impressed on sundry small objects, ornaments and relics. He had never
before, to his knowledge, had present to him relics, of any special dignity, of
a private order - little old miniatures, medallions, pictures, books; books in
leather bindings, pinkish and greenish, with gilt garlands on the back, ranged,
together with other promiscuous properties, under the glass of brass-mounted
cabinets. His attention took them all tenderly into account. They were among the
matters that marked Madame de Vionnet's apartment as something quite different
from Miss Gostrey's little museum of bargains and from Chad's lovely home; he
recognised it as founded much more on old accumulations that had possibly from
time to time shrunken than on any contemporary method of acquisition or form of
curiosity. Chad and Miss Gostrey had rummaged and purchased and picked up and
exchanged, sifting, selecting, comparing; whereas the mistress of the scene
before him, beautifully passive under the spell of transmission - transmission
from her father's line, he quite made up his mind - had only received, accepted
and been quiet. When she hadn't been quiet she had been moved at the most to
some occult charity for some fallen fortune. There had been objects she or her
predecessors might even conceivably have parted with under need, but Strether
couldn't suspect them of having sold old pieces to get better ones. They would
have felt no difference as to better or worse. He could but imagine their having
felt - perhaps in emigration, in proscription, for his sketch was slight and
confused - the pressure of want or the obligation of sacrifice.
    The pressure of want - whatever might be the case with the other force -
was, however, presumably not active now, for the tokens of a chastened ease
still abounded after all, many marks of a taste whose discriminations might
perhaps have been called eccentric. He guessed at intense little preferences and
sharp little exclusions, a deep suspicion of the vulgar and a personal view of
the right. The general result of this was something for which he had no name on
the spot quite ready, but something he would have come nearest to naming in
speaking of it as the air of supreme respectability, the consciousness, small,
still, reserved, but none the less distinct and diffused, of private honour. The
air of supreme respectability - that was a strange blank wall for his adventure
to have brought him to break his nose against. It had in fact, as he was now
aware, filled all the approaches, hovered in the court as he passed, hung on