ting her to trouble: that she wondered how, with such elements,
Sarah could still have no charm, was one of the principal things she
held her tongue about. Strether would have been interested in her
estimate of the elements--indubitably there, some of them, and to be
appraised according to taste--but he denied himself even the luxury of
this diversion. The way Madame de Vionnet affected him to-day was in
itself a kind of demonstration of the happy employment of gifts. How
could a woman think Sarah had charm who struck one as having arrived at
it herself by such different roads? On the other hand of course Sarah
wasn't obliged to have it. He felt as if somehow Madame de Vionnet
WAS. The great question meanwhile was what Chad thought of his sister;
which was naturally ushered in by that of Sarah's apprehension of Chad.
THAT they could talk of, and with a freedom purchased by their
discretion in other senses. The difficulty however was that they were
reduced as yet to conjecture. He had given them in the day or two as
little of a lead as Sarah, and Madame de Vionnet mentioned that she
hadn't seen him since his sister's arrival.

"And does that strike you as such an age?"

She met it in all honesty. "Oh I won't pretend I don't miss him.
Sometimes I see him every day. Our friendship's like that. Make what
you will of it!" she whimsically smiled; a little flicker of the kind,
occasional in her, that had more than once moved him to wonder what he
might best make of HER. "But he's perfectly right," she hastened to
add, "and I wouldn't have him fail in any way at present for the world.
I'd sooner not see him for three months. I begged him to be beautiful
to them, and he fully feels it for himself."

Strether turned away under his quick perception; she was so odd a
mixture of lucidity and mystery. She fell in at moments with the
theory about her he most cherished, and she seemed at others to blow it
into air. She spoke now as if her art were all an innocence, and then
again as if her innocence were all an art. "Oh he's giving himself up,
and he'll do so to the end. How can he but want, now that it's within
reach, his full impression?--which is much more important, you know,
than either yours or mine. But he's just soaking," Strether said as he
came back; "he's going in conscientiously for a saturation. I'm bound
to say he IS very good."

"Ah," she quietly replied, "to whom do you say it?" And then more
quietl