No, I'm only going to abandon HER. She'll want me to help her with
you. And I won't."

"You'll only help me with her? Well then--!" Most of the persons
previously gathered had, in the interest of tea, passed into the house,
and they had the gardens mainly to themselves. The shadows were long,
the last call of the birds, who had made a home of their own in the
noble interspaced quarter, sounded from the high trees in the other
gardens as well, those of the old convent and of the old hotels; it was
as if our friends had waited for the full charm to come out. Strether's
impressions were still present; it was as if something had happened
that "nailed" them, made them more intense; but he was to ask himself
soon afterwards, that evening, what really HAD happened--conscious as
he could after all remain that for a gentleman taken, and taken the
first time, into the "great world," the world of ambassadors and
duchesses, the items made a meagre total. It was nothing new to him,
however, as we know, that a man might have--at all events such a man as
he--an amount of experience out of any proportion to his adventures; so
that, though it was doubtless no great adventure to sit on there with
Miss Gostrey and hear about Madame de Vionnet, the hour, the picture,
the immediate, the recent, the possible--as well as the communication
itself, not a note of which failed to reverberate--only gave the
moments more of the taste of history.

It was history, to begin with, that Jeanne's mother had been
three-and-twenty years before, at Geneva, schoolmate and good
girlfriend to Maria Gostrey, who had moreover enjoyed since then,
though interruptedly and above all with a long recent drop, other
glimpses of her. Twenty-three years put them both on, no doubt; and
Madame de Vionnet--though she had married straight after
school--couldn't be today an hour less than thirty-eight. This made her
ten years older than Chad--though ten years, also, if Strether liked,
older than she looked; the least, at any rate, that a prospective
mother-in-law could be expected to do with. She would be of all
mothers-in-law the most charming; unless indeed, through some
perversity as yet insupposeable, she should utterly belie herself in
that relation. There was none surely in which, as Maria remembered
her, she mustn't be charming; and this frankly in spite of the stigma
of failure in the tie where failure always most showed. It was no test
there--when indeed