Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/415

Rh from là-bas, would all match for their return together to Paris. The chance that was most charming of all, the chance that drew from Mme. de Vionnet her clearest, gayest "Comme cela se trouve!" was the announcement made to Strether after they were seated at table, the word given him by their hostess in respect to his carriage for the station, on which he might now count. It settled the matter for his friends as well; the conveyance—it was all too lucky!—would serve for them; and nothing was more delightful than his being in a position to make the train so definite. It might have been, for themselves—to hear Mme. de Vionnet—almost unnaturally vague, a detail left to be fixed, though Strether indeed was afterwards to remember that Chad had promptly enough intervened to forestall this appearance, laughing at his companion's flightiness and making the point that he had, after all, in spite of the bedazzlement of a day out with her, known what he was about.

Strether was to remember afterwards, further, that this had had for him the effect of forming Chad's almost sole intervention; and indeed he was to remember further still, in subsequent meditation, many things that, as it were, fitted together. Another of them was, for instance, that the wonderful woman's overflow of surprise and amusement was wholly into French, which she struck him as speaking with an unprecedented command of idiomatic turns, but in which she got, as he might have said, somewhat away from him, taking all at once little brilliant jumps that he could but lamely match. The question of his own French had never come up for them; it was the one thing she wouldn't have permitted—it belonged, for a person who had been through much, to mere boredom; but the present result was odd, fairly veiling her identity, shifting her back into the mere voluble class or race with whose intense audibility he had by this time made his terms. When she spoke the charming, slightly strange English he best knew her by, he seemed to feel her as a creature, among all the millions, with a language quite to herself, the real monoplymonopoly [sic] of a special shade of speech, beautifully easy for her, yet of a colour and a cadence that were both inimitable and matters of accident. She