Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/175

Rh 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 Vionnet—it being also history that the lady in question was a countess—should now, under Miss Gostrey'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. "Ces gens-là don't divorce, you know, any more than they emigrate or abjure—they think it impious and vulgar"; a fact in the light of which they seemed but the more richly special. It was all special; it was all, for Strether's imagination, more or less rich. The girl at the Genevese school, an isolated, interesting, attaching creature, both sensitive, then, and violent, audacious but always forgiven, was the daughter of a French father and an English mother, who, early left a widow, had married again, had another try with a foreigner; in her career with whom she had apparently given her child no example of comfort. All these people—the people of the English mother's side—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 that "sounded," had been another matter, leaving his child, she clearly recalled, a memory all fondness, as well as an assured little fortune, which was, unluckily, later on to make her more or less of a prey. She had been, in particular, at school dazzlingly, though quite booklessly clever; as polyglot as a little Jewess (which she wasn'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,