e young Lamartine, had left its stamp of
harps and urns and torches, a stamp impressed on sundry small objects,
ornaments and relics. He had never before, to his knowledge, had
present to him relics, of any special dignity, of a private
order--little old miniatures, medallions, pictures, books; books in
leather bindings, pinkish and greenish, with gilt garlands on the back,
ranged, together with other promiscuous properties, under the glass of
brass-mounted cabinets. His attention took them all tenderly into
account. They were among the matters that marked Madame de Vionnet's
apartment as something quite different from Miss Gostrey's little
museum of bargains and from Chad's lovely home; he recognised it as
founded much more on old accumulations that had possibly from time to
time shrunken than on any contemporary method of acquisition or form of
curiosity. Chad and Miss Gostrey had rummaged and purchased and picked
up and exchanged, sifting, selecting, comparing; whereas the mistress
of the scene before him, beautifully passive under the spell of
transmission--transmission from her father's line, he quite made up his
mind--had only received, accepted and been quiet. When she hadn't been
quiet she had been moved at the most to some occult charity for some
fallen fortune. There had been objects she or her predecessors might
even conceivably have parted with under need, but Strether couldn't
suspect them of having sold old pieces to get "better" ones. They
would have felt no difference as to better or worse. He could but
imagine their having felt--perhaps in emigration, in proscription, for
his sketch was slight and confused--the pressure of want or the
obligation of sacrifice.

The pressure of want--whatever might be the case with the other
force--was, however, presumably not active now, for the tokens of a
chastened ease still abounded after all, many marks of a taste whose
discriminations might perhaps have been called eccentric. He guessed
at intense little preferences and sharp little exclusions, a deep
suspicion of the vulgar and a personal view of the right. The general
result of this was something for which he had no name on the spot quite
ready, but something he would have come nearest to naming in speaking
of it as the air of supreme respectability, the consciousness, small,
still, reserved, but none the less distinct and diffused, of private
honour. The air of supreme respectability--that was a strange