Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/174

168 were still present; it was as if something had happened that "nailed" them, made them more intense; but he was to ask himself soon afterwards, that evening, what really had happened—conscious as he could remain, after all, that, for a gentleman taken for the first time into the "great" world, 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 have—at all events such a man as he was—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 Mme. de Vionnet, the hour, the picture, the immediate, the recent, the possible—as well as the communication itself, not a note of which failed to reverberate—only gave the moments more of the taste of history.

It was history, to begin with, that Jeanne's mother had been, three-and-twenty years before, at Geneva, schoolmate and good girl-friend 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 Mme. de Vionnet, though she had married straight after school, couldn't be to-day an hour less than thirty-eight. This made her ten years older than Chad—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 insupposable, she should utterly belie herself in that relation. There was none, surely, in which, as Maria remembered her, she mustn't be charming; and this, frankly, in spite of the stigma of failure in the tie in which failure always most showed. It was no test there—when, indeed, was it a test there?—for M. de Vionnet had been a brute. She had lived for years apart from him—which was, of course, always a horrid position; but Miss Gostrey'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 that she was amiable. She was so amiable that nobody had had a word to say, which was