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only going to abandon her. Sheā€™ll want me to help her with you. And I wonā€™t.ā€

ā€œYouā€™ll only help me with her? Well thenā ā€”!ā€ 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. Stretherā€™s impressions were still present; it was as if something had happened that ā€œnailedā€ them, made them more intense; but he was to ask himself soon afterwards, that evening, what really had happenedā ā€”conscious as he could after all remain that for a gentleman taken, and taken the first time, into the ā€œgreat world,ā€ 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 haveā ā€”at all events such a man as heā ā€”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 possibleā ā€”as well as the communication itself, not a note of which failed to reverberateā ā€”only gave the moments more of the taste of history.

It was history, to begin with, that Jeanneā€™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 Vionnetā ā€”though she had married straight after schoolā ā€”couldnā€™t be today an hour less than thirty-eight. This made her ten years older than Chadā ā€”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 mustnā€™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 thereā ā€”when indeed was it a test there?ā ā€”for Monsieur de Vionnet had been a brute. She had lived for years apart from himā ā€”which was of course always a horrid position; but Miss Gostreyā€™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. He was so impossible that she had the advantage of all her merits.

It was still history for Strether that the Comte de Vionnetā ā€”it being also history that the lady in question was a Countessā ā€”should now, under Miss Gostreyā€™s sharp touch, rise before him as a high distinguished polished impertinent reprobate, the product of a mysterious order; it was history, further, that the charming girl so freely sketched by his companion should have been married out of hand by a mother, another figure of striking outline, full of dark personal motive; it was perhaps history most of all that this company was, as a matter of course, governed by such considerations as put divorce out of the question. ā€œCes gens-lĆ  donā€™t divorce, you know, any more than they emigrate or abjureā ā€”they think it impious and vulgarā€; a fact in the light of which they seemed but the more richly special. It was all special; it was all, for Stretherā€™s imagination, more or less rich. The girl at the Genevese school, an isolated interesting attaching creature, then both sensitive and violent, audacious but always forgiven, was the daughter of a French father and an English mother who, early left a widow, had married againā ā€”tried afresh with a foreigner; in her career with whom she had apparently given her child no example of comfort. All these peopleā ā€”the people of the English motherā€™s sideā ā€”had been of condition more or less eminent; yet with oddities and disparities that had often since made Maria, thinking them over, wonder what they really quite rhymed to. It was in any case her belief that the mother, interested and prone to adventure, had been without conscience, had only thought of ridding herself most quickly of a possible, an actual encumbrance. The father, by her impression, a Frenchman with a name one knew, had been a different matter, leaving his child, she clearly recalled, a memory all fondness, as well as an assured little fortune which was unluckily to make her more or less of a prey later on. She had been in particular, at school, dazzlingly, though quite booklessly, clever; as polyglot as a little Jewess (which she wasnā€™t, oh no!) and chattering French, English, German, Italian, anything one would, in a way that made a clean sweep, if not of prizes and parchments, at least of every ā€œpart,ā€ whether memorised or improvised, in the curtained costumed school repertory, and in especial of all mysteries of race and vagueness of reference, all swagger about ā€œhome,ā€ among their variegated mates.

It would doubtless be difficult today, as between French and English, to name her and place her; she would certainly show, on knowledge, Miss Gostrey felt, as one of those convenient types who donā€™t keep you explainingā ā€”minds with doors as numerous as the many-tongued cluster of confessionals at Saint Peterā€™s. You might confess to her with confidence in Roumelian, and even Roumelian sins. Thereforeā ā€”! But Stretherā€™s narrator covered her implication with a laugh; a laugh by which his betrayal of

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