nything, he thought,
just as Gloriani, with his nose very near and quick movements of the
head from side to side and bottom to top, examined this feature of
Chad's collection. The artist used that word the next moment smiling
courteously, wiping his nippers and looking round him further--paying
the place in short by the very manner of his presence and by something
Strether fancied he could make out in this particular glance, such a
tribute as, to the latter's sense, settled many things once for all.
Strether was conscious at this instant, for that matter, as he hadn't
yet been, of how, round about him, quite without him, they WERE
consistently settled. Gloriani's smile, deeply Italian, he considered,
and finely inscrutable, had had for him, during dinner, at which they
were not neighbours, an indefinite greeting; but the quality in it was
gone that had appeared on the other occasion to turn him inside out; it
was as if even the momentary link supplied by the doubt between them
had snapped. He was conscious now of the final reality, which was that
there wasn't so much a doubt as a difference altogether; all the more
that over the difference the famous sculptor seemed to signal almost
condolingly, yet oh how vacantly! as across some great flat sheet of
water. He threw out the bridge of a charming hollow civility on which
Strether wouldn't have trusted his own full weight a moment. That
idea, even though but transient and perhaps belated, had performed the
office of putting Strether more at his ease, and the blurred picture
had already dropped--dropped with the sound of something else said and
with his becoming aware, by another quick turn, that Gloriani was now
on the sofa talking with Jeanne, while he himself had in his ears again
the familiar friendliness and the elusive meaning of the "Oh, oh, oh!"
that had made him, a fortnight before, challenge Miss Barrace in vain.
She had always the air, this picturesque and original lady, who struck
him, so oddly, as both antique and modern--she had always the air of
taking up some joke that one had already had out with her. The point
itself, no doubt, was what was antique, and the use she made of it what
was modern. He felt just now that her good-natured irony did bear on
something, and it troubled him a little that she wouldn't be more
explicit only assuring him, with the pleasure of observation so visible
in her, that she wouldn't tell him more for the world. He could tak