Mrs.Newsome knew in other words that very night at Woollett that he himself knew Madame de Vionnet and that he had conscientiously been to see her; also that he had found her remarkably attractive and that there would probably be a good deal more to tell.
But she further knew, or would know very soon, that, again conscientiously, he hadn't repeated his visit; and that when Chad had asked him on the Countess's behalf--Strether made her out vividly, with a thought at the back of his head, a Countess--if he wouldn't name a day for dining with her, he had replied lucidly: "Thank you very much--impossible." He had begged the young man would present his excuses and had trusted him to understand that it couldn't really strike one as quite the straight thing.

He hadn't reported to Mrs.
Newsome that he had promised to "save" Madame de Vionnet; but, so far as he was concerned with that reminiscence, he hadn't at any rate promised to haunt her house.

What Chad had understood could only, in truth, be inferred from Chad's behaviour, which had been in this connexion as easy as in every other.

He was easy, always, when he understood; he was easier still, if possible, when he didn't; he had replied that he would make it all right; and he had proceeded to do this by substituting the present occasion--as he was ready to substitute others--for any, for every occasion as to which his old friend should have a funny scruple.
"Oh but I'm not a little foreign girl; I'm just as English as I can be," Jeanne de Vionnet had said to him as soon as, in the petit salon, he sank, shyly enough on his own side, into the place near her vacated by Madame Gloriani at his approach.

Madame Gloriani, who was in black velvet, with white lace and powdered hair, and whose somewhat massive majesty melted, at any contact, into the graciousness of some incomprehensible tongue, moved away to make room for the vague gentleman, after benevolent greetings to him which embodied, as he believed, in baffling accents, some recognition of his face from a couple of Sundays before.