er apparel, in embroidery, in enamel, in satin, in
substances and textures vaguely rich. Her head, extremely fair and
exquisitely festal, was like a happy fancy, a notion of the antique, on
an old precious medal, some silver coin of the Renaissance; while her
slim lightness and brightness, her gaiety, her expression, her
decision, contributed to an effect that might have been felt by a poet
as half mythological and half conventional. He could have compared her
to a goddess still partly engaged in a morning cloud, or to a sea-nymph
waist-high in the summer surge. Above all she suggested to him the
reflexion that the femme du monde--in these finest developments of the
type--was, like Cleopatra in the play, indeed various and multifold.
She had aspects, characters, days, nights--or had them at least, showed
them by a mysterious law of her own, when in addition to everything she
happened also to be a woman of genius. She was an obscure person, a
muffled person one day, and a showy person, an uncovered person the
next. He thought of Madame de Vionnet to-night as showy and uncovered,
though he felt the formula rough, because, thanks to one of the
short-cuts of genius she had taken all his categories by surprise.
Twice during dinner he had met Chad's eyes in a longish look; but these
communications had in truth only stirred up again old ambiguities--so
little was it clear from them whether they were an appeal or an
admonition. "You see how I'm fixed," was what they appeared to convey;
yet how he was fixed was exactly what Strether didn't see. However,
perhaps he should see now.

"Are you capable of the very great kindness of going to relieve
Newsome, for a few minutes, of the rather crushing responsibility of
Madame Gloriani, while I say a word, if he'll allow me, to Mr.
Strether, of whom I've a question to ask? Our host ought to talk a bit
to those other ladies, and I'll come back in a minute to your rescue."
She made this proposal to Miss Barrace as if her consciousness of a
special duty had just flickered-up, but that lady's recognition of
Strether's little start at it--as at a betrayal on the speaker's part
of a domesticated state--was as mute as his own comment; and after an
instant, when their fellow guest had good-naturedly left them, he had
been given something else to think of. "Why has Maria so suddenly
gone? Do you know?" That was the question Madame de Vionnet had
brought with her.

"I'm afraid I've no re