He had indeed no sooner so spoken than the queer displacement of his point of view appeared again to come up for him in the very sound, which drew from him a short laugh, immediately checked.
He became still more advisory.
"When they do come give them plenty of Miss Jeanne.
Let Mamie see her well."
She looked for a moment as if she placed them face to face.
"For Mamie to hate her?"
He had another of his corrective headshakes.
"Mamie won't.
Trust THEM."
She looked at him hard, and then as if it were what she must always come back to:
"It's you I trust.
But I was sincere," she said, "at the hotel. I did, I do, want my child—"
"Well?"—Strether waited with deference while she appeared to hesitate as to how to put it.
"Well, to do what she can for me."
Strether for a little met her eyes on it; after which something that might have been unexpected to her came from him.
"Poor little duck!"
Not more expected for himself indeed might well have been her echo of it.
"Poor little duck!
But she immensely wants herself," she said, "to see our friend's cousin."
"Is that what she thinks her?"
"It's what we call the young lady."
He thought again; then with a laugh:
"Well, your daughter will help you."
And now at last he took leave of her, as he had been intending for five minutes.
But she went part of the way with him, accompanying him out of the room and into the next and the next.
Her noble old apartment offered a succession of three, the first two of which indeed, on entering, smaller than the last, but each with its faded and formal air, enlarged the office of the antechamber and enriched the sense of approach.
Strether fancied them, liked them, and, passing through them with her more slowly now, met a sharp renewal of his original impression.
He stopped, he looked back; the whole thing made a vista, which he found high melancholy and sweet—full, once more, of dim historic shades, of the faint faraway cannon-roar of the great Empire.
It was doubtless half the projection of his mind, but his mind was a thing that, among old waxed parquets, pale shades of pink and green, pseudo-classic candelabra, he had always needfully to reckon with.
They could easily make him irrelevant.
The oddity, the originality, the poetry—he didn't know what to call it—of Chad's connexion reaffirmed for him its romantic side.
"They ought to see this, you know.
They MUST."
"The Pococks?"—she looked about in deprecation; she seemed to see gaps he didn't.
"Mamie and Sarah—Mamie in particular."
"My shabby old place?
But THEIR things—!"
"Oh their things!
You were talking of what will do something for you—"
"So that it strikes you," she broke in, "that my poor place may?
Oh," she ruefully mused, "that WOULD be desperate!"
"Do you know what I wish?" he went on.
"I wish Mrs. Newsome herself could have a look."
She stared, missing a little his logic.
"It would make a difference?"
Her tone was so earnest that as he continued to look about he laughed.
"It might!"
"But you've told her, you tell me—"
"All about you?
Yes, a wonderful story.