"We'll presently, after we go," she said, "walk round it again if you like.
I'm not in a particular hurry, and it will be pleasant to look at it well with you."
He had spoken of the great romancer and the great romance, and of what, to his imagination, they had done for the whole, mentioning to her moreover the exorbitance of his purchase, the seventy blazing volumes that were so out of proportion.
"Out of proportion to what?"
"Well, to any other plunge."
Yet he felt even as he spoke how at that instant he was plunging.
He had made up his mind and was impatient to get into the air; for his purpose was a purpose to be uttered outside, and he had a fear that it might with delay still slip away from him.
She however took her time; she drew out their quiet gossip as if she had wished to profit by their meeting, and this confirmed precisely an interpretation of her manner, of her mystery.
While she rose, as he would have called it, to the question of Victor Hugo, her voice itself, the light low quaver of her deference to the solemnity about them, seemed to make her words mean something that they didn't mean openly.
Help, strength, peace, a sublime support—she hadn't found so much of these things as that the amount wouldn't be sensibly greater for any scrap his appearance of faith in her might enable her to feel in her hand.
Every little, in a long strain, helped, and if he happened to affect her as a firm object she could hold on by, he wouldn't jerk himself out of her reach.
People in difficulties held on by what was nearest, and he was perhaps after all not further off than sources of comfort more abstract.
It was as to this he had made up his mind; he had made it up, that is, to give her a sign.
The sign would be that—though it was her own affair—he understood; the sign would be that—though it was her own affair—she was free to clutch.
Since she took him for a firm object—much as he might to his own sense appear at times to rock—he would do his best to BE one.
The end of it was that half an hour later they were seated together for an early luncheon at a wonderful, a delightful house of entertainment on the left bank—a place of pilgrimage for the knowing, they were both aware, the knowing who came, for its great renown, the homage of restless days, from the other end of the town.
Strether had already been there three times—first with Miss Gostrey, then with Chad, then with Chad again and with Waymarsh and little Bilham, all of whom he had himself sagaciously entertained; and his pleasure was deep now on learning that Madame de Vionnet hadn't yet been initiated.
When he had said as they strolled round the church, by the river, acting at last on what, within, he had made up his mind to,
"Will you, if you have time, come to dejeuner with me somewhere?
For instance, if you know it, over there on the other side, which is so easy a walk"—and then had named the place; when he had done this she stopped short as for quick intensity, and yet deep difficulty, of response.
She took in the proposal as if it were almost too charming to be true; and there had perhaps never yet been for her companion so unexpected a moment of pride—so fine, so odd a case, at any rate, as his finding himself thus able to offer to a person in such universal possession a new, a rare amusement.
She had heard of the happy spot, but she asked him in reply to a further question how in the world he could suppose her to have been there.
He supposed himself to have supposed that Chad might have taken her, and she guessed this the next moment to his no small discomfort.
"Ah, let me explain," she smiled, "that I don't go about with him in public; I never have such chances—not having them otherwise—and it's just the sort of thing that, as a quiet creature living in my hole, I adore."
It was more than kind of him to have thought of it—though, frankly, if he asked whether she had time she hadn't a single minute.
That however made no difference—she'd throw everything over.
Every duty at home, domestic, maternal, social, awaited her; but it was a case for a high line.
Her affairs would go to smash, but hadn't one a right to one's snatch of scandal when one was prepared to pay?
It was on this pleasant basis of costly disorder, consequently, that they eventually seated themselves, on either side of a small table, at a window adjusted to the busy quay and the shining barge-burdened Seine; where, for an hour, in the matter of letting himself go, of diving deep, Strether was to feel he had touched bottom.
He was to feel many things on this occasion, and one of the first of them was that he had travelled far since that evening in London, before the theatre, when his dinner with Maria Gostrey, between the pink-shaded candles, had struck him as requiring so many explanations.
He had at that time gathered them in, the explanations—he had stored them up; but it was at present as if he had either soared above or sunk below them—he couldn't tell which; he could somehow think of none that didn't seem to leave the appearance of collapse and cynicism easier for him than lucidity.
How could he wish it to be lucid for others, for any one, that he, for the hour, saw reasons enough in the mere way the bright clean ordered water-side life came in at the open window?—the mere way Madame de Vionnet, opposite him over their intensely white table-linen, their omelette aux tomates, their bottle of straw-coloured Chablis, thanked him for everything almost with the smile of a child, while her grey eyes moved in and out of their talk, back to the quarter of the warm spring air, in which early summer had already begun to throb, and then back again to his face and their human questions.
Their human questions became many before they had done—many more, as one after the other came up, than our friend's free fancy had at all foreseen.
The sense he had had before, the sense he had had repeatedly, the sense that the situation was running away with him, had never been so sharp as now; and all the more that he could perfectly put his finger on the moment it had taken the bit in its teeth.
That accident had definitely occurred, the other evening, after Chad's dinner; it had occurred, as he fully knew, at the moment when he interposed between this lady and her child, when he suffered himself so to discuss with her a matter closely concerning them that her own subtlety, marked by its significant
"Thank you!" instantly sealed the occasion in her favour.
Again he had held off for ten days, but the situation had continued out of hand in spite of that; the fact that it was running so fast being indeed just WHY he had held off.
What had come over him as he recognised her in the nave of the church was that holding off could be but a losing game from the instant she was worked for not only by her subtlety, but by the hand of fate itself.
If all the accidents were to fight on her side—and by the actual showing they loomed large—he could only give himself up.
This was what he had done in privately deciding then and there to propose she should breakfast with him.
What did the success of his proposal in fact resemble but the smash in which a regular runaway properly ends?
The smash was their walk, their dejeuner, their omelette, the Chablis, the place, the view, their present talk and his present pleasure in it—to say nothing, wonder of wonders, of her own.
To this tune and nothing less, accordingly, was his surrender made good.
It sufficiently lighted up at least the folly of holding off.
Ancient proverbs sounded, for his memory, in the tone of their words and the clink of their glasses, in the hum of the town and the plash of the river.
It WAS clearly better to suffer as a sheep than as a lamb.
One might as well perish by the sword as by famine.
"Maria's still away?"—that was the first thing she had asked him; and when he had found the frankness to be cheerful about it in spite of the meaning he knew her to attach to Miss Gostrey's absence, she had gone on to enquire if he didn't tremendously miss her.
There were reasons that made him by no means sure, yet he nevertheless answered
"Tremendously"; which she took in as if it were all she had wished to prove.