to face at last; you're made for each other--vous allez
voir; and I bless your union." It was indeed, after he had gone off,
as if he had been partly serious too. This latter motion had been
determined by an enquiry from him about "Jeanne"; to which her mother
had replied that she was probably still in the house with Miss Gostrey,
to whom she had lately committed her. "Ah but you know," the young man
had rejoined, "he must see her"; with which, while Strether pricked up
his ears, he had started as if to bring her, leaving the other objects
of his interest together. Strether wondered to find Miss Gostrey
already involved, feeling that he missed a link; but feeling also, with
small delay, how much he should like to talk with her of Madame de
Vionnet on this basis of evidence.

The evidence as yet in truth was meagre; which, for that matter, was
perhaps a little why his expectation had had a drop. There was somehow
not quite a wealth in her; and a wealth was all that, in his
simplicity, he had definitely prefigured. Still, it was too much to be
sure already that there was but a poverty. They moved away from the
house, and, with eyes on a bench at some distance, he proposed that
they should sit down. "I've heard a great deal about you," she said as
they went; but he had an answer to it that made her stop short. "Well,
about YOU, Madame de Vionnet, I've heard, I'm bound to say, almost
nothing"--those struck him as the only words he himself could utter
with any lucidity; conscious as he was, and as with more reason, of the
determination to be in respect to the rest of his business perfectly
plain and go perfectly straight. It hadn't at any rate been in the
least his idea to spy on Chad's proper freedom. It was possibly,
however, at this very instant and under the impression of Madame de
Vionnet's pause, that going straight began to announce itself as a
matter for care. She had only after all to smile at him ever so gently
in order to make him ask himself if he weren't already going crooked.
It might be going crooked to find it of a sudden just only clear that
she intended very definitely to be what he would have called nice to
him. This was what passed between them while, for another instant,
they stood still; he couldn't at least remember afterwards what else it
might have been. The thing indeed really unmistakeable was its rolling
over him as a wave that he had been, in conditions incalculable and
unimaginable