Miss Gostrey

“ Strether took this in as they slowly moved to the house on their way out. “She counts on me then to put the thing through?”
“Yes—she counts on you. Oh and first of all of course,” Miss Gostrey added, “on her—well, convincing you.”
“Ah,” her friend returned, “she caught Chad young!”
“Yes, but there are women who are for all your ‘times of life.’ They’re the most wonderful sort.” ”

“ She leaves no room in your life for anybody else. Do you know," she inquired of Mrs. Pocock, "about dear old Maria? The worst is that Miss Gostrey is really a wonderful woman."
"Oh, yes, indeed," Strether answered for her, "Mrs. Pocock knows about Miss Gostrey. Your mother, Sarah, must have told you about her; your mother knows everything," he sturdily pursued. "And I cordially admit," he added with his conscious gaiety of courage, "that she's as wonderful a woman as you like." ”

“ It came over him for instance that Miss Gostrey looked perhaps like Mary Stuart: Lambert Strether had a candour of fancy which could rest for an instant gratified in such an antithesis. It came over him that never before—no, literally never—had a lady dined with him at a public place before going to the play. The publicity of the place was just, in the matter, for Strether, the rare strange thing; it affected him almost as the achievement of privacy might have affected a man of a different experience. ”

“ She played her long handle, which shifted her observation; she saw in an instant all the absences, all the diverted attentions, that left them free. "How can we be anything else? But isn't that exactly your plight? 'We ladies'—oh, we're nice, and you must be having enough of us! As one of us, you know, I don't know that I'm crazy about us! But Miss Gostrey, at least, to-night, has left you alone, hasn't she?" With which she again looked about as if Maria might still lurk.
"Oh, yes," said Strether; "she's only sitting up for me at home." ”

“ You must take things as they come. Besides,” Miss Gostrey added, “I’m not afraid for myself.”
“For yourself—?”
“Of your seeing her. I trust her. There’s nothing she’ll say about me. In fact there’s nothing she can.”
Strether wondered—little as he had thought of this. Then he broke out. “Oh you women!” ”

“ Miss Gostrey followed. "Jim, for instance?"
"Jim. Jim hugely enhances. Jim was made to enhance. And then Mrs. Waymarsh. It's the crowning touch—it supplies the colour. He's positively separated."
"And she herself unfortunately isn't—that supplies the colour too." Miss Gostrey was all there. But somehow———! "Is he in love?"
Strether looked at her a long time; then looked all about the room; then came a little nearer. "Will you never tell anyone in the world as long as ever you live?"
"Never." It was charming.
"He thinks Sarah really is. But he has no fear," Strether hastened to add. ”

“ It would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the effect of the ribbon from which Miss Gostrey’s trinket depended, had he not for the hour, at the best, been so given over to uncontrolled perceptions. What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his friend’s velvet band somehow added, in her appearance, to the value of every other item—to that of her smile and of the way she carried her head, to that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her hair? What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man’s work in the world to do with red velvet bands? ”

“ The only qualification of the quietness was the synthetic “Oh hang it!” into which Strether’s share of the silence soundlessly flowered. It represented, this mute ejaculation, a final impulse to burn his ships. These ships, to the historic muse, may seem of course mere cockles, but when he presently spoke to Miss Gostrey it was with the sense at least of applying the torch. “Is it then a conspiracy?”
“Between the two young men? Well, I don’t pretend to be a seer or a prophetess,” she presently replied; “but if I’m simply a woman of sense he’s working for you to-night. ”

“ You’re the bigger swell of the two,” she immediately continued, “because you think you’re not one. She thinks she is one. However,” Miss Gostrey added, “she thinks you’re one too. You’re at all events the biggest she can get hold of.” She embroidered, she abounded. “I don’t say it to interfere between you, but on the day she gets hold of a bigger one—!” Strether had thrown back his head as in silent mirth over something that struck him in her audacity or felicity, and her flight meanwhile was already higher. ”

“ Strether went on, frankly amused now; “don’t call it that: the kind of freedom you deal in is dear.” Then as to justify himself: “Am I not in my way trying it? It’s this.”
“Being here, you mean, with me?”
“Yes, and talking to you as I do. I’ve known you a few hours, and I’ve known him all my life; so that if the ease I thus take with you about him isn’t magnificent”—and the thought of it held him a moment—“why it’s rather base.”
“It’s magnificent!” said Miss Gostrey to make an end of it. “And you should hear,” she added, “the ease I take—and I above all intend to take—with Mr. Waymarsh.” ”

“ Strether threw out, “why shouldn’t the daughter consent to him?”
“Oh,” said Miss Gostrey, “mayn’t it be that every one else isn’t quite so struck with him as you?”
“Doesn’t regard him you mean as such an ‘eligible’ young man? Is that what I’ve come to?” he audibly and rather gravely sought to know. “However,” he went on, “his marriage is what his mother most desires—that is if it will help. And oughtn’t any marriage to help? They must want him”—he had already worked it out—“to be better off. Almost any girl he may marry will have a direct interest in his taking up his chances. ”

“ It was a case then simply, a strong case, as people nowadays called such things, a case of transformation unsurpassed, and the hope was but in the general law that strong cases were liable to control from without. Perhaps he, Strether himself, was the only person after all aware of it. Even Miss Gostrey, with all her science, wouldn’t be, would she?—and he had never seen any one less aware of anything than Waymarsh as he glowered at Chad. ”

“ Strether felt in it the strange irony.
"So it's scarcely his fault!"
"It's at any rate his danger. I mean," said Strether, "it's hers. But she knows it."
"Yes, she knows it. And is your idea," Miss Gostrey asked, "that there was some other woman in London?"
"Yes. No. That is, I have no ideas. I'm afraid of them. I've done with them." And he put out his hand to her. "Good-bye."
It brought her back to her unanswered question. "To what do you go home?"
"I don't know. There will always be something." ”

“ I much less. I don’t begin to have her faith. She provides,” said Strether, “three fourths of that. And she provides, as I’ve confided to you, all the money.”
It evoked somehow a vision of gold that held for a little Miss Gostrey’s eyes, and she looked as if she heard the bright dollars shovelled in. “I hope then you make a good thing—”
“I never made a good thing!” he at once returned.
She just waited. “Don’t you call it a good thing to be loved?”
“Oh we’re not loved. We’re not even hated. We’re only just sweetly ignored.”
She had another pause. “You don’t trust me!” ”

“ she would certainly show, on knowledge, Miss Gostrey felt, as one of those convenient types who don’t keep you explaining—minds with doors as numerous as the many-tongued cluster of confessionals at Saint Peter’s. ”

“ We do seem to keep you going. But Sarah, as I see her, must be great."
"She is"—Strether fully assented—"great! Whatever happens, she won't, with these unforgettable days, have lived in vain."
Miss Gostrey had a pause. "You mean she has fallen in love?"
"I mean she wonders if she hasn't—and it serves all her purpose."
"It has, indeed," Maria laughed, "served women's purposes before!"
"Yes—for giving in. But I doubt if the idea—as an idea—has ever up to now answered so well for holding out. That's her tribute to the ideal—we each have our own. ”

“ Miss Gostrey continued suggestive. "Mme. de Vionnet?"
"She has plenty."
"Certainly—she had quantities of old. But there are different ways of making one's self felt."
"Yes, it comes, no doubt, to that. You now———!" ”

“ Miss Gostrey would now tell him—that, with every deference to present preoccupation, was uppermost for Strether after they had taken their seat. One of the others was, at the end of five minutes, that she—oh incontestably, yes—differed less; differed, that is, scarcely at all—well, superficially speaking, from Mrs. Newsome or even from Mrs. Pocock. She was ever so much younger than the one and not so young as the other; but what was there in her, if anything, that would have made it impossible he should meet her at Woollett? ”

“ Miss Gostrey asked, “for her age?”
Strether seemed to feel with a certain disquiet the pressure of it. “I don’t say she’s wonderful. Or rather,” he went on the next moment, “I do say it. It’s exactly what she is—wonderful. But I wasn’t thinking of her appearance,” he explained—“striking as that doubtless is. I was thinking—well, of many other things.” He seemed to look at these as if to mention some of them; then took, pulling himself up, another turn. “About Mrs. Pocock people may differ.”
“Is that the daughter’s name—‘Pocock’?”
“That’s the daughter’s name,” Strether sturdily confessed. ”

“ Miss Gostrey, however, wouldn’t let it depend on anything—wouldn’t have it, and wouldn’t want him, at any price. “It suits my book,” she said, “that he should be impossible; and it suits it still better,” she more imaginatively added, “that Mrs. Newsome doesn’t know he is.”
Strether, in consequence, had to take it from her, but he fell back on something else. “I’ll tell you who does really know.”
“Mr. Waymarsh? Never!”
“Never indeed. I’m not always thinking of Mr. Waymarsh; in fact I find now I never am.” Then he mentioned the person as if there were a good deal in it. “Mamie.” ”

“ I’m talking of some person who in his present situation may have held her own, may really have counted.”
“That’s exactly what I am!” said Miss Gostrey. But she as quickly made her point. “I thought you thought—or that they think at Woollett—that that’s what mere wretches necessarily do. Mere wretches necessarily don’t!” she declared with spirit. “There must, behind every appearance to the contrary, still be somebody—somebody who’s not a mere wretch, since we accept the miracle. What else but such a somebody can such a miracle be?” ”

“ Once more their eyes met on it, and she held him an instant. “The green cover won’t—nor will any cover—avail you with me. You’re of a depth of duplicity!” Still, she could in her own large grasp of the real condone it. “Is Mamie a great parti?”
“Oh the greatest we have—our prettiest brightest girl.”
Miss Gostrey seemed to fix the poor child. “I know what they can be. And with money?”
“Not perhaps with a great deal of that—but with so much of everything else that we don’t miss it. We don’t miss money much, you know,” Strether added, “in general, in America, in pretty girls.” ”

“ Or for Mamie either. She’ll do anything for me.”
Miss Gostrey gave a comprehensive sigh. “The way you reduce people to subjection!”
“It’s certainly, on one side, wonderful. But it’s quite equalled, on another, by the way I don’t. I haven’t reduced Sarah, since yesterday; though I’ve succeeded in seeing her again, as I’ll presently tell you. The others however are really all right. Mamie, by that blessed law of ours, absolutely must have a young man.”
“But what must poor Mr. Bilham have? Do you mean they’ll marry for you?” ”

“ In the scenic episodes, the colloquies that Strether holds, for example, with his sympathetic friend Maria Gostrey, another turn appears in the author's procedure. Throughout these clear-cut dialogues Strether's point of view still reigns; the only eyes in the matter are still his, there is no sight of the man himself as his companion sees him. Miss Gostrey is clearly visible, and Madame de Vionnet and little Bilham, or whoever it may be; the face of Strether himself is never turned to the reader. ”

“ It was nothing new to him, however, as we know, that a man might have—at all events such a man as he—an amount of experience out of any proportion to his adventures; so that, though it was doubtless no great adventure to sit on there with Miss Gostrey and hear about Madame de Vionnet, the hour, the picture, the immediate, the recent, the possible—as well as the communication itself, not a note of which failed to reverberate—only gave the moments more of the taste of history. ”

“ When the woman of fashion permitted Strether—as she permitted him at the most—the purchase of a pair of gloves, the terms she made about it, the prohibition of neckties and other items till she should be able to guide him through the Burlington Arcade, were such as to fall upon a sensitive ear as a challenge to just imputations. Miss Gostrey was such a woman of fashion as could make without a symptom of vulgar blinking an appointment for the Burlington Arcade. ”

“ Miss Gostrey cast about. “No—you reason well! But of course on the other hand there’s always dear old Woollett itself.”
“Oh yes,” he mused—“there’s always dear old Woollett itself.”
She waited a moment. “The young lady mayn’t find herself able to swallow that quantity. She may think it’s paying too much; she may weigh one thing against another.”
Strether, ever restless in such debates, took a vague turn “It will all depend on who she is. That of course—the proved ability to deal with dear old Woollett, since I’m sure she does deal with it—is what makes so strongly for Mamie.” ”