[EDGAR] HENRY JAMES AND HIS METHOD 231 



feminine complication of which rumours have reached the startled 

 Woollett ears/ We encounter Strether first at Chester where Miss 

 Gostrey, on scarcely sufficient provocation if the truth were told, 

 takes the wanderer in hand, and gives him with the most. winning and 

 innocent grace his second initiation into the charms of the old world. 

 With each stage of Strether's journey Woollett seems to recede more 

 and more into the background. Accompanied by his friend Way- 

 marsh, who strikes throughout a resonant nasal American note, 

 Strether crosses to Paris to find the erring Chad and to lure him home 

 to business and Woollett. When he presently encounters the young 

 man he recognizes the extraordinary change that five years abroad 

 have wrought in his appearance, his manner, and his point of view, 

 and when later he makes the acquaintance of the fascinating Madame 

 de Vionnet he realizes that she is in large measure responsible for the 

 recreation of Chad. So deep have been the new influences operating 

 upon Strether himself, and so fine a mesh has been woven about his 

 Puritanic soul that he is not inordinately shocked at learning that 

 Madame de Vionnet's husband is still alive. Indeed the process of 

 Strether's saturation is so gradual, and his sensitiveness to impres- 

 sions is so exquisite that the reader is compelled to sympathise with 

 and share the salutary contagion. We are both fortified for the present 

 with little Bilham's assurance that the relations between Chad and 

 Madame de Vionnet are innocent. 



Meanwhile Strether is in almost daily receipt of letters from Mrs. 

 Newsome, and is under the compulsion of replying to them with 

 equal frequency and length. The Woollett widow is punctually 

 informed of all the Parisian happenings, but Strether not being a 

 hypocrite she divines that her ambassador has become contaminated. 

 The first result of this suspicion is the cold infrequency of her letters, 

 the next result is the sudden arrival in Paris of the second ambassador- 

 ial group, Chad's sister, the incorruptible Sarah Pocock, her husband 

 Jim with the emancipated Puritan's zest for the vulgar delights of 

 Paris, and his pleasant little sister Mamie who is quick to take the 

 impression of her new surroundings and who gives to Strether the 

 only sympathy, ineffectual as it is, which he is destined to receive 

 from the direction of America. 



Sarah's mission we presently realise is less the saving of Chad, 

 who is now looked upon as hopeless, than the rescue of Strether, who 

 also proves intractable. The Pocock group and Waymarsh flit away, 

 and Strether lingers on through the Parisian summer with Miss 

 Gostrey, Chad and the Countess to cheer his solitude. A chance 

 country outing reveals to him the far other than innocent relations 

 of Chad and Madame de Vionnet. Yet even to this he reconciles 



