kindness and ease, but she couldn't help so giving him; she was exquisite, and her being just as she was poured for Sarah a sudden rush of meaning into his own equivocations.
How could she know how she was hurting him?
She wanted to show as simple and humble—in the degree compatible with operative charm; but it was just this that seemed to put him on her side.
She struck him as dressed, as arranged, as prepared infinitely to conciliate—with the very poetry of good taste in her view of the conditions of her early call.
She was ready to advise about dressmakers and shops; she held herself wholly at the disposition of Chad's family.
Strether noticed her card on the table—her coronet and her "Comtesse"—and the imagination was sharp in him of certain private adjustments in Sarah's mind.
She had never, he was sure, sat with a "Comtesse" before, and such was the specimen of that class he had been keeping to play on her.