Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/332

326 would the appreciation to which she was entitled—so assured was he that the more he saw of her process the more he should see of her pride. She saw, herself, everything; but she knew what she didn't want, and this it was that had helped her. What didn't she want?—there was a pleasure lost for her old friend in not yet knowing, as there would doubtless be a thrill in getting a glimpse. Gently and sociably she kept that dark to him, and it was as if she soothed and beguiled him in other ways to compensate him. She aired for him her impression of Mme. de Vionnet—of whom she had "heard so much "; she threw off her impression of Jeanne, whom she had been "dying to see"; she produced it with a blandness by which her auditor was really stirred that she had been with Sarah early that very afternoon, and after dreadful delays caused by all sorts of things, mainly, eternally, by the purchase of clothes—clothes that unfortunately wouldn't be themselves eternal—to call in the Rue de Bellechasse.

At the sound of these names Strether almost blushed to feel that he couldn't have sounded them first and yet couldn't either have justified his squeamishness. Mamie made them easy as he couldn't have begun to do, and yet it could only have cost her more than he should ever have had to spend. It was as friends of Chad's—friends special, distinguished, desirable, enviable—that she spoke of them, and she beautifully carried it off that, much as she had heard of them, though she didn't say how or where, which was a touch of her own, she had found them beyond her supposition. She abounded in their praise, and after the manner of Woollett—which made the manner of Woollett a lovable thing again to Strether. He had never so felt the true inwardness of it as when his blooming companion pronounced the elder of the ladies of the Rue de Bellechasse too fascinating for words, and declared of the younger that she was perfectly ideal—a real little miracle of charm. "Nothing," she said of Jeanne, "ought ever to happen to her—she's so awfully right as she is. Another touch will spoil her—so she oughtn't to be touched."

"Ah, but things here in Paris," Strether observed, "do