"So that they can't marry?"
The young man waited a moment.
"Not being able to marry is all they've with any confidence to look forward to.
A woman—a particular woman—may stand that strain.
But can a man?" he propounded.
Strether's answer was as prompt as if he had already, for himself, worked it out.
"Not without a very high ideal of conduct.
But that's just what we're attributing to Chad.
And how, for that matter," he mused, "does his going to America diminish the particular strain?
Wouldn't it seem rather to add to it?"
"Out of sight out of mind!" his companion laughed. Then more bravely: "Wouldn't distance lessen the torment?"
But before Strether could reply, "The thing is, you see, Chad ought to marry!" he wound up.
Strether, for a little, appeared to think of it.
"If you talk of torments you don't diminish mine!" he then broke out.
The next moment he was on his feet with a question. "He ought to marry whom?"
Little Bilham rose more slowly.
"Well, some one he CAN—some thoroughly nice girl."
Strether's eyes, as they stood together, turned again to Jeanne.
"Do you mean HER?"
His friend made a sudden strange face.
"After being in love with her mother?
No." "But isn't it exactly your idea that he ISn't in love with her mother?"
His friend once more had a pause.
"Well, he isn't at any rate in love with Jeanne."
"I dare say not."
"How CAN he be with any other woman?"
"Oh that I admit.
But being in love isn't, you know, here"—little Bilham spoke in friendly reminder—"thought necessary, in strictness, for marriage."
"And what torment—to call a torment—can there ever possibly be with a woman like that?"
As if from the interest of his own question Strether had gone on without hearing.
"Is it for her to have turned a man out so wonderfully, too, only for somebody else?"
He appeared to make a point of this, and little Bilham looked at him now. "When it's for each other that people give things up they don't miss them."
Then he threw off as with an extravagance of which he was conscious: "Let them face the future together!" Little Bilham looked at him indeed.
"You mean that after all he shouldn't go back?"
"I mean that if he gives her up—!"
"Yes?"
"Well, he ought to be ashamed of himself."
But Strether spoke with a sound that might have passed for a laugh.
Volume II Book Seventh
I
It wasn't the first time Strether had sat alone in the great dim church—still less was it the first of his giving himself up, so far as conditions permitted, to its beneficent action on his nerves.
He had been to Notre Dame with Waymarsh, he had been there with Miss Gostrey, he had been there with Chad Newsome, and had found the place, even in company, such a refuge from the obsession of his problem that, with renewed pressure from that source, he had not unnaturally recurred to a remedy meeting the case, for the moment, so indirectly, no doubt, but so relievingly.
He was conscious enough that it was only for the moment, but good moments—if he could call them good—still had their value for a man who by this time struck himself as living almost disgracefully from hand to mouth.
Having so well learnt the way, he had lately made the pilgrimage more than once by himself—had quite stolen off, taking an unnoticed chance and making no point of speaking of the adventure when restored to his friends.
His great friend, for that matter, was still absent, as well as remarkably silent; even at the end of three weeks Miss Gostrey hadn't come back.
She wrote to him from Mentone, admitting that he must judge her grossly inconsequent—perhaps in fact for the time odiously faithless; but asking for patience, for a deferred sentence, throwing herself in short on his generosity.
For her too, she could assure him, life was complicated—more complicated than he could have guessed; she had moreover made certain of him—certain of not wholly missing him on her return—before her disappearance.
If furthermore she didn't burden him with letters it was frankly because of her sense of the other great commerce he had to carry on.
He himself, at the end of a fortnight, had written twice, to show how his generosity could be trusted; but he reminded himself in each case of Mrs. Newsome's epistolary manner at the times when Mrs. Newsome kept off delicate ground.
He sank his problem, he talked of Waymarsh and Miss Barrace, of little Bilham and the set over the river, with whom he had again had tea, and he was easy, for convenience, about Chad and Madame de Vionnet and Jeanne.