“Well then there we are! Only”—and Miss Barrace appealed again to Strether—“don’t let it discourage you. You’ll break down soon enough, but you’ll meanwhile have had your moments. Il faut en avoir. I always like to see you while you last. And I’ll tell you who will last.”
“Waymarsh?”—he had already taken her up.
She laughed out as at the alarm of it. “He’ll resist even Miss Gostrey: so grand is it not to understand. He’s wonderful.”
“He is indeed,” Strether conceded. “He wouldn’t tell me of this affair—only said he had an engagement; but with such a gloom, you must let me insist, as if it had been an engagement to be hanged. Then silently and secretly he turns up here with you. Do you call that ‘lasting’?”
“Oh I hope it’s lasting!” Miss Barrace said. “But he only, at the best, bears with me. He doesn’t understand—not one little scrap. He’s delightful. He’s wonderful,” she repeated.
“Michelangelesque!”—little Bilham completed her meaning. “He is a success. Moses, on the ceiling, brought down to the floor; overwhelming, colossal, but somehow portable.”
“Certainly, if you mean by portable,” she returned, “looking so well in one’s carriage. He’s too funny beside me in his corner; he looks like somebody, somebody foreign and famous, en exil; so that people wonder—it’s very amusing—whom I’m taking about. I show him Paris, show him everything, and he never turns a hair. He’s like the Indian chief one reads about, who, when he comes up to Washington to see the Great Father, stands wrapt in his blanket and gives no sign. I might be the Great Father—from the way he takes everything.” She was delighted at this hit of her identity with that personage—it fitted so her character; she declared it was the title she meant henceforth to adopt. “And the way he sits, too, in the corner of my room, only looking at my visitors very hard and as if he wanted to start something! They wonder what he does want to start. But he’s wonderful,” Miss Barrace once more insisted. “He has never started anything yet.”
It presented him none the less, in truth, to her actual friends, who looked at each other in intelligence, with frank amusement on Bilham’s part and a shade of sadness on Strether’s. Strether’s sadness sprang—for the image had its grandeur—from his thinking how little he himself was wrapt in his blanket, how little, in marble halls, all too oblivious of the Great Father, he resembled a really majestic aboriginal. But he had also another reflexion. “You’ve all of you here so much visual sense that you’ve somehow all ‘run’ to it. There are moments when it strikes one that you haven’t any other.”
“Any moral,” little Bilham explained, watching serenely, across the garden, the several femmes du monde. “But Miss Barrace has a moral distinction,” he kindly continued; speaking as if for Strether’s benefit not less than for her own.
“Have you?” Strether, scarce knowing what he was about, asked of her almost eagerly.