 for them; and nothing was more
delightful than his being in a position to make the train so definite. It might
have been, for themselves - to hear Madame de Vionnet - almost unnaturally
vague, a detail left to be fixed; though Strether indeed was afterwards to
remember that Chad had promptly enough intervened to forestall this appearance,
laughing at his companion's flightiness and making the point that he had, after
all, in spite of the bedazzlement of a day out with her, known what he was
about.
    Strether was to remember afterwards further that this had had for him the
effect of forming Chad's almost sole intervention; and indeed he was to remember
further still, in subsequent meditation, many things that, as it were, fitted
together. Another of them was for instance that the wonderful woman's overflow
of surprise and amusement was wholly into French, which she struck him as
speaking with an unprecedented command of idiomatic turns, but in which she got,
as he might have said, somewhat away from him, taking all at once little
brilliant jumps that he could but lamely match. The question of his own French
had never come up for them; it was the one thing she wouldn't have permitted -
it belonged, for a person who had been through much, to mere boredom; but the
present result was odd, fairly veiling her identity, shifting her back into a
mere voluble class or race to the intense audibility of which he was by this
time inured. When she spoke the charming slightly strange English he best knew
her by he seemed to feel her as a creature, among all the millions, with a
language quite to herself, the real monopoly of a special shade of speech,
beautifully easy for her, yet of a colour and a cadence that were both
inimitable and matters of accident. She came back to these things after they had
shaken down in the inn-parlour and knew, as it were, what was to become of them;
it was inevitable that loud ejaculation over the prodigy of their convergence
should at last wear itself out. Then it was that his impression took fuller form
- the impression, destined only to deepen, to complete itself, that they had
something to put a face upon, to carry off and make the best of, and that it was
she who, admirably on the whole, was doing this. It was familiar to him of
course that they had something to put a face upon; their friendship, their
connexion, took any amount of explaining - that would have been made familiar by
his twenty minutes
