“Yes,” she thoughtfully returned—“but if they shut their eyes to it!”
Strether for an instant had his own thought. “Well perhaps that won’t matter!”
“You mean because he probably—do what they will—won’t like them?”
“Oh ‘do what they will’—! They won’t do much; especially if Sarah hasn’t more—well, more than one has yet made out—to give.”
Madame de Vionnet weighed it. “Ah she has all her grace!” It was a statement over which, for a little, they could look at each other sufficiently straight, and though it produced no protest from Strether the effect was somehow as if he had treated it as a joke. “She may be persuasive and caressing with him; she may be eloquent beyond words. She may get hold of him,” she wound up—“well, as neither you nor I have.”
“Yes, she may”—and now Strether smiled. “But he has spent all his time each day with Jim. He’s still showing Jim round.”
She visibly wondered. “Then how about Jim?”
Strether took a turn before he answered. “Hasn’t he given you Jim? Hasn’t he before this ‘done’ him for you?” He was a little at a loss. “Doesn’t he tell you things?”
She hesitated. “No”—and their eyes once more gave and took. “Not as you do. You somehow make me see them—or at least feel them. And I haven’t asked too much,” she added; “I’ve of late wanted so not to worry him.”
“Ah for that, so have I,” he said with encouraging assent; so that—as if she had answered everything—they were briefly sociable on it. It threw him back on his other thought, with which he took another turn; stopping again, however, presently with something of a glow. “You see Jim’s really immense. I think it will be Jim who’ll do it.”