It was an offer he could temporarily entertain; but he decided.
"She knows perfectly how I see her."
"Not favourably enough, she mentioned to me, to wish ever to see her again.
She told me you had taken a final leave of her.
She says you've done with her."
"So I have."
Maria had a pause; then she spoke as if for conscience.
"She wouldn't have done with YOU.
She feels she has lost you—yet that she might have been better for you."
"Oh she has been quite good enough!" Strether laughed.
"She thinks you and she might at any rate have been friends."
"We might certainly.
That's just"—he continued to laugh—"why I'm going."
It was as if Maria could feel with this then at last that she had done her best for each.
But she had still an idea.
"Shall I tell her that?"
"No. Tell her nothing."
"Very well then."
To which in the next breath Miss Gostrey added: "Poor dear thing!"
Her friend wondered; then with raised eyebrows: "Me?"
"Oh no.
Marie de Vionnet."
He accepted the correction, but he wondered still.
"Are you so sorry for her as that?"
It made her think a moment—made her even speak with a smile.
But she didn't really retract.
"I'm sorry for us all!"
IV
He was to delay no longer to re-establish communication with Chad, and we have just seen that he had spoken to Miss Gostrey of this intention on hearing from her of the young man's absence.
It was not moreover only the assurance so given that prompted him; it was the need of causing his conduct to square with another profession still—the motive he had described to her as his sharpest for now getting away.
If he was to get away because of some of the relations involved in staying, the cold attitude toward them might look pedantic in the light of lingering on.
He must do both things; he must see Chad, but he must go.
The more he thought of the former of these duties the more he felt himself make a subject of insistence of the latter.
They were alike intensely present to him as he sat in front of a quiet little cafe into which he had dropped on quitting Maria's entresol.
The rain that had spoiled his evening with her was over; for it was still to him as if his evening HAD been spoiled—though it mightn't have been wholly the rain.
It was late when he left the cafe, yet not too late; he couldn't in any case go straight to bed, and he would walk round by the Boulevard Malesherbes—rather far round—on his way home.
Present enough always was the small circumstance that had originally pressed for him the spring of so big a difference—the accident of little Bilham's appearance on the balcony of the mystic troisieme at the moment of his first visit, and the effect of it on his sense of what was then before him.
He recalled his watch, his wait, and the recognition that had proceeded from the young stranger, that had played frankly into the air and had presently brought him up—things smoothing the way for his first straight step.
He had since had occasion, a few times, to pass the house without going in; but he had never passed it without again feeling how it had then spoken to him.
He stopped short to-night on coming to sight of it: it was as if his last day were oddly copying his first.
The windows of Chad's apartment were open to the balcony—a pair of them lighted; and a figure that had come out and taken up little Bilham's attitude, a figure whose cigarette-spark he could see leaned on the rail and looked down at him.
It denoted however no reappearance of his younger friend; it quickly defined itself in the tempered darkness as Chad's more solid shape; so that Chad's was the attention that after he had stepped forward into the street and signalled, he easily engaged; Chad's was the voice that, sounding into the night with promptness and seemingly with joy, greeted him and called him up.
That the young man had been visible there just in this position expressed somehow for Strether that, as Maria Gostrey had reported, he had been absent and silent; and our friend drew breath on each landing—the lift, at that hour, having ceased to work—before the implications of the fact.
He had been for a week intensely away, away to a distance and alone; but he was more back than ever, and the attitude in which Strether had surprised him was something more than a return—it was clearly a conscious surrender.
He had arrived but an hour before, from London, from Lucerne, from Homburg, from no matter where—though the visitor's fancy, on the staircase, liked to fill it out; and after a bath, a talk with Baptiste and a supper of light cold clever French things, which one could see the remains of there in the circle of the lamp, pretty and ultra-Parisian, he had come into the air again for a smoke, was occupied at the moment of Strether's approach in what might have been called taking up his life afresh.
His life, his life!—Strether paused anew, on the last flight, at this final rather breathless sense of what Chad's life was doing with Chad's mother's emissary. It was dragging him, at strange hours, up the staircases of the rich; it was keeping him out of bed at the end of long hot days; it was transforming beyond recognition the simple, subtle, conveniently uniform thing that had anciently passed with him for a life of his own.
Why should it concern him that Chad was to be fortified in the pleasant practice of smoking on balconies, of supping on salads, of feeling his special conditions agreeably reaffirm themselves, of finding reassurance in comparisons and contrasts?
There was no answer to such a question but that he was still practically committed—he had perhaps never yet so much known it.
It made him feel old, and he would buy his railway-ticket—feeling, no doubt, older—the next day; but he had meanwhile come up four flights, counting the entresol, at midnight and without a lift, for Chad's life.
The young man, hearing him by this time, and with Baptiste sent to rest, was already at the door; so that Strether had before him in full visibility the cause in which he was labouring and even, with the troisieme fairly gained, panting a little.