These things, all the same, he wouldn't breathe to
Madame de Vionnet--much as they might make him walk up and down.
And what he didn't say--as well as what SHE didn't, for she had
also her high decencies--enhanced the effect of his being there
with her at the end of ten minutes more intimately on the basis of
saving her than he had yet had occasion to be. It ended in fact by
being quite beautiful between them, the number of things they had a
manifest consciousness of not saying. He would have liked to turn
her, critically, to the subject of Mrs. Pocock, but he so stuck to
the line he felt to be the point of honour and of delicacy that he
scarce even asked her what her personal impression had been.
He knew it, for that matter, without putting 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.
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