in the regular
French style."

It somehow made both Strether and Madame de Vionnet laugh out, though
at the very moment he caught in Sarah's eyes, as glancing at the
speaker, a vague but unmistakeable "You too?" It made Waymarsh in fact
look consciously over her head. Madame de Vionnet meanwhile, however,
made her point in her own way. "I wish indeed I could offer you my
poor child as a dazzling attraction: it would make one's position
simple enough! She's as good as she can be, but of course she's
different, and the question is now--in the light of the way things seem
to go--if she isn't after all TOO different: too different I mean from
the splendid type every one is so agreed that your wonderful country
produces. On the other hand of course Mr. Newsome, who knows it so
well, has, as a good friend, dear kind man that he is, done everything
he can--to keep us from fatal benightedness--for my small shy creature.
Well," she wound up after Mrs. Pocock had signified, in a murmur still
a little stiff, that she would speak to her own young charge on the
question--"well, we shall sit, my child and I, and wait and wait and
wait for you." But her last fine turn was for Strether. "Do speak of
us in such a way--!"

"As that something can't but come of it? Oh something SHALL come of
it! I take a great interest!" he further declared; and in proof of it,
the next moment, he had gone with her down to her carriage.

Book Ninth

I

"The difficulty is," Strether said to Madame de Vionnet a couple of
days later, "that I can't surprise them into the smallest sign of his
not being the same old Chad they've been for the last three years
glowering at across the sea. They simply won't give any, and as a
policy, you know--what you call a parti pris, a deep game--that's
positively remarkable."

It was so remarkable that our friend had pulled up before his hostess
with the vision of it; he had risen from his chair at the end of ten
minutes and begun, as a help not to worry, to move about before her
quite as he moved before Maria. He had kept his appointment with her
to the minute and had been intensely impatient, though divided in truth
between the sense of having everything to tell her and the sense of
having nothing at all. The short interval had, in the face of their
complication, multiplied his impressions--it being meanwhile to be
noted, moreover, that he already frankly, already almost publicly,
viewed