“Of her being affected by it?”
“Of his being. He likes it, but he knows she can hold out. He’s helping her, he’s floating her over, by kindness.”
Maria rather funnily considered it. “Floating her over in champagne? The kindness of dining her, nose to nose, at the hour when all Paris is crowding to profane delights, and in the—well, in the great temple, as one hears of it, of pleasure?”
“That’s just it, for both of them,” Strether insisted—“and all of a supreme innocence. The Parisian place, the feverish hour, the putting before her of a hundred francs’ worth of food and drink, which they’ll scarcely touch—all that’s the dear man’s own romance; the expensive kind, expensive in francs and centimes, in which he abounds. And the circus afterwards—which is cheaper, but which he’ll find some means of making as dear as possible—that’s also his tribute to the ideal. It does for him. He’ll see her through. They won’t talk of anything worse than you and me.”
“Well, we’re bad enough perhaps, thank heaven,” she laughed, “to upset them! Mr. Waymarsh at any rate is a hideous old coquette.” And the next moment she had dropped everything for a different pursuit. “What you don’t appear to know is that Jeanne de Vionnet has become engaged. She’s to marry—it has been definitely arranged—young Monsieur de Montbron.”
He fairly blushed. “Then—if you know it—it’s ‘out’?”
“Don’t I often know things that are not out? However,” she said, “this will be out to-morrow. But I see I’ve counted too much on your possible ignorance. You’ve been before me, and I don’t make you jump as I hoped.”
He gave a gasp at her insight. “You never fail! I’ve had my jump. I had it when I first heard.”
“Then if you knew why didn’t you tell me as soon as you came in?”
“Because I had it from her as a thing not yet to be spoken of.”