Chapter 9

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 the complication
as common to them. If Madame de Vionnet, under Sarah's eyes, had
pulled him into her boat, there was by this time no doubt whatever
that he had remained in it and that what he had really most been
conscious of for many hours together was the movement of the vessel
itself. They were in it together this moment as they hadn't yet
been, and he hadn't at present uttered the least of the words of
alarm or remonstrance that had died on his lips at the hotel. He
had other things to say to her than that she had put him in a
position; so quickly had his position grown to affect him as quite
excitingly, altogether richly, inevitable. That the outlook,
however--given the point of exposure--hadn't cleared up half so
much as he had reckoned was the first warning she received from him
on his arrival. She had replied with indulgence that he was in too
great a hurry, and had remarked soothingly that if she knew how to
be patient surely HE might be. He felt her presence, on the spot,
he felt her tone and everything about her, as an aid to that effort;
and it was perhaps one of the proofs of her success with him
that he seemed so much to take his ease while they talked.
By the time he had explained to her why his impressions, though
multiplied, still baffled him, it was as if he had been familiarly
talking for hours. They baffled him because Sarah--well, Sarah was
deep, deeper than she had ever yet had a chance to show herself.
He didn't say that this was partly the effect of her opening so
straight down, as it were, into her mother, and that, given
Mrs. Newsome's profundity, the shaft thus sunk might well have a reach;
but he wasn't without a resigned apprehension that, at such a rate
of