He was well in port, the outer sea behind him, and it was only a matter of getting ashore.
There was a question that came and went for him, however, as he rested against the side of his ship, and it was a little to get rid of the obsession that he prolonged his hours with Miss Gostrey.
It was a question about himself, but it could only be settled by seeing Chad again; it was indeed his principal reason for wanting to see Chad.
After that it wouldn't signify—it was a ghost that certain words would easily lay to rest.
Only the young man must be there to take the words.
Once they were taken he wouldn't have a question left; none, that is, in connexion with this particular affair.
It wouldn't then matter even to himself that he might now have been guilty of speaking BECAUSE of what he had forfeited.
That was the refinement of his supreme scruple—he wished so to leave what he had forfeited out of account.
He wished not to do anything because he had missed something else, because he was sore or sorry or impoverished, because he was maltreated or desperate; he wished to do everything because he was lucid and quiet, just the same for himself on all essential points as he had ever been.
Thus it was that while he virtually hung about for Chad he kept mutely putting it:
"You've been chucked, old boy; but what has that to do with it?"
It would have sickened him to feel vindictive.
These tints of feeling indeed were doubtless but the iridescence of his idleness, and they were presently lost in a new light from Maria.
She had a fresh fact for him before the week was out, and she practically met him with it on his appearing one night.
He hadn't on this day seen her, but had planned presenting himself in due course to ask her to dine with him somewhere out of doors, on one of the terraces, in one of the gardens, of which the Paris of summer was profuse.
It had then come on to rain, so that, disconcerted, he changed his mind; dining alone at home, a little stuffily and stupidly, and waiting on her afterwards to make up his loss.
He was sure within a minute that something had happened; it was so in the air of the rich little room that he had scarcely to name his thought.
Softly lighted, the whole colour of the place, with its vague values, was in cool fusion—an effect that made the visitor stand for a little agaze.
It was as if in doing so now he had felt a recent presence—his recognition of the passage of which his hostess in turn divined.
She had scarcely to say it—"Yes, she has been here, and this time I received her."
It wasn't till a minute later that she added: "There being, as I understand you, no reason NOW—!"
"None for your refusing?"
"No—if you've done what you've had to do."
"I've certainly so far done it," Strether said, "as that you needn't fear the effect, or the appearance of coming between us.
There's nothing between us now but what we ourselves have put there, and not an inch of room for anything else whatever.
Therefore you're only beautifully WITH us as always—though doubtless now, if she has talked to you, rather more with us than less.
Of course if she came," he added, "it was to talk to you."
"It was to talk to me," Maria returned; on which he was further sure that she was practically in possession of what he himself hadn't yet told her.
He was even sure she was in possession of things he himself couldn't have told; for the consciousness of them was now all in her face and accompanied there with a shade of sadness that marked in her the close of all uncertainties.
It came out for him more than ever yet that she had had from the first a knowledge she believed him not to have had, a knowledge the sharp acquisition of which might be destined to make a difference for him.
The difference for him might not inconceivably be an arrest of his independence and a change in his attitude—in other words a revulsion in favour of the principles of Woollett.
She had really prefigured the possibility of a shock that would send him swinging back to Mrs. Newsome.
He hadn't, it was true, week after week, shown signs of receiving it, but the possibility had been none the less in the air.
What Maria accordingly had had now to take in was that the shock had descended and that he hadn't, all the same, swung back.
He had grown clear, in a flash, on a point long since settled for herself; but no reapproximation to Mrs. Newsome had occurred in consequence.
Madame de Vionnet had by her visit held up the torch to these truths, and what now lingered in poor Maria's face was the somewhat smoky light of the scene between them.
If the light however wasn't, as we have hinted, the glow of joy, the reasons for this also were perhaps discernible to Strether even through the blur cast over them by his natural modesty.
She had held herself for months with a firm hand; she hadn't interfered on any chance—and chances were specious enough—that she might interfere to her profit.
She had turned her back on the dream that Mrs. Newsome's rupture, their friend's forfeiture—the engagement the relation itself, broken beyond all mending—might furnish forth her advantage; and, to stay her hand from promoting these things, she had on private, difficult, but rigid, lines, played strictly fair.
She couldn't therefore but feel that, though, as the end of all, the facts in question had been stoutly confirmed, her ground for personal, for what might have been called interested, elation remained rather vague.
Strether might easily have made out that she had been asking herself, in the hours she had just sat through, if there were still for her, or were only not, a fair shade of uncertainty.
Let us hasten to add, however, that what he at first made out on this occasion he also at first kept to himself.
He only asked what in particular Madame de Vionnet had come for, and as to this his companion was ready.
"She wants tidings of Mr. Newsome, whom she appears not to have seen for some days."
"Then she hasn't been away with him again?"
"She seemed to think," Maria answered, "that he might have gone away with YOU."
"And did you tell her I know nothing of him?"
She had her indulgent headshake.
"I've known nothing of what you know.
I could only tell her I'd ask you."