WAS it a test there?--for Monsieur de Vionnet had
been a brute. She had lived for years apart from him--which was of
course always a horrid position; but Miss Gostrey's impression of the
matter had been that she could scarce have made a better thing of it
had she done it on purpose to show she was amiable. She was so amiable
that nobody had had a word to say; which was luckily not the case for
her husband. He was so impossible that she had the advantage of all
her merits.

It was still history for Strether that the Comte de Vionnet--it being
also history that the lady in question was a Countess--should now,
under Miss Gostrey's sharp touch, rise before him as a high
distinguished polished impertinent reprobate, the product of a
mysterious order; it was history, further, that the charming girl so
freely sketched by his companion should have been married out of hand
by a mother, another figure of striking outline, full of dark personal
motive; it was perhaps history most of all that this company was, as a
matter of course, governed by such considerations as put divorce out of
the question. "Ces gens-la don't divorce, you know, any more than they
emigrate or abjure--they think it impious and vulgar"; a fact in the
light of which they seemed but the more richly special. It was all
special; it was all, for Strether's imagination, more or less rich. The
girl at the Genevese school, an isolated interesting attaching
creature, then both sensitive and violent, audacious but always
forgiven, was the daughter of a French father and an English mother
who, early left a widow, had married again--tried afresh with a
foreigner; in her career with whom she had apparently given her child
no example of comfort. All these people--the people of the English
mother's side--had been of condition more or less eminent; yet with
oddities and disparities that had often since made Maria, thinking them
over, wonder what they really quite rhymed to. It was in any case her
belief that the mother, interested and prone to adventure, had been
without conscience, had only thought of ridding herself most quickly of
a possible, an actual encumbrance. The father, by her impression, a
Frenchman with a name one knew, had been a different matter, leaving
his child, she clearly recalled, a memory all fondness, as well as an
assured little fortune which was unluckily to make her more or less of
a prey later on. She had been in particular, at school, daz