So far as a direct approach was concerned Sarah had neglected him, for the week now about to end, with a civil consistency of chill that, giving him a higher idea of her social resource, threw him back on the general reflection that a woman could always be amazing. It indeed helped a little to console him that he felt sure she had for the same period also left Chad’s curiosity hanging; though on the other hand, for his personal relief, Chad could at least go through the various motions—and he made them extraordinarily numerous—of seeing she had a good time. There wasn’t a motion on which, in her presence, poor Strether could so much as venture, and all he could do when he was out of it was to walk over for a talk with Maria. He walked over of course much less than usual, but he found a special compensation in a certain half-hour during which, toward the close of a crowded empty expensive day, his several companions seemed to him so disposed of as to give his forms and usages a rest. He had been with them in the morning and had nevertheless called on the Pococks in the afternoon; but their whole group, he then found, had dispersed after a fashion of which it would amuse Miss Gostrey to hear. He was sorry again, gratefully sorry she was so out of it—she who had really put him in; but she had fortunately always her appetite for news. The pure flame of the disinterested burned in her cave of treasures as a lamp in a Byzantine vault. It was just now, as happened, that for so fine a sense as hers a near view would have begun to pay. Within three days, precisely, the situation on which he was to report had shown signs of an equilibrium; the effect of his look in at the hotel was to confirm this appearance. If the equilibrium might only prevail! Sarah was out with Waymarsh, Mamie was out with Chad, and Jim was out alone. Later on indeed he himself was booked to Jim, was to take him that evening to the Varieties—which Strether was careful to pronounce as Jim pronounced them.

Miss Gostrey drank it in. “What then tonight do the others do?”

“Well, it has been arranged. Waymarsh takes Sarah to dine at Bignon’s.”

She wondered. “And what do they do after? They can’t come straight home.”

“No, they can’t come straight home—at least Sarah can’t. It’s their secret, but I think I’ve guessed it.” Then as she waited: “The circus.”

It made her stare a moment longer, then laugh almost to extravagance. “There’s no one like you!”

“Like me?”—he only wanted to understand.

“Like all of you together—like all of us: Woollett, Milrose and their products. We’re abysmal—but may we never be less so! Mr. Newsome,” she continued, “meanwhile takes Miss Pocock—?”

“Precisely—to the Français: to see what you took Waymarsh and me to, a family-bill.”

“Ah then may Mr. Chad enjoy it as I did!” But she saw so much in things. “Do they spend their evenings, your young people, like that, alone together?”

“Well, they’re young people—but they’re old friends.”

“I see, I see. And do they dine—for a difference—at Brébant’s?”

“Oh where they dine is their secret too. But I’ve my idea that it will be, very quietly, at Chad’s own place.”

“She’ll come to him there alone?”

They looked at each other a moment. “He has known her from a child. Besides,” said Strether with emphasis, “Mamie’s remarkable. She’s splendid.”

She wondered. “Do you mean she expects to bring it off?”

“Getting hold of him? No—I think not.”

“She doesn’t want him enough?—or doesn’t believe in her power?” On which as he said nothing she continued: “She finds she doesn’t care for him?”

“No—I think she finds she does. But that’s what I mean by so describing her. It’s if she does that she’s splendid. But we’ll see,” he wound up, “where she comes out.”

“You seem to show me sufficiently,” Miss Gostrey laughed, “where she goes in! But is her childhood’s friend,” she asked, “permitting himself recklessly to flirt with her?”

“No—not that. Chad’s also splendid. They’re all splendid!” he declared with a sudden strange sound of wistfulness and envy. “They’re at least happy.”

“Happy?”—it appeared, with their various difficulties, to surprise her.

“Well—I seem to myself among them the only one who isn’t.”

She demurred. “With your constant tribute to the ideal?”

He had a laugh at his tribute to the ideal, but he explained after a moment his impression. “I mean they’re living. They’re rushing about. I’ve already had my rushing. I’m waiting.”

“But aren’t you,” she asked by way of cheer, “waiting with me?”

He looked at her in all kindness. “Yes—if it weren’t for that!”

“And you help me to wait,” she said. “However,” she went on, “I’ve really something for you that will help you to wait and which you shall have in a minute. Only there’s something more I want from you first. I revel in Sarah.”

“So do I. If it weren’t,” he again amusedly sighed, “for that—!”

“Well, you owe more to women than any man I ever saw. We do seem to keep you going. Yet Sarah, as I see her, must be great.”

“She is” Strether fully assented: “great! Whatever happens, she won’t, with these unforgettable days, have lived in vain.”

Miss Gostrey had a pause. “You mean she has fallen in love?”

“I mean she wonders if she hasn’t—and it serves all her purpose.”

“It has indeed,” Maria laughed, “served women’s purposes before!”

“Yes—for giving in. But I doubt if the idea—as an idea—has ever up to now answered so well for holding out. That’s her tribute to the ideal—we each have our own. It’s her romance—and it seems to me better on the whole than mine. To have it in Paris too,” he explained—“on this classic ground, in this charged infectious air, with so sudden an intensity: well, it’s more than she expected. She has had in short to recognise the breaking out for her of a real affinity—and with everything to enhance the drama.”

Miss Gostrey followed. “Jim for instance?”

“Jim. Jim hugely enhances. Jim was made to enhance. And then Mr. Waymarsh. It’s the crowning touch—it supplies the colour. He’s positively separated.”

“And she herself unfortunately isn’t—that supplies the colour too.” Miss Gostrey was all there. But somehow—! “Is he in love?”

Strether looked at her a long time; then looked all about the room; then came a little nearer. “Will you never tell anyone in the world as long as ever you live?”

“Never.” It was charming.

“He thinks Sarah really is. But he has no fear,” Strether hastened to add.

“Of her being affected by it?”

“Of his being. He likes it, but he knows she can hold out. He’s helping her, he’s floating her over, by kindness.”

Maria rather funnily considered it. “Floating her over in champagne? The kindness of dining her, nose to nose, at the hour when all Paris is crowding to profane delights, and in the—well, in the great temple, as one hears of it, of pleasure?”

“That’s just it, for both of them,” Strether insisted—“and all of a supreme innocence. The Parisian place, the feverish hour, the putting before her of a hundred francs’ worth of food and drink, which they’ll scarcely touch—all that’s the dear man’s own romance; the expensive kind, expensive in francs and centimes, in which he abounds. And the circus afterwards—which is cheaper, but which he’ll find some means of making as dear as possible—that’s also his tribute to the ideal. It does for him. He’ll see her through. They won’t talk of anything worse than you and me.”

“Well, we’re bad enough perhaps, thank heaven,” she laughed, “to upset them! Mr. Waymarsh at any rate is a hideous old coquette.” And the next moment she had dropped everything for a different pursuit. “What you don’t appear to know is that Jeanne de Vionnet has become engaged. She’s to marry—it has been definitely arranged—young Monsieur de Montbron.”

He fairly blushed. “Then—if you know it—it’s ‘out’?”

“Don’t I often know things that are not out? However,” she said, “this will be out tomorrow. But I see I’ve counted too much on your possible ignorance. You’ve been before me, and I don’t make you jump as I hoped.”

He gave a gasp at her insight. “You never fail! I’ve had my jump. I had it when I first heard.”

“Then if you knew why didn’t you tell me as soon as you came in?”

“Because I had it from her as a thing not yet to be spoken of.”

Miss Gostrey wondered. “From Madame de Vionnet herself?”

“As a probability—not quite a certainty: a good cause in which Chad has been working. So I’ve waited.”

“You need wait no longer,” she returned. “It reached me yesterday—roundabout and accidental, but by a person who had had it from one of the young man’s own people—as a thing quite settled. I was only keeping it for you.”

“You thought Chad wouldn’t have told me?”

She hesitated. “Well, if he hasn’t—”

“He hasn’t. And yet the thing appears to have been practically his doing. So there we are.”

“There we are!” Maria candidly echoed.

“That’s why I jumped. I jumped,” he continued to explain, “because it means, this disposition of the daughter, that there’s now nothing else: nothing else but him and the mother.”

“Still—it simplifies.”

“It simplifies”—he fully concurred. “But that’s precisely where we are. It marks a stage in his relation. The act is his answer to Mrs. Newsome’s demonstration.”

“It tells,” Maria asked, “the worst?”

“The worst.”

“But is the worst what he wants Sarah to know?”

“He doesn’t care for Sarah.”

At which Miss Gostrey’s eyebrows went up. “You mean she has already dished herself?”

Strether took a turn about; he had thought it out again and again before this, to the end; but the vista seemed each time longer. “He wants his good friend to know the best. I mean the measure of his attachment. She asked for a sign, and he thought of that one. There it is.”

“A concession to her jealousy?”

Strether pulled up. “Yes—call it that. Make it lurid—for that makes my problem richer.”

“Certainly, let us have it lurid—for I quite agree with you that we want none of our problems poor. But let us also have it clear. Can he, in the midst of such a preoccupation, or on the heels of it, have seriously cared for Jeanne?—cared, I mean, as a young man at liberty would have cared?”

Well, Strether had mastered it. “I think he can have thought it would be charming if he could care. It would be nicer.”

“Nicer than being tied up to Marie?”

“Yes—than the discomfort of an attachment to a person he can never hope, short of a catastrophe, to marry. And he was quite right,” said Strether. “It would certainly have been nicer. Even when a thing’s already nice there mostly is some other thing that would have been nicer—or as to which we wonder if it wouldn’t. But his question was all the same a dream. He couldn’t care in that way. He is tied up to Marie. The relation is too special and has gone too far. It’s the very basis, and his recent lively contribution toward establishing Jeanne in life has been his definite and final acknowledgement to Madame de Vionnet that he has ceased squirming. I doubt meanwhile,” he went on, “if Sarah has at all directly attacked him.”

His companion brooded. “But won’t he wish for his own satisfaction to make his ground good to her?”

“No—he’ll leave it to me, he’ll leave everything to me. I ‘sort of’ feel”—he worked it out—“that the whole thing will come upon me. Yes, I shall have every inch and every ounce of it. I shall be used for it—!” And Strether lost himself in the prospect. Then he fancifully expressed the issue. “To the last drop of my blood.”

Maria, however, roundly protested. “Ah you’ll please keep a drop for me. I shall have a use for it!”—which she didn’t however follow up. She had come back the next moment to another matter. “Mrs. Pocock, with her brother, is trusting only to her general charm?”

“So it would seem.”

“And the charm’s not working?”

Well, Strether put it otherwise, “She’s sounding the note of home—which is the very best thing she can do.”

“The best for Madame de Vionnet?”

“The best for home itself. The natural one; the right one.”

“Right,” Maria asked, “when it fails?”

Strether had a pause. “The difficulty’s Jim. Jim’s the note of home.”

She debated. “Ah surely not the note of Mrs. Newsome.”

But he had it all. “The note of the home for which Mrs. Newsome wants him—the home of the business. Jim stands, with his little legs apart, at the door of that tent; and Jim is, frankly speaking, extremely awful.”

Maria stared. “And you in, you poor thing, for your evening with him?”

“Oh he’s all right for me!” Strether laughed. “Anyone’s good enough for me. But Sarah shouldn’t, all the same, have brought him. She doesn’t appreciate him.”

His friend was amused with this statement of it. “Doesn’t know, you mean, how bad he is?”

Strether shook his head with decision. “Not really.”

She wondered. “Then doesn’t Mrs. Newsome?”

It made him frankly do the same. “Well, no—since you ask me.”

Maria rubbed it in. “Not really either?”

“Not at all. She rates him rather high.” With which indeed, immediately, he took himself up. “Well, he is good too, in his way. It depends on what you want him for.”

Miss Gostrey, however, wouldn’t let it depend on anything—wouldn’t have it, and wouldn’t want him, at any price. “It suits my book,” she said, “that he should be impossible; and it suits it still better,” she more imaginatively added, “that Mrs. Newsome doesn’t know he is.”

Strether, in consequence, had to take it from her, but he fell back on something else. “I’ll tell you who does really know.”

“Mr. Waymarsh? Never!”

“Never indeed. I’m not always thinking of Mr. Waymarsh; in fact I find now I never am.” Then he mentioned the person as if there were a good deal in it. “Mamie.”

“His own sister?” Oddly enough it but let her down. “What good will that do?”

“None perhaps. But there—as usual—we are!”