LITMIR.BIZ

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would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the effect of the ribbon from which Miss Gostrey’s trinket depended, had he not for the hour, at the best, been so given over to uncontrolled perceptions. What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his friend’s velvet band somehow added, in her appearance, to the value of every other item — to that of her smile and of the way she carried her head, to that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her hair? What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man’s work in the world to do with red velvet bands? He wouldn’t for anything have so exposed himself as to tell Miss Gostrey how much he liked hers, yet he HAD none the less not only caught himself in the act — frivolous, no doubt, idiotic, and above all unexpected — of liking it: he had in addition taken it as a starting-point for fresh backward, fresh forward, fresh lateral flights. The manner in which Mrs. Newsome’s throat WAS encircled suddenly represented for him, in an alien order, almost as many things as the manner in which Miss Gostrey’s was. Mrs. Newsome wore, at operatic hours, a black silk dress — very handsome, he knew it was “handsome” — and an ornament that his memory was able further to identify as a ruche. He had his association indeed with the ruche, but it was rather imperfectly romantic. He had once said to the wearer — and it was as “free” a remark as he had ever made to her — that she looked, with her ruff and other matters, like Queen Elizabeth; and it had after this in truth been his fancy that, as a consequence of that tenderness and an acceptance of the idea, the form of this special tribute to the “frill” had grown slightly more marked. The connexion, as he sat there and let his imagination roam, was to strike him as vaguely pathetic; but there it all was, and pathetic was doubtless in the conditions the best thing it could possibly be. It had assuredly existed at any rate; for it seemed now to come over him that no gentleman of his age at Woollett could ever, to a lady of Mrs. Newsome’s, which was not much less than his, have embarked on such a simile.

      All sorts of things in fact now seemed to come over him, comparatively few of which his chronicler can hope for space to mention. It came over him for instance that Miss Gostrey looked perhaps like Mary Stuart: Lambert Strether had a candour of fancy which could rest for an instant gratified in such an antithesis. It came over him that never before — no, literally never — had a lady dined with him at a public place before going to the play. The publicity of the place was just, in the matter, for Strether, the rare strange thing; it affected him almost as the achievement of privacy might have affected a man of a different experience. He had married, in the faraway years, so young as to have missed the time natural in Boston for taking girls to the Museum; and it was absolutely true of him that — even after the close of the period of conscious detachment occupying the centre of his life, the grey middle desert of the two deaths, that of his wife and that, ten years later, of his boy — he had never taken any one anywhere. It came over him in especial — though the monition had, as happened, already sounded, fitfully gleamed, in other forms — that the business he had come out on hadn’t yet been so brought home to him as by the sight of the people about him. She gave him the impression, his friend, at first, more straight than he got it for himself — gave it simply by saying with offhand illumination: “Oh yes, they’re types!” — but after he had taken it he made to the full his own use of it; both while he kept silence for the four acts and while he talked in the intervals. It was an evening, it was a world of types, and this was a connexion above all in which the figures and faces in the stalls were interchangeable with those on the stage.

      He felt as if the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow of his neighbour, a great stripped handsome red-haired lady who conversed with a gentleman on her other side in stray dissyllables which had for his ear, in the oddest way in the world, so much sound that he wondered they hadn’t more sense; and he recognised by the same law, beyond the footlights, what he was pleased to take for the very flush of English life. He had distracted drops in which he couldn’t have said if it were actors or auditors who were most true, and the upshot of which, each time, was the consciousness of new contacts. However he viewed his job it was “types” he should have to tackle. Those before him and around him were not as the types of Woollett, where, for that matter, it had begun to seem to him that there must only have been the male and the female. These made two exactly, even with the individual varieties. Here, on the other hand, apart from the personal and the sexual range — which might be greater or less — a series of strong stamps had been applied, as it were, from without; stamps that his observation played with as, before a glass case on a table, it might have passed from medal to medal and from copper to gold. It befell that in the drama precisely there was a bad woman in a yellow frock who made a pleasant weak goodlooking young man in perpetual evening dress do the most dreadful things. Strether felt himself on the whole not afraid of the yellow frock, but he was vaguely anxious over a certain kindness into which he found himself drifting for its victim. He hadn’t come out, he reminded himself, to be too kind, or indeed to be kind at all, to Chadwick Newsome. Would Chad also be in perpetual evening dress? He somehow rather hoped it — it seemed so to add to THIS young man’s general amenability; though he wondered too if, to fight him with his own weapons, he himself (a thought almost startling) would have likewise to be. This young man furthermore would have been much more easy to handle — at least for HIM — than appeared probable in respect to Chad.

      It came up for him with Miss Gostrey that there were things of which she would really perhaps after all have heard; and she admitted when a little pressed that she was never quite sure of what she heard as distinguished from things such as, on occasions like the present, she only extravagantly guessed. “I seem with this freedom, you see, to have guessed Mr. Chad. He’s a young man on whose head high hopes are placed at Woollett; a young man a wicked woman has got hold of and whom his family over there have sent you out to rescue. You’ve accepted the mission of separating him from the wicked woman. Are you quite sure she’s very bad for him?”

      Something in his manner showed it as quite pulling him up. “Of course we are. Wouldn’t YOU be?”

      “Oh I don’t know. One never does — does one? — beforehand. One can only judge on the facts. Yours are quite new to me; I’m really not in the least, as you see, in possession of them: so it will be awfully interesting to have them from you. If you’re satisfied, that’s all that’s required. I mean if you’re sure you ARE sure: sure it won’t do.”

      “That he should lead such a life? Rather!”

      “Oh but I don’t know, you see, about his life; you’ve not told me about his life. She may be charming — his life!”

      “Charming?” — Strether stared before him. “She’s base, venal — out of the streets.”

      “I see. And HE — ?”

      “Chad, wretched boy?”

      “Of what type and temper is he?” she went on as Strether had lapsed.

      “Well — the obstinate.” It was as if for a moment he had been going to say more and had then controlled himself.

      That was scarce what she wished. “Do you like him?”

      This time he was prompt. “No. How CAN I?”

      “Do you mean because of your being so saddled with him?”

      “I’m thinking of his mother,” said Strether after a moment. “He has darkened her admirable life.” He spoke with austerity. “He has worried her half to death.”

      “Oh that’s of course odious.” She had a pause as if for renewed emphasis of this truth, but it ended on another note. “Is her life very admirable?”

      “Extraordinarily.”

      There was so much in the tone that Miss Gostrey had to devote another pause to the appreciation of it. “And has he only HER? I don’t mean the bad woman in Paris,” she quickly added— “for I assure you I shouldn’t even at the best be disposed to allow him more than one. But has he only his mother?”

      “He has also a sister, older than himself and married; and they’re both remarkably fine women.”

      “Very handsome, you mean?”

      This

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