“I mean,” he explained, “that she might have affected you by her exquisite amiability—a real revelation, it has seemed to myself; her high rarity, her distinction of every sort.”
He had been, with these words, consciously a little “precious”; but he had had to be—he couldn’t give her the truth of the case without them; and it seemed to him moreover now that he didn’t care. He had at all events not served his cause, for she sprang at its exposed side. “A ‘revelation’—to me: I’ve come to such a woman for a revelation? You talk to me about ‘distinction’—you, you who’ve had your privilege?—when the most distinguished woman we shall either of us have seen in this world sits there insulted, in her loneliness, by your incredible comparison!”
Strether forbore, with an effort, from straying; but he looked all about him. “Does your mother herself make the point that she sits insulted?”
Sarah’s answer came so straight, so “pat,” as might have been said, that he felt on the instant its origin. “She has confided to my judgement and my tenderness the expression of her personal sense of everything, and the assertion of her personal dignity.”
They were the very words of the lady of Woollett—he would have known them in a thousand; her parting charge to her child. Mrs. Pocock accordingly spoke to this extent by book, and the fact immensely moved him. “If she does really feel as you say it’s of course very very dreadful. I’ve given sufficient proof, one would have thought,” he added, “of my deep admiration for Mrs. Newsome.”
“And pray what proof would one have thought you’d call sufficient? That of thinking this person here so far superior to her?”
He wondered again; he waited. “Ah dear Sarah, you must leave me this person here!”
In his desire to avoid all vulgar retorts, to show how, even perversely, he clung to his rag of reason, he had softly almost wailed this plea. Yet he knew it to be perhaps the most positive declaration he had ever made in his life, and his visitor’s reception of it virtually gave it that importance. “That’s exactly what I’m delighted to do. God knows we don’t want her! You take good care not to meet,” she observed in a still higher key, “my question about their life. If you do consider it a thing one can even speak of, I congratulate you on your taste!”
The life she alluded to was of course Chad’s and Madame de Vionnet’s, which she thus bracketed together in a way that made him wince a little; there being nothing for him but to take home her full intention. It was none the less his inconsequence that while he had himself been enjoying for weeks the view of the brilliant woman’s specific action, he just suffered from any characterisation of it by other lips. “I think tremendously well of her, at the same time that I seem to feel her ‘life’ to be really none of my business. It’s my business, that is, only so far as Chad’s own life is affected by it; and what has happened, don’t you see? is that Chad’s has been affected so beautifully. The proof of the pudding’s in the eating”—he tried, with no great success, to help it out with a touch of pleasantry, while she let him go on as if to sink and sink. He went on however well enough, as well as he could do without fresh counsel; he indeed shouldn’t stand quite firm, he felt, till he should have re-established his communications with Chad. Still, he could always speak for the woman he had so definitely promised to “save.” This wasn’t quite for her the air of salvation; but as that chill fairly deepened what did it become but a reminder that one might at the worst perish with her? And it was simple enough—it was rudimentary: not, not to give her away. “I find in her more merits than you would probably have patience with my counting over. And do you know,” he enquired, “the effect you produce on me by alluding to her in such terms? It’s as if you had some motive in not recognising all she has done for your brother, and so shut your eyes to each side of the matter, in order, whichever side comes up, to get rid of the other. I don’t, you must allow me to say, see how you can with any pretence to candour get rid of the side nearest you.”
“Near me—that sort of thing?” And Sarah gave a jerk back of her head that well might have nullified any active proximity.