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He would rather seem stupid any day than fatuous,
and she really had tones to make justice weep.
she had driven in by a single word a little golden nail, the sharp intention of which he signally felt.
This small struggle sprang not a little, in its way, from the same impulse that had now carried him across to Notre Dame; the impulse to let things be, to give them time to justify themselves or at least to pass.
The smash was their walk, their déjeuner, their omelette, the Chablis, the place, the view, their present talk and his present pleasure in it—to say nothing, wonder of wonders, of her own. To this tune and nothing less, accordingly, was his surrender made good. It sufficiently lighted up at least the folly of holding off. Ancient proverbs sounded, for his memory, in the tone of their words and the clink of their glasses, in the hum of the town and the plash of the river. It was clearly better to suffer as a sheep than as a lamb. One might as well perish by the sword as by famine.
“A man in trouble must be possessed somehow of a woman,” she said; “if she doesn’t come in one way she comes in another.”
Wouldn’t it be found to have made more for reality to be silly with these persons than sane with Sarah and Jim?
Mamie made them easy as he couldn’t have begun to do, and yet it could only have cost her more than he should ever have had to spend.
He put out his hand for good-bye with a “Splendid, splendid, splendid!” And he left her, in her splendour, still waiting for little Bilham.
which had for him in these days most of comfort—that he was free to believe in anything that from hour to hour kept him going. He had positively motions and flutters of this conscious hour-to-hour kind, temporary surrenders to irony, to fancy, frequent instinctive snatches at the growing rose of observation, constantly stronger for him, as he felt, in scent and colour, and in which he could bury his nose even to wantonness.
“Well, she thinks she has had her own way. And what’s to-night for her but a kind of apotheosis? Her frock’s really good.”
BOOK ELEVENTH
She took it as if the words were all she had wished; as if they brought her, gave her something that was the compensation of her case.
“Oh,” said Strether, “what I want is a thing I’ve ceased to measure or even to understand.”
“Well, intensity with ignorance—what do you want worse?”
Tremont Street.
“The” thing was the thing that implied the greatest number of other things of the sort he had had to tackle; and it was queer of course, but so it was—the implication here was complete.
He found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful things.
That was the refinement of his supreme scruple—he wished so to leave what he had forfeited out of account.
he wished to do everything because he was lucid and quiet,
There were moments,” she explained, “when you struck me as grandly cynical; there were others when you struck me as grandly vague.”
She has such variety and yet such harmony.”
He had sufficiently understood. “So good as this place at this moment? So good as what you make of everything you touch?” He took a moment to say, for, really and truly, what stood about him there in her offer—which was as the offer of exquisite service, of lightened care, for the rest of his days—might well have tempted. It built him softly round, it roofed him warmly over, it rested, all so firm, on selection. And what ruled selection was beauty and knowledge. It was awkward, it was almost stupid, not to seem to prize such things; yet, none the less, so far as they made his opportunity they
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Honest and fine, she couldn’t greatly pretend she didn’t see it. Still she could pretend just a little. “But why should you be so dreadfully right?”
