"It's the child!" he had exclaimed to her almost as soon as she appeared; and though her direct response was for some time delayed he could feel in her meanwhile the working of this truth.
It might have been simply, as she waited, that they were now in presence altogether of truth spreading like a flood and not for the moment to be offered her in the mere cupful; inasmuch as who should ces dames prove to be but persons about whom—once thus face to face with them—she found she might from the first have told him almost everything?
This would have freely come had he taken the simple precaution of giving her their name.
There could be no better example—and she appeared to note it with high amusement—than the way, making things out already so much for himself, he was at last throwing precautions to the winds.
They were neither more nor less, she and the child's mother, than old school-friends—friends who had scarcely met for years but whom this unlooked-for chance had brought together with a rush.
It was a relief, Miss Gostrey hinted, to feel herself no longer groping; she was unaccustomed to grope and as a general thing, he might well have seen, made straight enough for her clue.
With the one she had now picked up in her hands there need be at least no waste of wonder.
"She's coming to see me—that's for YOU," Strether's counsellor continued; "but I don't require it to know where I am."
The waste of wonder might be proscribed; but Strether, characteristically, was even by this time in the immensity of space.
"By which you mean that you know where SHE is?"
She just hesitated. "I mean that if she comes to see me I shall—now that I've pulled myself round a bit after the shock—not be at home."
Strether hung poised.
"You call it—your recognition—a shock?"
She gave one of her rare flickers of impatience.
"It was a surprise, an emotion.
Don't be so literal.
I wash my hands of her."
Poor Strether's face lengthened.
"She's impossible—?"
"She's even more charming than I remembered her."
"Then what's the matter?"
She had to think how to put it.
"Well, I'M impossible. It's impossible.
Everything's impossible."
He looked at her an instant.
"I see where you're coming out.
Everything's possible."
Their eyes had on it in fact an exchange of some duration; after which he pursued: "Isn't it that beautiful child?"
Then as she still said nothing: "Why don't you mean to receive her?"
Her answer in an instant rang clear.
"Because I wish to keep out of the business."
It provoked in him a weak wail.
"You're going to abandon me NOW?"
"No, I'm only going to abandon HER.
She'll want me to help her with you.
And I won't."
"You'll only help me with her?
Well then—!"
Most of the persons previously gathered had, in the interest of tea, passed into the house, and they had the gardens mainly to themselves.
The shadows were long, the last call of the birds, who had made a home of their own in the noble interspaced quarter, sounded from the high trees in the other gardens as well, those of the old convent and of the old hotels; it was as if our friends had waited for the full charm to come out.
Strether's impressions were still present; it was as if something had happened that "nailed" them, made them more intense; but he was to ask himself soon afterwards, that evening, what really HAD happened—conscious as he could after all remain that for a gentleman taken, and taken the first time, into the "great world," the world of ambassadors and duchesses, the items made a meagre total.
It was nothing new to him, however, as we know, that a man might have—at all events such a man as he—an amount of experience out of any proportion to his adventures; so that, though it was doubtless no great adventure to sit on there with Miss Gostrey and hear about Madame de Vionnet, the hour, the picture, the immediate, the recent, the possible—as well as the communication itself, not a note of which failed to reverberate—only gave the moments more of the taste of history.
It was history, to begin with, that Jeanne's mother had been three-and-twenty years before, at Geneva, schoolmate and good girlfriend to Maria Gostrey, who had moreover enjoyed since then, though interruptedly and above all with a long recent drop, other glimpses of her.
Twenty-three years put them both on, no doubt; and Madame de Vionnet—though she had married straight after school—couldn't be today an hour less than thirty-eight.
This made her ten years older than Chad—though ten years, also, if Strether liked, older than she looked; the least, at any rate, that a prospective mother-in-law could be expected to do with.
She would be of all mothers-in-law the most charming; unless indeed, through some perversity as yet insupposeable, she should utterly belie herself in that relation.
There was none surely in which, as Maria remembered her, she mustn't be charming; and this frankly in spite of the stigma of failure in the tie where failure always most showed.
It was no test there—when indeed WAS it a test there?—for Monsieur de Vionnet had been a brute.
She had lived for years apart from him—which was of course always a horrid position; but Miss Gostrey's impression of the matter had been that she could scarce have made a better thing of it had she done it on purpose to show she was amiable.
She was so amiable that nobody had had a word to say; which was luckily not the case for her husband.