“Something more vivid? Less?”
He had bent, with neared glasses, over a group of articles on a small stand; and at this he came up. “It was a mere allusion, but, on the lookout as I was, it struck me. ‘Awful, you know, as Chad is’—those were Bilham’s words.”
“‘Awful, you know’—? Oh!”—and Miss Gostrey turned them over. She seemed, however, satisfied. “Well, what more do you want?”
He glanced once more at a bibelot or two, and everything sent him back. “But it is all the same as if they wished to let me have it between the eyes.”
She wondered. “Quoi donc?”
“Why what I speak of. The amenity. They can stun you with that as well as with anything else.”
“Oh,” she answered, “you’ll come round! I must see them each,” she went on, “for myself. I mean Mr. Bilham and Mr. Newsome—Mr. Bilham naturally first. Once only—once for each; that will do. But face to face—for half an hour. What’s Mr. Chad,” she immediately pursued, “doing at Cannes? Decent men don’t go to Cannes with the—well, with the kind of ladies you mean.”
“Don’t they?” Strether asked with an interest in decent men that amused her.
“No, elsewhere, but not to Cannes. Cannes is different. Cannes is better. Cannes is best. I mean it’s all people you know—when you do know them. And if he does, why that’s different too. He must have gone alone. She can’t be with him.”
“I haven’t,” Strether confessed in his weakness, “the least idea.” There seemed much in what she said, but he was able after a little to help her to a nearer impression. The meeting with little Bilham took place, by easy arrangement, in the great gallery of the Louvre; and when, standing with his fellow visitor before one of the splendid Titians—the overwhelming portrait of the young man with the strangely-shaped glove and the blue-grey eyes—he turned to see the third member of their party advance from the end of the waxed and gilded vista, he had a sense of having at last taken hold. He had agreed with Miss Gostrey—it dated even from Chester—for a morning at the Louvre, and he had embraced independently the same idea as thrown out by little Bilham, whom he had already accompanied to the museum of the Luxembourg. The fusion of these schemes presented no difficulty, and it was to strike him again that in little Bilham’s company contrarieties in general dropped.