He was conscious now of the final reality, which was that there wasn’t so much a doubt as a difference altogether; all the more that over the difference the famous sculptor seemed to signal almost condolingly, yet oh how vacantly! as across some great flat sheet of water. He threw out the bridge of a charming hollow civility on which Strether wouldn’t have trusted his own full weight a moment. That idea, even though but transient and perhaps belated, had performed the office of putting Strether more at his ease, and the blurred picture had already dropped—dropped with the sound of something else said and with his becoming aware, by another quick turn, that Gloriani was now on the sofa talking with Jeanne, while he himself had in his ears again the familiar friendliness and the elusive meaning of the “Oh, oh, oh!” that had made him, a fortnight before, challenge Miss Barrace in vain. She had always the air, this picturesque and original lady, who struck him, so oddly, as both antique and modern—she had always the air of taking up some joke that one had already had out with her. The point itself, no doubt, was what was antique, and the use she made of it what was modern. He felt just now that her good-natured irony did bear on something, and it troubled him a little that she wouldn’t be more explicit only assuring him, with the pleasure of observation so visible in her, that she wouldn’t tell him more for the world. He could take refuge but in asking her what she had done with Waymarsh, though it must be added that he felt himself a little on the way to a clue after she had answered that this personage was, in the other room, engaged in conversation with Madame de Vionnet. He stared a moment at the image of such a conjunction; then, for Miss Barrace’s benefit, he wondered. “Is she too then under the charm—?” “No, not a bit”—Miss Barrace was prompt. “She makes nothing of him. She’s bored. She won’t help you with him.” “Oh,” Strether laughed, “she can’t do everything. “Of course not—wonderful as she is. Besides, he makes nothing of _her_. She won’t take him from me—though she wouldn’t, no doubt, having other affairs in hand, even if she could. I’ve never,” said Miss Barrace, “seen her fail with any one before. And to-night, when she’s so magnificent, it would seem to her strange—if she minded. So at any rate I have him all. _Je suis tranquille!_” Strether understood, so far as that went; but he was feeling for his clue. “She strikes you to-night as particularly magnificent?” “Surely. Almost as I’ve never seen her. Doesn’t she you? Why it’s _for_ you.” He persisted in his candour. “‘For’ me—?” “Oh, oh, oh!” cried Miss Barrace, who persisted in the opposite of that quality. “Well,” he acutely admitted, “she _is_ different. She’s gay.” “She’s gay!” Miss Barrace laughed. “And she has beautiful shoulders—though there’s nothing different in that.” “No,” said Strether, “one was sure of her shoulders. It isn’t her shoulders.”