law the most charming;
unless indeed, through some perversity as yet insupposeable, she should utterly
belie herself in that relation. There was none surely in which, as Maria
remembered her, she mustn't be charming; and this frankly in spite of the stigma
of failure in the tie where failure always most showed. It was no test there -
when indeed was it a test there? - for Monsieur de Vionnet had been a brute. She
had lived for years apart from him - which was of course always a horrid
position; but Miss Gostrey's impression of the matter had been that she could
scarce have made a better thing of it had she done it on purpose to show she was
amiable. She was so amiable that nobody had had a word to say; which was luckily
not the case for her husband. He was so impossible that she had the advantage of
all her merits.
    It was still history for Strether that the Comte de Vionnet - it being also
history that the lady in question was a Countess - should now, under Miss
Gostrey's sharp touch, rise before him as a high distinguished polished
impertinent reprobate, the product of a mysterious order; it was history,
further, that the charming girl so freely sketched by his companion should have
been married out of hand by a mother, another figure of striking outline, full
of dark personal motive; it was perhaps history most of all that this company
was, as a matter of course, governed by such considerations as put divorce out
of the question. »Ces gens-là don't divorce, you know, any more than they
emigrate or abjure - they think it impious and vulgar«; a fact in the light of
which they seemed but the more richly special. It was all special; it was all,
for Strether's imagination, more or less rich. The girl at the Genevese school,
an isolated interesting attaching creature, then both sensitive and violent,
audacious but always forgiven, was the daughter of a French father and an
English mother who, early left a widow, had married again - tried afresh with a
foreigner; in her career with whom she had apparently given her child no example
of comfort. All these people - the people of the English mother's side - had
been of condition more or less eminent; yet with oddities and disparities that
had often since made Maria, thinking them over, wonder what they really quite
rhymed to. It was in any case her belief that the mother, interested and prone
to adventure, had been without conscience, had