of assent; but before
they separated it had been confirmed that he should be picked up at a
quarter to five.

Book Sixth

I

It was quite by half-past five--after the two men had been together in
Madame de Vionnet's drawing-room not more than a dozen minutes--that
Chad, with a look at his watch and then another at their hostess, said
genially, gaily: "I've an engagement, and I know you won't complain if
I leave him with you. He'll interest you immensely; and as for her,"
he declared to Strether, "I assure you, if you're at all nervous, she's
perfectly safe."

He had left them to be embarrassed or not by this guarantee, as they
could best manage, and embarrassment was a thing that Strether wasn't
at first sure Madame de Vionnet escaped. He escaped it himself, to his
surprise; but he had grown used by this time to thinking of himself as
brazen. She occupied, his hostess, in the Rue de Bellechasse, the
first floor of an old house to which our visitors had had access from
an old clean court. The court was large and open, full of revelations,
for our friend, of the habit of privacy, the peace of intervals, the
dignity of distances and approaches; the house, to his restless sense,
was in the high homely style of an elder day, and the ancient Paris
that he was always looking for--sometimes intensely felt, sometimes
more acutely missed--was in the immemorial polish of the wide waxed
staircase and in the fine boiseries, the medallions, mouldings,
mirrors, great clear spaces, of the greyish-white salon into which he
had been shown. He seemed at the very outset to see her in the midst
of possessions not vulgarly numerous, but hereditary cherished
charming. While his eyes turned after a little from those of his
hostess and Chad freely talked--not in the least about HIM, but about
other people, people he didn't know, and quite as if he did know
them--he found himself making out, as a background of the occupant,
some glory, some prosperity of the First Empire, some Napoleonic
glamour, some dim lustre of the great legend; elements clinging still
to all the consular chairs and mythological brasses and sphinxes' heads
and faded surfaces of satin striped with alternate silk.

The place itself went further back--that he guessed, and how old Paris
continued in a manner to echo there; but the post-revolutionary period,
the world he vaguely thought of as the world of Chateaubriand, of
Madame de Stael, even of th