"Ces gens-la 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 only thought of ridding herself most quickly of a
possible, an actual encumbrance. The father, by her impression, a
Frenchman with a name one knew, had been a different matter,
leaving his child, she clearly recalled, a memory all fondness, as
well as an assured little fortune which was unluckily to make her
more or less of a prey later on.
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