The ambassadors

THE NOVELS AND TALES OF
HENRY JAMES

New York Edition

VOLUME XXI

By Notre Dame

THE AMBASSADORS

BY

HENRY JAMES

VOLUME I

Copyright, 1909, by Charles Scribner's Sons
Copyright, 1902, 1903, by Harper & Brothers

Published under special arrangement with
Harper & Brothers

l~~

yin foy-cT N^ '

SRLF
URL V*

PREFACE

NOTHING is. more easy than to state the subject of " The
Ambassadors," which first appeared in twelve numbers of
The North American Review (1903) and was published as
a whole the same year. The situation involved is gathered
up betimes, that is in the second chapter of Book Fifth, for
the reader's benefit, into as few words as possible — planted
or " sunk," stiffly and saliently, in the centre of the current,
almost perhaps to the obstruction of traffic. Never can a com
position of this sort have sprung straighter from a dropped
grain of suggestion, and never can that grain, developed,
overgrown and smothered, have yet lurked more in the
mass as an independent particle. The whole case, in fine, is
in Lambert Strether's irrepressible outbreak to little Bilham
on the Sunday afternoon in Gloriani's garden, the candour
with which he yields, for his young friend's enlightenment,
to the charming admonition of that crisis. The idea of the
tale resides indeed in the very fact that an hour of such un
precedented ease should have been felt by him as a crisis, and
he is at pains to express it for us as neatly as we could de
sire. The remarks to which he thus gives utterance contain
the essence of " The Ambassadors," his fingers close, before
he has done, round the stem of the full-blown flower ; which,
after that fashion, he continues officiously to present to us.
" Live all you can ; it 's a mistake not to. It does n't so much
matter what you do in particular so long as you have your
life. If you have n't had that what have you had ? I 'm too
old — too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one
loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illu
sion of freedom ; therefore don't, like me to-day, be without
the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time,
too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I 'm a case
of reaction against the mistake. Do what you like so long

v

PREFACE

as you don't make it. For it was a mistake. Live, live ! "
Such is the gist of Strether's appeal to the impressed youth,
whom he likes and whom he desires to befriend ; the word
" mistake " occurs several times, it will be seen, in the course
of his remarks — which gives the measure of the signal
warning he feels attached to his case. He has accordingly
missed too much, though perhaps after all constitutionally
qualified for a better part, and he wakes up to it in condi
tions that press the spring of a terrible question. Would
there yet perhaps be time for reparation ? — reparation, that
is, for the injury done his character ; for the affront, he is
quite ready to say, so stupidly put upon it and in which he
has even himself had so clumsy a hand ? The answer to
which is that he now at all events sees ; so that the business
of my tale and the march of my action, not to say the
precious moral of everything, is just my demonstration of
this process of vision.

Nothing can exceed the closeness with which the whole
fits again into its germ. That had been given me bodily, as
usual, by the spoken word, for I was to take the image over
exactly as I happened to have met it. A friend had repeated
to me, with great appreciation, a thing or two said to him
by a man of distinction, much his senior, and to which a
sense akin to that of Strether's melancholy eloquence might
be imputed — said as chance would have, and so easily
might, in Paris, and in a charming old garden attached to a
house of art, and on a Sunday afternoon of summer, many
persons of great interest being present. The observation
there listened to and gathered up had contained part of the
" note " that I was to recognise on the spot as to my pur
pose — had contained in fact the greater part ; the rest was
in the place and the time and the scene they sketched : these
constituents clustered and combined to give me further sup
port, to give me what I may call the note absolute. There
it stands, accordingly, full in the tideway ; driven in, with
hard taps, like some strong stake for the noose of a cable,
the swirl of the current roundabout it. What amplified the
hint to more than the bulk of hints in general was the gift

vi

PREFACE

with it of the old Paris garden, for in that token were sealed
up values infinitely precious. There was of course the seal
to break and each item of the packet to count over and
handle and estimate ; but somehow, in the light of the hint,
all the elements of a situation of the sort most to my taste
were there. I could even remember no occasion on which,
so confronted, I had found it of a livelier interest to take
stock, in this fashion, of suggested wealth. For I think,
verily, that there are degrees of merit in subjects — in spite
of the fact that to treat even one of the most ambiguous
with due decency we must for the time, for the feverish and
prejudiced hour, at least figure its merit and its dignity as
possibly absolute. What it comes to, doubtless, is that even
among the supremely good — since with such alone is it
one's theory of one's honour to be concerned — there is
an ideal beauty of goodness the invoked action of which is to
raise the artistic faith to its maximum. Then truly, I hold,
one's theme may be said to shine, and that of " The Am
bassadors," I confess, wore this glow for me from beginning
to end. Fortunately thus I am able to estimate this as,
frankly, quite the best, " all round," of all my productions ;
any failure of that justification would have made such an
extreme of complacency publicly fatuous.

I recall then in this connexion no moment of subjective
intermittence, never one of those alarms as for a suspected
hollow beneath one's feet, a felt ingratitude in the scheme
adopted, under which confidence fails and opportunity seems
but to mock. If the motive of "The Wings of the Dove,"
as I have noted, was to worry me at moments by a sealing-
up of its face — though without prejudice to its again, of
a sudden, fairly grimacing with expression — so in this other
business I had absolute conviction and constant clearness to
deal with ; it had been a frank proposition, the whole bunch
of data, installed on my premises like a monotony of fine
weather. (The order of composition, in these things, I may
mention, was reversed by the order of publication ; the
earlier written of the two books having appeared as the
later.) Even under the weight of my hero's years I could feel

vii

PREFACE

my postulate firm ; even under the strain of the difference
between those of Madame de Vionnet and those of Chad
Newsome, a difference liable to be denounced as shocking,
I could still feel it serene. Nothing resisted, nothing be
trayed, I seem to make out, in this full and sound sense of
the matter ; it shed from any side I could turn it to the same
golden glow. I rejoiced in the promise of a hero so mature,
who would give me thereby the more to bite into — since
it *s only into thickened motive and accumulated character,
I think, that the painter of life bites more than a little. My
poor friend should have accumulated character, certainly ; or
rather would be quite naturally and handsomely possessed of
it, in the sense that he would have, and would always have
felt he had, imagination galore, and that this yet would n't
have wrecked him. It was immeasurable, the opportunity
to " do " a man of imagination, for if there might n't be
a chance to " bite," where in the world might it be ? This
personage of course, so enriched, would n't give me, for his
type, imagination in predominance or as his prime faculty, nor
should I, in view of other matters, have found that conven
ient. So particular a luxury — some occasion, that is, for
study of the high gift in supreme command of a case or of
a career — would still doubtless come on the day I should
be ready to pay for it ; and till then might, as from far back,
remain hung up well in view and just out of reach. The
comparative case meanwhile would serve — it was only on
the minor scale that I had treated myself even to compar
ative cases.'

I was to hasten to add however that, happy stopgaps as
the minor scale had thus yielded, the instance in hand should
enjoy the advantage of the full range of the major ; since
most immediately to the point was the question of that
supplement of situation logically involved in our gentle
man's impulse to deliver himself in the Paris garden on the
Sunday afternoon — or if not involved by strict logic then
all ideally and enchantingly implied in it. (I say " ideally,"
because I need scarce mention that for development, for
expression of its maximum, my glimmering story was, at the

viii

PREFACE

earliest stage, to have nipped the thread of connexion with
the possibilities of the actual reported speaker. He remains
but the happiest of accidents ; his actualities, all too defin
ite, precluded any range of possibilities ; it had only been
his charming office to project upon that wide field of the
artist's vision — which hangs there ever in place like the
white sheet suspended for the figures of a child's magic-
lantern — a more fantastic and more moveable shadow.) No
privilege of the teller of tales and the handler of puppets is
more delightful, or has more of the suspense and the thrill
of a game of difficulty breathlessly played, than just this
business of looking for the unseen and the occult, in a
scheme half-grasped, by the light or, so to speak, by the
clinging scent, of the gage already in hand. No dreadful
old pursuit of the hidden slave with bloodhounds and the
rag of association can ever, for " excitement," I judge, have
bettered it at its best. For the dramatist always, by the very
law of his genius, believes not only in a possible right issue
from the rightly-conceived tight place ; he does much more
than this — he believes, irresistibly, in the necessary, the
precious " tightness " of the place (whatever the issue) on
the strength of any respectable hint. It being thus the re
spectable hint that I had with such avidity picked up, what
would be the story to which it would most inevitably form
the centre ? It is part of the charm attendant on such ques
tions that the " story," with the omens true, as I say, puts
on from this stage the authenticity of concrete existence. It
then /V, essentially — it begins to be, though it may more
or less obscurely lurk ; so that the point is not in the least
what to make of it, but only, very delightfully and very
damnably, where to put one's hand on it.

In which truth resides surely much of the interest of that
admirable mixture for salutary application which we know
as art. Art deals with what we see, it must first contribute
full-handed that ingredient; it plucks its material, otherwise
expressed, in the garden of life — which material elsewhere
grown is stale and uneatable. But it has no sooner done
this than it has to take account of a. process — from which

ix

PREFACE

only when it 's the basest of the servants of man, incurring
ignominious dismissal with no " character, " does it, and
whether under some muddled pretext of morality or on any
other, pusillanimously edge away. The process, that of the
expression, the literal squeezing-out, of value is another af
fair — with which the happy luck of mere finding has little
to do. The joys of finding, at this stage, are pretty well
over; that quest of the subject as a whole by "matching,"
as the ladies say at the shops, the big piece with the snip
pet, having ended, we assume, with a capture. The sub
ject is found, and if the problem is then transferred to the
ground of what to do with it the field opens out for any
amount of doing. This is precisely the infusion that, as I
submit, completes the strong mixture. It is on the other
hand the part of the business that can least be likened to
the chase with horn and hound. It 's all a sedentary part —
involves as much ciphering, of sorts, as would merit the
highest salary paid to a chief accountant. Not, however,
that the chief accountant has n't bis gleams of bliss; for the
felicity, or at least the equilibrium, of the artist's state
dwells less, surely, in the further delightful complications
he can smuggle in than in those he succeeds in keeping out.
He sows his seed at the risk of too thick a crop; where
fore yet again, like the gentlemen who audit ledgers, he
must keep his head at any price. In consequence of all
which, for the interest of the matter, I might seem here to
have my choice of narrating my " hunt " for Lambert
Strether, of describing the capture of the shadow projected
by my friend's anecdote, or of reporting on the occurrences
subsequent to that triumph. But I had probably best at
tempt a little to glance in each direction; since it comes to
me again and again, over this licentious record, that one's
bag of adventures, conceived or conceivable, has been only
half-emptied by the mere telling of one's story. It depends
so on what one means by that equivocal quantity. There
is the story of one's hero, and then, thanks to the intimate
connexion of things, the story of one's story itself. I blush
to confess it, but if one 's a dramatist one 's a dramatist, and

x

PREFACE

the latter imbroglio is liable on occasion to strike me as
really the more objective of the two.

The philosophy imputed to him in that beautiful out
break, the hour there, amid such happy provision, striking
for him, would have been then, on behalf of my man of
imagination, to be logically and, as the artless craft of
comedy has it, " led up " to ; the probable course to such a
goal, the goal of so conscious a predicament, would have in
short to be finely calculated. Where has he come from and
why has he come, what is he doing (as we Anglo-Saxons,
and we only, say, in our foredoomed clutch of exotic aids
to expression) in that galere? To answer these questions
plausibly, to answer them as under cross-examination in
the witness-box by counsel for the prosecution, in other
words satisfactorily to account for Strether and for his
" peculiar tone," was to possess myself of the entire fabric.
At the same time the clue to its whereabouts would lie in
a certain principle of probability : he would n't have in
dulged in his peculiar tone without a reason ; it would take
a felt predicament or a false position to give him so ironic
an accent. One had n't been noting " tones " all one's life
without recognising when one heard it the voice of the
false position. The dear man in the Paris garden was then
admirably and unmistakeably in one — which was no small
point gained ; what next accordingly concerned us was the
determination of this identity. One could only go by prob
abilities, but there was the advantage that the most general
of the probabilities were virtual certainties. Possessed of
our friend's nationality, to start with, there was a general
probability in his narrower localism ; which, for that mat
ter, one had really but to keep under the lens for an hour
to see it give up its secrets. He would have issued, our rue
ful worthy, from the very heart of New England — at the
heels of which matter of course a perfect train of secrets
tumbled for me into the light. They had to be sifted and
sorted, and I shall not reproduce the detail of that process ;
but unmistakeably they were all there, and it was but a
question, auspiciously, of picking among them. What the

xi

PREFACE

" position " would infallibly be, and why, on his hands, it
had turned " false " — these inductive steps could only be
as rapid as they were distinct. I accounted for everything —
and " everything " had by this time become the most pro
mising quantity — by the view that he had come to Paris in
some state of mind which was literally undergoing, as a re
sult of new and unexpected assaults and infusions, a change
almost from hour to hour. He had come with a view that
might have been figured by a clear green liquid, say, in a
neat glass phial ; and the liquid, once poured into the open
cup of application, once exposed to the action of another
air, had begun to turn from green to red, or whatever, and
might, for all he knew, be on its way to purple, to black,
to yellow. At the still wilder extremes represented perhaps,
for all he could say to the contrary, by a variability so vio
lent, he would at first, naturally, but have gazed in surprise
and alarm ; whereby the situation clearly would spring from
the play of wildness and the development of extremes. I
saw in a moment that, should this development proceed
both with force and logic, my " story " would leave no
thing to be desired. There is always, of course, for the
story-teller, the irresistible determinant and the incalculable
advantage of his interest in the story as such ; it is ever, ob
viously, overwhelmingly, the prime and precious thing (as
other than this I have never been able to see it) ; as to
which what makes for it, with whatever headlong energy,
may be said to pale before the energy with which it simply
makes for itself. It rejoices, none the less, at its best, to
seem to offer itself in a light, to seem to know, and with
the very last knowledge, what it 's about — liable as it yet
is at moments to be caught by us with its tongue in its
cheek and absolutely no warrant but its splendid impudence.
Let us grant then that the impudence is always there —
there, so to speak, for grace and effect and allure ; there,
above all, because the Story is just the spoiled child of art,
and because, as we are always disappointed when the
pampered don't " play up," we like it, to that extent, to
look all its character. It probably does so, in truth, even

xii

PREFACE

when we most flatter ourselves that we negotiate with it by
treaty.

All of which, again, is but to say that the steps, for my
fable, placed themselves with a prompt and, as it were, func
tional assurance — an air quite as of readiness to have dis
pensed with logic had I been in fact too stupid for my clue.
Never, positively, none the less, as the links multiplied, had
I felt less stupid than for the determination of poor Strether's
errand and for the apprehension of his issue. These things
continued to fall together, as by the neat action of their own
weight and form, even while their commentator scratched
his head about them ; he easily sees now that they were
always well in advance of him. As the case completed it
self he had in fact, from a good way behind, to catch up
with them, breathless and a little flurried, as he best could.
The false position, for our belated man of the world — be
lated because he had endeavoured so long to escape being
one, and now at last had really to face his doom — the false
position for him, I say, was obviously to have presented
himself at the gate of that boundless menagerie primed with
a moral scheme of the most approved pattern which was
yet framed to break down on any approach to vivid facts ;
that is to any at all liberal appreciation of them. There
would have been of course the case of the Strether pre
pared, wherever presenting himself, only to judge and to
feel meanly ; but be would have moved for me, I confess,
enveloped in no legend whatever. The actual man's note,
from the first of our seeing it struck, is the note of dis
crimination, just as his drama is to become, under stress,
the drama of discrimination. It would have been his blest
imagination, we have seen, that had already helped him to
discriminate; the element that was for so much of the
pleasure of my cutting thick, as I have intimated, into his
intellectual, into his moral substance. Yet here it was, at
the same time, just here, that a shade for a moment fell
across the scene.

There was the dreadful little old tradition, one of the
platitudes of the human comedy, that people's moral scheme

xiii

PREFACE

does break down in Paris ; that nothing is more frequently
observed; that hundreds of thousands of more or less hypo
critical or more or less cynical persons annually visit the
place for the sake of the probable catastrophe, and that I
came late in the day to work myself up about it. There
was in fine the trivial association, one of the vulgarest in
the world; but which gave me pause no longer, I think,
simply because its vulgarity is so advertised. The revolution
performed by Strether under the influence of the most in
teresting of great cities was to have nothing to do with any
betise of the imputably " tempted " state ; he was to be
thrown forward, rather, thrown quite with violence, upon
his lifelong trick of intense reflexion: which friendly test
indeed was to bring him out, through winding passages,
through alternations of darkness and light, very much in
Paris, but with the surrounding scene itself a minor matter,
a mere symbol for more things than had been dreamt of in
the philosophy of Woollett. Another surrounding scene
would have done as well for our show could it have repre
sented a place in which Strether's errand was likely to lie
and his crisis to await him. The likely place had the great
merit of sparing me preparations; there would have been
too many involved — not at all impossibilities, only rather
worrying and delaying difficulties — in positing elsewhere
Chad Newsome's interesting relation, his so interesting
complexity of relations. Strether's appointed stage, in fine,
could be but Chad's most luckily selected one. The young
man had gone in, as they say, for circumjacent charm ; and
where he would have found it, by the turn of his mind,
most " authentic," was where his earnest friend's analysis
would most find him ; as well as where, for that matter, the
former's whole analytic faculty would be led such a won
derful dance.

"The Ambassadors" had been, all conveniently, "ar
ranged for " ; its first appearance was from month to month,
in the North American Review during 1903, and I had been
open from far back to any pleasant provocation for ingenu
ity that might reside in one's actively adopting — so as to

xiv

PREFACE

make it, in its way, a small compositional law — recurrent
breaks and resumptions. I had made up my mind here
regularly to exploit and enjoy these often rather rude jolts
— having found, as I believed, an admirable way to it ; yet
every question of form and pressure, I easily remember,
paled in the light of the major propriety, recognised as soon
as really weighed ; that of employing but one centre and
keeping it all within my hero's compass. The thing was to
be so much this worthy's intimate adventure that even the
projection of his consciousness upon it from beginning to
end without intermission or deviation would probably still
leave a part of its value for him, and a fortiori for ourselves,
unexpressed. I might, however, express every grain of it
that there would be room for — on condition of contriving
a splendid particular economy. Other persons in no small
number were to people the scene, and each with his or her
axe to grind, his or her situation to treat, his or her coher
ency not to fail of, his or her relation to my leading mot
ive, in a word, to establish and carry on. But Strether's
sense of these things, and Strether's only, should avail me
for showing them; I should know them but through his
more or less groping knowledge of them, since his very
gropings would figure among his most interesting motions,
and a full observance of the rich rigour I speak of would
give me more of the effect I should be most " after " than
all other possible observances together. It would give me a
large unity, and that in turn would crown me with the grace
to which the enlightened story-teller will at any time, for
his interest, sacrifice if need be all other graces whatever.
I refer of course to the grace of intensity, which there are
ways of signally achieving and ways of signally missing —
as we see it, all round us, helplessly and woefully missed.
Not that it is n't, on the other hand, a virtue eminently sub
ject to appreciation — there being no strict, no absolute
measure of it ; so that one may hear it acclaimed where it
has quite escaped one's perception, and see it unnoticed
where one has gratefully hailed it. After all of which I am
not sure, either, that the immense amusement of the whole

xv

PREFACE

cluster of difficulties so arrayed may not operate, for the
fond fabulist, when judicious not less than fond, as his best
of determinants. That charming principle is always there,
at all events, to keep interest fresh : it is a principle, we
remember, essentially ravenous, without scruple and with
out mercy, appeased with no cheap nor easy nourishment.
It enjoys the costly sacrifice and rejoices thereby in the very
odour of difficulty — even as ogres, with their "Fee-faw-
fum!" rejoice in the smell of the blood of Englishmen.

Thus it was, at all events, that the ultimate, though after
all so speedy, definition of my gentleman's job — his com
ing out, all solemnly appointed and deputed, to "save"
Chad, and his then finding the young man so disobligingly
and, at first, so bewilderingly not lost that a new issue alto
gether, in the connexion, prodigiously faces them, which
has to be dealt with in a new light — promised as many
calls on ingenuity and on the higher branches of the com
positional art as one could possibly desire. Again and yet
again, as, from book to book, I proceed with my survey, I
find no source of interest equal to this verification after the
fact, as I may call it, and the more in detail the better, of
the scheme of consistency "gone in" for. As always —
since the charm never fails — the retracing of the process
from point to point brings back the old illusion. The old
intentions bloom again and flower — in spite of all the blos
soms they were to have dropped by the way. This is the
charm, as I say, of adventure transposed — the thrilling ups
and downs, the intricate ins and outs of the compositional
problem, made after such a fashion admirably objective, be
coming the question at issue and keeping the author's heart
in his mouth. Such an element, for instance, as his inten
tion that Mrs. Newsome, away off with her finger on the
pulse of Massachusetts, should yet be no less intensely than
circuitously present through the whole thing, should be no
less felt as to be reckoned with than the most direct exhibi
tion, the finest portrayal at first hand could make her, such
a sign of artistic good faith, I say, once it 's unmistakeably
there, takes on again an actuality not too much impaired by

xvi

PREFACE

the comparative dimness of the particular success. Cher
ished intention too inevitably acts and operates, in the book,
about fifty times as little as I had fondly dreamt it might ;
but that scarce spoils for me the pleasure of recognising the
fifty ways in which I had sought to provide for it. The
mere charm of seeing such an idea constituent, in its de
gree ; the fineness of the measures taken — a real extension,
if successful, of the very terms and possibilities of repre
sentation and figuration — such things alone were, after this
fashion, inspiring, such things alone were a gage of the
probable success of that dissimulated calculation with which
the whole effort was to square. But oh the cares begotten,
none the less, of that same "judicious" sacrifice to a par
ticular form of interest ! One's work should have composi
tion, because composition alone is positive beauty ; but all
the while — apart from one's inevitable consciousness too of
the dire paucity of readers ever recognising or ever missing
positive beauty — how, as to the cheap and easy, at every
turn, how, as to immediacy and facility, and even as to the
commoner vivacity, positive beauty might have to be
sweated for and paid for ! Once achieved and installed it
may always be trusted to make the poor seeker feel he would
have blushed to the roots of his hair for failing of it ; yet,
how, as its virtue can be essentially but the virtue of the
whole, the wayside traps set in the interest of muddlement
and pleading but the cause of the moment, of the particu
lar bit in itself, have to be kicked out of the path ! All the
sophistications in life, for example, might have appeared to
muster on behalf of the menace — the menace to a bright
variety — involved in Strether's having all the subjective
u say," as it were, to himself.

Had I, meanwhile, made him at once hero and historian,
endowed him with the romantic privilege of the " first
person " — the darkest abyss of romance this, inveterately,
when enjoyed on the grand scale — variety, and many other
queer matters as well, might have been smuggled in by a
back door. Suffice it, to be brief, that the first person, in the
\ong piece, is a form foredoomed to looseness, and that

xvii

PREFACE

looseness, never much my affair, had never been so little so
as on this particular occasion. All of which reflexions
flocked to the standard from the moment — a very early
one — the question of how to keep my form amusing while
sticking so close to my central figure and constantly taking
its pattern from him had to be faced. He arrives (arrives at
Chester) as for the dreadful purpose of giving his creator
"no end" to tell about him — before which rigorous mis
sion the serenest of creators might well have quailed. I was
far from the serenest ; I was more than agitated enough to
reflect that, grimly deprived of one alternative or one sub
stitute for " telling," I must address myself tooth and nail
to another. I could n't, save by implication, make other per
sons tell each other about him — blest resource, blest neces
sity, of the drama, which reaches its effects of unity, all
remarkably, by paths absolutely opposite to the paths of the
novel : with other persons, save as they were primarily his
persons (not he primarily but one of theirs), I had simply
nothing to do. I had relations for him none the less, by the
mercy of Providence, quite as much as if my exhibition
was to be a muddle ; if I could only by implication and a
show of consequence make other persons tell each other
about him, I could at least make him tell them whatever in
the world he must ; and could so, by the same token —
which was a further luxury thrown in — see straight into
the deep differences between what that could do for me, or
at all events for him, and the large ease of " autobiography."
It may be asked why, if one so keeps to one's hero, one
should n't make a single mouthful of " method," should n't
throw the reins on his neck and, letting them flap there as
free as in " Gil Bias " or in " David Copperfield," equip
him with the double privilege of subject and object — a
course that has at least the merit of brushing away ques
tions at a sweep. The answer to which is, I think, that one
makes that surrender only if one is prepared not to make
certain precious discriminations.

The "first person" then, so employed, is addressed by
the author directly to ourselves, his possible readers, whom

xviii

PREFACE

he has to reckon with, at the best, by our English tradition,
so loosely and vaguely after all, so little respectfully, on so
scant a presumption of exposure to criticism. Strether, on
the other hand, encaged and provided for as " The Ambas
sadors " encages and provides, has to keep in view proprie
ties much stiffer and more salutary than any our straight
and credulous gape are likely to bring home to him, has
exhibitional conditions to meet, in a word, that forbid the
terrible fluidity of self-revelation. I may seem not to better
the case for my discrimination if I say that, for my first
care, I had thus inevitably to set him up a confidant or
two, to wave away with energy the custom of the seated
mass of explanation after the fact, the inserted block of
merely referential narrative, which flourishes so, to the
shame of the modern impatience, on the serried page of
Balzac, but which seems simply to appal our actual, our
general weaker, digestion. " Harking back to make up "
took at any rate more doing, as the phrase is, not only than
the reader of to-day demands, but than he will tolerate at
any price any call upon him either to understand or re
motely to measure ; and for the beauty of the thing when
done the current editorial mind in particular appears wholly
without sense. It is not, however, primarily for either of
these reasons, whatever their weight, that Strether's friend
Waymarsh is so keenly clutched at, on the threshold of the
book, or that no less a pounce is made on Maria Gostrey
— without even the pretext, either, of her being, in essence,
Strether's friend. She is the reader's friend much rather —
in consequence of dispositions that make him so eminently
require one ; and she acts in that capacity, and really in that
capacity alone, with exemplary devotion, from beginning to
end of the book. She is an enrolled, a direct, aid to lucid
ity ; she is in fine, to tear off her mask, the most unmiti
gated and abandoned of ficelles. Half the dramatist's art, as
we well know — since if we don't it 's not the fault of the
proofs that lie scattered about us — is in the use of ficelles ;
by which I mean in a deep dissimulation of his dependence
on them. Waymarsh only to a slighter degree belongs, in

xix

PREFACE

the whole business, less to my subject than to my treatment
of it ; the interesting proof, in these connexions, being that
one has but to take one's subject for the stuff of drama to
interweave with enthusiasm as many Gostreys as need be.
The material of "The Ambassadors," conforming in
this respect exactly to that of " The Wings of the Dove,"
published just before it, is taken absolutely for the stuff of
drama ; so that, availing myself of the opportunity given
me by this edition for some prefatory remarks on the latter
work, I had mainly to make on its behalf the point of its
scenic consistency. It disguises that virtue, in the oddest
way in the world, by just looking, as we turn its pages, as
little scenic as possible; but it sharply divides itself, just as
the composition before us does, into the parts that prepare,
that tend in fact to over-prepare, for scenes, and the parts,
or otherwise into the scenes, that justify and crown the
preparation. It may definitely be said, I think, that every
thing in it that is not scene (not, I of course mean,
complete and functional scene, treating all the submitted
matter, as by logical start, logical turn, and logical finish)
is discriminated preparation, is the fusion and synthesis
of picture. These alternations propose themselves all re-
cogniseably, I think, from an early stage, as the very form
and figure of " The Ambassadors " ; so that, to repeat, such
an agent as Miss Gostrey, pre-engaged at a high salary,
but waits in the draughty wing with her shawl and her
smelling-salts. Her function speaks at once for itself, and
by the time she has dined with Strether in London and gone
to a play with him her intervention as a ficelle is, I hold,
expertly justified. Thanks to it we have treated scenically,
and scenically alone, the whole lumpish question of Streth
er' s " past," which has seen us more happily on the way
than anything else could have done ; we have strained to
a high lucidity and vivacity (or at least we hope we have)
certain indispensable facts ; we have seen our two or three
immediate friends all conveniently and profitably in "ac
tion"; to say nothing of our beginning to descry others,
of a remoter intensity, getting into motion, even if a bit

xx

PREFACE

vaguely as yet, for our further enrichment. Let my first
point be here that the scene in question, that in which the
whole situation at Woollett and the complex forces that
have propelled my hero to where this lively extractor of his
value and distiller of his essence awaits him, is normal and
entire, is really an excellent standard scene; copious, com
prehensive, and accordingly never short, but with its office
as definite as that of the hammer on the gong of the clock,
the office of expressing all that is in the hour.

The "ficelle " character of the subordinate party is as art
fully dissimulated, throughout, as may be, and to that extent
that, with the seams or joints of Maria Gostrey's ostensible
connectedness taken particular care of, duly smoothed
over, that is, and anxiously kept from showing as " pieced
on," this figure doubtless achieves, after a fashion, some
thing of the dignity of a prime idea : which circumstance
but shows us afresh how many quite incalculable but none
the less clear sources of enjoyment for the infatuated artist,
how many copious springs of our never-to-be-slighted " fun "
for the reader and critic susceptible of contagion, may sound
their incidental plash as soon as an artistic process begins
to enjoy free development. Exquisite — in illustration of
this — the mere interest and amusement of such at once
u creative " and critical questions as how and where and
why to make Miss Gostrey's false connexion carry itself,
under a due high polish, as a real one. Nowhere is it more
of an artful expedient for mere consistency of form, to
mention a case, than in the last " scene " of the book, where
its function is to give or to add nothing whatever, but only
to express as vividly as possible certain things quite other
than itself and that are of the already fixed and appointed
measure. Since, however, all art is expression, and is thereby
vividness, one was to find the door open here to any amount
of delightful dissimulation. These verily are the refinements
and ecstasies of method — amid which, or certainly under
the influence of any exhilarated demonstration of which, one
must keep one's head and not lose one's way. To cultivate
an adequate intelligence for them and to make that sense

xxi

PREFACE

operative is positively to find a charm in any produced am
biguity of appearance that is not by the same stroke, and
all helplessly, an ambiguity of sense. To project imaginat
ively, for my hero, a relation that has nothing to do with
the matter (the matter of my subject) but has everything to
do with the manner (the manner of my presentation of the
same) and yet to treat it, at close quarters and for fully
economic expression's possible sake, as if it were important
and essential — to do that sort of thing and yet muddle
nothing may easily become, as one goes, a signally attach
ing proposition; even though it all remains but part and
parcel, I hasten to recognise, of the merely general and re
lated question of expressional curiosity and expressional
decency.

I am moved to add after so much insistence on the scenic
side of my labour that I have found the steps of re-perusal
almost as much waylaid here by quite another style of effort
in the same signal interest — or have in other words not
failed to note how, even so associated and so discriminated,
the finest proprieties and charms of the non-scenic may,
under the right hand for them, still keep their intelligibility
and assert their office. Infinitely suggestive such an observa
tion as this last on the whole delightful head, where repre
sentation is concerned, of possible variety, of effective
expressional change and contrast. One would like, at such
an hour as this, for critical licence, to go into the matter of
the noted inevitable deviation (from too fond an original
vision) that the exquisite treachery even of the straightest
execution may ever be trusted to inflict even on the most
mature plan — the case being that, though one's last recon
sidered production always seems to bristle with that partic
ular evidence, " The Ambassadors " would place a flood of
such light at my service. I must attach to my final remark
here a different import ; noting in the other connexion I
just glanced at that such passages as that of my hero's first
encounter with Chad Newsome, absolute attestations of the
non-scenic form though they be, yet lay the firmest hand
too — so far at least as intention goes — on representational

xxii

PREFACE

effect. To report at all closely and completely of what
" passes " on a given occasion is inevitably to become more
or less scenic ; and yet in the instance I allude to, with
the conveyance, expressional curiosity and expressional de
cency are sought and arrived at under quite another law.
The true inwardness of this may be at bottom but that one
of the suffered treacheries has consisted precisely, for Chad's
whole figure and presence, of a direct presentability dimin
ished and compromised — despoiled, that is, of its propor
tional advantage ; so that, in a word, the whole economy of
his author's relation to him has at important points to be
redetermined. The book, however, critically viewed, is
touchingly full of these disguised and repaired losses, these
insidious recoveries, these intensely redemptive consisten
cies. The pages in which Mamie Pocock gives her appointed
and, I can't but think, duly felt lift to the whole action by
the so inscrutably-applied side-stroke or short-cut of our
just watching, and as quite at an angle of vision as yet un
tried, her single hour of suspense in the hotel salon, in our
partaking of her concentrated study of the sense of matters
bearing on her own case, all the bright warm Paris after
noon, from the balcony that overlooks the Tuileries garden
— these are as marked an example of the representational
virtue that insists here and there on being, for the charm of
opposition and renewal, other than the scenic. It would n't
take much to make me further argue that from an equal
play of such oppositions the book gathers an intensity that
fairly adds to the dramatic — though the latter is supposed
to be the sum of all intensities ; or that has at any rate
nothing to fear from juxtaposition with it. I consciously
fail to shrink in fact from that extravagance — I risk it,
rather, for the sake of the moral involved ; which is not that
the particular production before us exhausts the interesting
questions it raises, but that the Novel remains still, under
the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic,
most prodigious of literary forms.

HENRY JAMES.

BOOK FIRST

THE AMBASSADORS

STRETHER'S first question, when he reached the
hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that
Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening
he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from
him bespeaking a room "only if not noisy," reply
paid, was produced for the enquirer at the office, so
that the understanding they should meet at Chester
rather than at Liverpool remained to that extent
sound. The same secret principle, however, that
had prompted Strether not absolutely to desire Way-
marsh's presence at the dock, that had led him thus
to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of it, now
operated to make him feel he could still wait without
disappointment. They would dine together at the
worst, and, with all respect to dear old Waymarsh —
if not even, for that matter, to himself — there was
little fear that in the sequel they should n't see enough
of each other. The principle I have just mentioned as
operating had been, with the most newly disembarked
of the two men, wholly instinctive — the fruit of a
sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find
himself looking, after so much separ^:i^n, into his
comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled
should he simply arrange for this countenance to pre
sent itself to the nearing steamer as the first "note,"
of Europe. Mixed with everything was the appre-

3

THE AMBASSADORS

hension, already, on Strether's part, that it would, at
best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in quite
a sufficient degree.

That note had been meanwhile — since the pre
vious afternoon, thanks to this happier device — such
a consciousness of personal freedom as he had n't
known for years ; such a deep taste of change and of
having above all for the moment nobody and nothing
to consider, as promised already, if headlong hope
were not too foolish, to colour his adventure with cool
success. There were people on the ship with whom
he had easily consorted — so far as ease could up to
now be imputed to him — and who for the most part
plunged straight into the current that set from the
landing-stage to London; there were others who had
invited him to a tryst at the inn and had even invoked
his aid for a "look round" at the beauties of Liver
pool; but he had stolen away from every one alike,
had kept no appointment and renewed no acquaint
ance, had been indifferently aware of the number
of persons who esteemed themselves fortunate in
being, unlike himself, "met," and had even independ
ently, unsociably, alone, without encounter or relapse
and by mere quiet evasion, given his afternoon and
evening to the immediate and the sensible. They
formed a qualified draught of Europe, an afternoon
and an evening on the banks of the Mersey, but such
as it was he took his potion at least undiluted. He
winced a little, truly, at the thought that Waymarsh
might be already at Chester; he reflected that, should
he have to describe himself there as having "got in"
so early, it would be difficult to make the interval

4

BOOK FIRST

look particularly eager; but he was like a man who,
elatedly rinding in his pocket more money than usual,
handles it a while and idly and pleasantly chinks it
before addressing himself to the business of spending.
That he was prepared to be vague to Waymarsh about
the hour of the ship's touching, and that he both wanted
extremely to see him and enjoyed extremely the dura
tion of delay — these things, it is to be conceived, were
early signs in him that his relation to his actual errand
might prove none of the simplest. He was burdened,
poor Strether — it had better be confessed at the
outset — with the oddity of a double consciousness.
There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his
indifference.

After the young woman in the glass cage had held
up to him across her counter the pale-pink leaflet
bearing his friend's name, which she neatly pro
nounced, he turned away to find himself, in the hall,
facing a lady who met his eyes as with an intention
suddenly determined, and whose features — not
freshly young, not markedly fine, but on happy terms
with each other — came back to him as from a recent
vision. For a moment they stood confronted ; then the
moment placed her: he had noticed her the day be
fore, noticed her at his previous inn, where — again
in the hall — she had been briefly engaged with some
people of his own ship's company. Nothing had actu
ally passed between them, and he would as little have
been able to say what had been the sign of her face
for him on the first occasion as to name the ground
of his present recognition. Recognition at any rate
appeared to prevail on her own side as well — which

5

THE AMBASSADORS

would only have added to the mystery. All she now
began by saying to him nevertheless was that, having
chanced to catch his enquiry, she was moved to ask,
by his leave, if it were possibly a question of Mr. Way-
marsh of Milrose Connecticut — Mr. Waymarsh the
American lawyer.

"Oh yes," he replied, "my very well-known friend.
He 's to meet me here, coming up from Malvern, and
I supposed he 'd already have arrived. But he does n't
come till later, and I 'm relieved not to have kept him.
Do you know him ? " Strether wound up.

It was n't till after he had spoken that he became
aware of how much there had been in him of response;
when the tone of her own rejoinder, as well as the play
of something more in her face — something more,
that is, than its apparently usual restless light — •
seemed to notify him. "I've met him at Milrose —
where I used sometimes, a good while ago, to stay;
I had friends there who were friends of his, and I 've
been at his house. I won't answer for it that he
would know me," Strether's new acquaintance pur
sued ; " but I should be delighted to see him. Perhaps,"
she added, "I shall — for I'm staying over." She
paused while our friend took in these things, and it
was as if a good deal of talk had already passed.
They even vaguely smiled at it, and Strether presently
observed that Mr. Waymarsh would, no doubt, be
easily to be seen. This, however, appeared to affect
the lady as if she might have advanced too far. She
appeared to have no reserves about anything. " Oh,"
she said, "he won't care!" — and she immediately
thereupon remarked that she believed Strether knew

6

BOOK FIRST

the Ministers ; the Munsters being the people he had
seen her with at Liverpool.

But he did n't, it happened, know the Munsters well
enough to give the case much of a lift; so that they
were left together as if over the mere laid table of
conversation. Her qualification of the mentioned con
nexion had rather removed than placed a dish, and
there seemed nothing else to serve. Their attitude re
mained, none the less, that of not forsaking the board ;
and the effect of this in turn was to give them the
appearance of having accepted each other with an
absence of preliminaries practically complete. They
moved along the hall together, and Strether's com
panion threw off that the hotel had the advantage
of a garden. He was aware by this time of his strange
inconsequence : he had shirked the intimacies of the
steamer and had muffled the shock of Waymarsh only
to find himself forsaken, in this sudden case, both of
avoidance and of caution. He passed, under this
unsought protection and before he had so much as
gone up to his room, into the garden of the hotel,
and at the end of ten minutes had agreed to meet
there again, as soon as he should have made himself
tidy, the dispenser of such good assurances. He
wanted to look at the town, and they would forthwith
look together. It was almost as if she had been in
possession and received him as a guest. Her acquaint
ance with the place presented her in a manner as a
hostess, and Strether had a rueful glance for the
lady in the glass cage. It was as if this personage had
seen herself instantly superseded.

When in a quarter of an hour he came down, what

7

THE AMBASSADORS

his hostess saw, what she might have taken in with a
vision kindly adjusted, was the lean, the slightly loose
figure of a man of the middle height and something
more perhaps than the middle age — a man of five-
and-fifty, whose most immediate signs were a marked
bloodless brownness of face, a thick dark moustache,
of characteristically American cut, growing strong
and falling low, a head of hair still abundant but
irregularly streaked with grey, and a nose of bold free
prominence, the even line, the high finish, as it might
have been called, of which, had a certain effect of
mitigation. A perpetual pair of glasses astride of
this fine ridge, and a line, unusually deep and drawn,
the prolonged pen-stroke of time, accompanying
the curve of the moustache from nostril to chin, did
something to complete the facial furniture that an
attentive observer would have seen catalogued, on the
spot, in the vision of the other party to Strether's
appointment. She waited for him in the garden, the
other party, drawing on a pair of singularly fresh soft
and elastic light gloves and presenting herself with a
superficial readiness which, as he approached her over
the small smooth lawn and in the watery English
sunshine, he might, with his rougher preparation,
have marked as the model for such an occasion. She
had, this lady, a perfect plain propriety, an expensive
subdued suitability, that her companion was not free
to analyse, but that struck him, so that his conscious
ness of it was instantly acute, as a quality quite new
to him. Before reaching her he stopped on the grass
and went through the form of feeling for something,
possibly forgotten, in the light overcoat he carried

8

BOOK FIRST

on his arm ; yet the essence of the act was no more than
the impulse to gain time. Nothing could have been
odder than Strether's sense of himself as at that
moment launched in something of which the sense
would be quite disconnected from the sense of his
past and which was literally beginning there and
then. It had begun in fact already upstairs and before
the dressing-glass that struck him as blocking fur
ther, so strangely, the dimness of the window of his
dull bedroom; begun with a sharper survey of the
elements of Appearance than he had for a long time
been moved to make. He had during those moments
felt these elements to be not so much to his hand as he
should have liked, and then had fallen back on the
thought that they were precisely a matter as to which
help was supposed to come from what he was about
to do. He was about to go up to London, so that hat
and necktie might wait. What had come as straight
to him as a ball in a well-played game — and caught
moreover not less neatly — was just the air, in the
person of his friend, of having seen and chosen, the
air of achieved possession of those vague qualities
and quantities that collectively figured to him as the
advantage snatched from lucky chances. Without
pomp or circumstance, certainly, as her original
address to him, equally with his own response, had
been, he would have sketched to himself his impres
sion of her as: "Well, she's more thoroughly civil
ized — ! " If " More thoroughly than whom ? " would
not have been for him a sequel to this remark, that
was just by reason of his deep consciousness of the
bearing of his comparison.

9

THE AMBASSADORS

The amusement, at all events, of a civilisation
intenser was what — familiar compatriot as she was,
with the full tone of the compatriot and the rattling
link not with mystery but only with dear dyspeptic
Waymarsh — she appeared distinctly to promise.
His pause while he felt in his overcoat was positively
the pause of confidence, and it enabled his eyes to
make out as much of a case for her, in proportion, as
her own made out for himself. She affected him as
almost insolently young; but an easily carried five-
and-thirty could still do that. She was, however, like
himself, marked and wan ; only it naturally could n't
have been known to him how much a spectator look
ing from one to the other might have discerned that
they had in common. It would n't for such a spec
tator have been altogether insupposable that, each
so finely brown and so sharply spare, each confessing
so to dents of surface and aids to sight, to a dispro
portionate nose and a head delicately or grossly
grizzled, they might have been brother and sister. On
this ground indeed there would have been a residuum
of difference; such a sister having surely known in
respect to such a brother the extremity of separation,
and such a brother now feeling in respect to such a
sister the extremity of surprise. Surprise, it was true,
was not on the other hand what the eyes of Strether's
friend most showed him while she gave him, stroking
her gloves smoother, the time he appreciated. They
had taken hold of him straightway, measuring him
up and down as if they knew how ; as if he were human
material they had already in some sort handled.
Their possessor was in truth, it may be communicated,

10

BOOK FIRST

the mistress of a hundred cases or categories, recep
tacles of the mind, subdivisions for convenience,
in which, from a full experience, she pigeon-holed
her fellow mortals with a hand as free as that of a
compositor scattering type. She was as equipped in
this particular as Strether was the reverse, and it
made an opposition between them which he might
well have shrunk from submitting to if he had fully
suspected it. So far as he did suspect it he was on
the contrary, after a short shake of his consciousness,
as pleasantly passive as might be. He really had a
sort of sense of what she knew. He had quite the
sense that she knew things he did n't, and though
this was a concession that in general he found not
easy to make to women, he made it now as good-
humouredly as if it lifted a burden. His eyes were so
quiet behind his eternal nippers that they might
almost have been absent without changing his face,
which took its expression mainly, and not least its
stamp of sensibility, from other sources, surface and
grain and form. He joined his guide in an instant,
and then felt she had profited still better than he by
his having been, for the moments just mentioned, so
at the disposal of her intelligence. She knew even
intimate things about him that he had n't yet told
her and perhaps never would. He was n't unaware
that he had told her rather remarkably many for
the time, but these were not the real ones. Some
of the real ones, however, precisely, were what she
knew.

They were to pass again through the hall of the inn
to get into the street, and it was here she presently

ii

THE AMBASSADORS
checked him with a question. " Have you looked up

my name ?''

He could only stop with a laugh. " Have you looked
up mine?"

; " Oh dear, yes — as soon as you left me. I went to
the office and asked. Had n't you better do the same ?"

He wondered. "Find out who you are? — after
the uplifted young woman there has seen us thus
scrape acquaintance!"

She laughed on her side now at the shade of alarm
in his amusement. "Is n't it a reason the more? If
what you 're afraid of is the injury for me — my being
seen to walk off with a gentleman who has to ask who
I am — I assure you I don't in the least mind. Here,
however," she continued, "is my card, and as I find
there's something else again I have to say at the
office, you can just study it during the moment I leave
you."

She left him after he had taken from her the small
pasteboard she had extracted from her pocket-book,
and he had extracted another from his own, to ex
change with it, before she came back. He read thus
the simple designation "Maria Gostrey," to which
was attached, in a corner of the card, with a number,
the name of a street, presumably in Paris, without
other appreciable identity than its foreignness. He
put the card into his waistcoat pocket, keeping his
own meanwhile in evidence; and as he leaned against
the door-post he met with the smile of a straying
thought what the expanse before the hotel offered to
his view. It was positively droll to him that he should
already have Maria Gostrey, whoever she was — of

12

BOOK FIRST

which he had n't really the least idea — in a place
of safe keeping. He had somehow an assurance that
he should carefully preserve the little token he had
just tucked in. He gazed with unseeing lingering
eyes as he followed some of the implications of his
act, asking himself if he really felt admonished to
qualify it as disloyal. It was prompt, it was possibly
even premature, and there was little doubt of the
expression of face the sight of it would have pro
duced in a certain person. But if it was "wrong" —
why then he had better not have come out at all. At
this, poor man, had he already — and even before
meeting Waymarsh — arrived. He had believed he
had a limit, but the limit had been transcended
within thirty-six hours. By how long a space on the
plane of manners, or even of morals, moreover, he felt
still more sharply after Maria Gostrey had come
back to him and with a gay decisive "So now — !"
led him forth into the world. This counted, it struck
him as he walked beside her with his overcoat on an
arm, his umbrella under another and his personal
pasteboard a little stiffly retained between forefinger
and thumb, this struck him as really, in comparison,
his introduction to things. It had n't been "Europe"
at Liverpool, no — not even in the dreadful delightful
impressive streets the night before — to the extent
his present companion made it so. She had n't yet
done that so much as when, after their walk had lasted
a few minutes and he had had time to wonder if
a couple of sidelong glances from her meant that he
had best have put on gloves, she almost pulled him
up with an amused challenge. " But why — fondly

13

THE AMBASSADORS

as it 's so easy to imagine your clinging to it — don't
you put it away ? Or if it 's an inconvenience to you
to carry it, one 's often glad to have one's card back.
The fortune one spends in them ! "

Then he saw both that his way of marching with
his own prepared tribute had affected her as a devia
tion in one of those directions he could n't yet meas
ure, and that she supposed this emblem to be still
the one he had received from her. He accordingly
handed her the card as if in restitution, but as soon
as she had it she felt the difference and, with her eyes
on it, stopped short for apology. "I like," she ob
served, "your name."

"Oh," he answered, "you won't have heard of it!"
Yet he had his reasons for not being sure but that she
perhaps might.

Ah it was but too visible ! She read it over again
as one who had never seen it. "'Mr. Lewis Lambert
Strether ' " — she sounded it almost as freely as for
any stranger. She repeated however that she liked it
— "particularly the Lewis Lambert. It's the name
of a novel of Balzac's."

"Oh I know that!" said Strether.

"But the novel's an awfully bad one."

" I know that too," Strether smiled. To which he
added with an irrelevance that was only superficial :
" I come from Woollett Massachusetts." It made her
for some reason — the irrelevance or whatever —
laugh. Balzac had described many cities, but had n't
described Woollett Massachusetts. "You say that,"
she returned, " as if you wanted one immediately to
know the worst."

BOOK FIRST

"Oh I think it's a thing," he said, "that you must
already have made out. I feel it so that I certainly
must look it, speak it, and, as people say there, ' act '
it. It sticks out of me, and you knew surely for your
self as soon as you looked at me/'

" The worst, you mean ? "

"Well, the fact of where I come from. There at any
rate it is; so that you won't be able, if anything hap
pens, to say I 've not been straight with you."

" I see " — and Miss Gostrey looked really inter
ested in the point he had made. "But what do you
think of as happening ? "

Though he was n't shy — which was rather anom
alous — Strether gazed about without meeting her
eyes; a motion that was frequent with him in talk,
yet of which his words often seemed not at all the
effect. "Why that you should find me too hopeless."
With which they walked on again together while she
answered, as they went, that the most "hopeless" of
her countryfolk were in general precisely those she
liked best. All sorts of other pleasant small things —
small things that were yet large for him — flowered
in the air of the occasion ; but the bearing of the oc
casion itself on matters still remote concerns us too
closely to permit us to multiply our illustrations. Two
or three, however, in truth, we should perhaps re
gret to lose. The tortuous wall — girdle, long since
snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place
by careful civic hands — wanders in narrow file be
tween parapets smoothed by peaceful generations,
pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a
bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps

15

THE AMBASSADORS

down, queer twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely
streets and under the brows of gables, views of cathe
dral tower and waterside fields, of huddled English
town and ordered English country. Too deep almost
for words was the delight of these things to Strether;
yet as deeply mixed with it were certain images of his
inward picture. He had trod this walk in the far-off
time, at twenty-five; but that, instead of spoiling it,
only enriched it for present feeling and marked his
renewal as a thing substantial enough to share. It
was with Waymarsh he should have shared it, and
he was now accordingly taking from him something
that was his due. He looked repeatedly at his watch,
and when he had done so for the fifth time Miss
Gostrey took him up.

" You 're doing something that you think not right."

It so touched the place that he quite changed colour
and his laugh grew almost awkward. "Am I enjoying
it as much as that?"

"You're not enjoying it, I think, so much as you
ought."

" I see " — he appeared thoughtfully to agree.
"Great is my privilege."

" Oh it 's not your privilege ! It has nothing to do
with me. It has to do with yourself. Your failure's
general."

"Ah there you are!" he laughed. "It's the failure
ofWoollett. That's general."

"The failure to enjoy," Miss Gostrey explained, "is
what I mean."

" Precisely. Woollett is n't sure it ought to enjoy.
If it were it would. But it has n't, poor thing,"

16

BOOK FIRST

Strether continued, " any one to show it how. It 's not
like me. I have somebody."

They had stopped, in the afternoon sunshine —
constantly pausing, in their stroll, for the sharper
sense of what they saw — and Strether rested on one
of the high sides of the old stony groove of the little
rampart. He leaned back on this support with his face
to the tower of the cathedral, now admirably com
manded by their station, the high red-brown mass,
square and subordinately spired and crocketed, re
touched and restored, but charming to his long-sealed
eyes and with the first swallows of the year weaving
their flight all round it. Miss Gostrey lingered near
him, full of an air, to which she more and more justi
fied her right, of understanding the effect of things.
She quite concurred. "You've indeed somebody."
And she added : " I wish you would let me show you
how!"

"Oh I'm afraid of you!" he cheerfully pleaded.

She kept on him a moment, through her glasses and
through his own, a certain pleasant pointedness.
"Ah no, you're not! You're not in the least, thank
goodness ! If you had been we should n't so soon
have found ourselves here together. I think," she
comfortably concluded, "you trust me."

" I think I do ! — but that 's exactly what I 'm afraid
of. I should n't mind if I did n't. It 's falling thus
in twenty minutes so utterly into your hands. I dare
say," Strether continued, " it 's a sort of thing you 're
thoroughly familiar with ; but nothing more extraor
dinary has ever happened to me."

She watched him with all her kindness. "That

17

THE AMBASSADORS

means simply that you've recognised me — which
is rather beautiful and rare. You see what I am."
As on this, however, he protested, with a good-hum
oured headshake, a resignation of any such claim, she
had a moment of explanation. " If you '11 only come
on further as you have come you '11 at any rate make
out. My own fate has been too many for me, and I 've
succumbed to it. I 'm a general guide — to ' Europe,'
don't you know ? I wait for people — I put them
through. I pick them up — I set them down. I 'm
a sort of superior * courier-maid/ I'm a companion
at large. I take people, as I've told you, about. I
never sought it — it has come to me. It has been my
fate, and one's fate one accepts. It 's a dreadful thing
to have to say, in so wicked a world, but I verily be
lieve that, such as you see me, there 's nothing I don't
know. I know all the shops and the prices — but I
know worse things still. I bear on my back the huge
load of our national consciousness, or, in other words
— for it comes to that — of our nation itself. Of what
is our nation composed but of the men and women
individually on my shoulders ? I don't do it, you
know, for any particular advantage. I don't do it,
for instance — some people do, you know — for
money."

Strether could only listen and wonder and weigh his
chance. " And yet, affected as you are then to so many
of your clients, you can scarcely be said to do it for love."
He waited a moment. " How do we reward you ? "

She had her own hesitation, but "You don't!" she
finally returned, setting him again in motion. They
went on, but in a few minutes, though while still

18

BOOK FIRST

thinking over what she had said, he once more took
out his watch; mechanically, unconsciously and as
if made nervous by the mere exhilaration of what
struck him as her strange and cynical wit. He looked
at the hour without seeing it, and then, on something
again said by his companion, had another pause.
" You 're really in terror of him."

He smiled a smile that he almost felt to be sickly.
" Now you can see why I 'm afraid of you."

"Because I've such illuminations? Why they're
all for your help ! It 's what I told you," she added,
"just now. You feel as if this were wrong."

He fell back once more, settling himself against the
parapet as if to hear more about it. "Then get me
out!"

Her face fairly brightened for the joy of the appeal,
but, as if it were a question of immediate action, she
visibly ' considered. " Out of waiting for him ? — of
seeing him at all ? "

"Oh no — not that," said poor Strether, looking
grave. " I 've got to wait for him — and I want very
much to see him. But out of the terror. You did put
your finger on it a few minutes ago. It 's general, but
it avails itself of particular occasions. That 's what
it 's doing for me now. I 'm always considering some
thing else; something else, I mean, than the thing of
the moment. The obsession of the other thing is the
terror. I 'm considering at present for instance some
thing else than you"

She listened with charming earnestness. "Oh you
ought n't to do that!"

" It 's what I admit. Make it then impossible."

19

THE AMBASSADORS

She continued to think. "Is it really an 'order'
from you ? — that I shall take the job ? Will you give
yourself up ? "

Poor Strether heaved his sigh. " If I only could !
But that 's the deuce of it — that I never can. No —
I can't."

She was n't, however, discouraged. " But you want
to at least ? "

"Oh unspeakably!"

"Ah then, if you'll try!" — and she took over the
job, as she had called it, on the spot. "Trust me!"
she exclaimed ; and the action of this, as they retraced
their steps, was presently to make him pass his hand
into her arm in the manner of a benign dependent
paternal old person who wishes to be "nice" to a
younger one. If he drew it out again indeed as they
approached the inn this may have been because, after
more talk had passed between them, the relation of
age, or at least of experience — which, for that mat
ter, had already played to and fro with some freedom
— affected him as incurring a readjustment. It was
at all events perhaps lucky that they arrived in suf
ficiently separate fashion within range of the hotel-
door. The young lady they had left in the glass cage
watched as if she had come to await them on the
threshold. At her side stood a person equally inter
ested, by his attitude, in their return, and the effect
of the sight of whom was instantly to determine for
Strether another of those responsive arrests that we
have had so repeatedly to note. He left it to Miss
Gostrey to name, with the fine full bravado, as it
almost struck him, of her " Mr. Waymarsh ! " what

20

BOOK FIRST

was to have been, what — he more than ever felt as his
short stare of suspended welcome took things in —
would have been, but for herself, his doom. It was
already upon him even at that distance — Mr. Way-
marsh was for bis part joyless.

II

HE had none the less to confess to this friend that
evening that he knew almost nothing about her, and
it was a deficiency that Waymarsh, even with his
memory refreshed by contact, by her own prompt
and lucid allusions and enquiries, by their having
publicly partaken of dinner in her company, and by
another stroll, to which she was not a stranger, out
into the town to look at the cathedral by moonlight —
it was a blank that the resident of Milrose, though
admitting acquaintance with the Munsters, professed
himself unable to fill. He had no recollection of Miss
Gostrey, and two or three questions that she put
to him about those members of his circle had, to
Strether's observation, the same effect he himself had
already more directly felt — the effect of appearing
to place all knowledge, for the time, on this original
woman's side. It interested him indeed to mark the
limits of any such relation for her with his friend as
there could possibly be a question of, and it particu
larly struck him that they were to be marked alto
gether in Waymarsh's quarter. This added to his own
sense of having gone far with her — gave him an
early illustration of a much shorter course. There was
a certitude he immediately grasped — a conviction
that Waymarsh would quite fail, as it were, and on
whatever degree of acquaintance, to profit by her.
There had been after the first interchange among
22

BOOK FIRST

the three a talk of some five minutes in the hall, and
then the two men had adjourned to the garden, Miss
Gostrey for the time disappearing. Strether in due
course accompanied his friend to the room he had
bespoken and had, before going out, scrupulously
visited; where at the end of another half-hour he
had no less discreetly left him. On leaving him
he repaired straight to his own room, but with the
prompt effect of feeling the compass of that cham
ber resented by his condition. There he enjoyed at
once the first consequence of their reunion. A place
was too small for him after it that had seemed large
enough before. He had awaited it with something
he would have been sorry, have been almost ashamed
not to recognise as emotion, yet with a tacit assump
tion at the same time that emotion would in the event
find itself relieved. The actual oddity was that he was
only more excited ; and his excitement — to which in
deed he would have found it difficult instantly to give
a name — brought him once more downstairs and
caused him for some minutes vaguely to wander. He
went once more to the garden; he looked into the
public room, found Miss Gostrey writing letters and
backed out; he roamed, fidgeted and wasted time;
but he was to have his more intimate session with his
friend before the evening closed.

It was late — not till Strether had spent an hour
upstairs with him — that this subject consented to be
take himself to doubtful rest. Dinner and the sub
sequent stroll by moonlight — a dream, on Strether's
part, of romantic effects rather prosaically merged in
a mere missing of thicker coats — had measurably

23

THE AMBASSADORS

intervened, and this midnight conference was the re
sult of Waymarsh's having (when they were free, as
he put it, of their fashionable friend) found the smok
ing-room not quite what he wanted, and yet bed what
he wanted less. His most frequent form of words was
that he knew himself, and they were applied on this
occasion to his certainty of not sleeping. He knew
himself well enough to know that he should have a
night of prowling unless he should succeed, as a pre
liminary, in getting prodigiously tired. If the effort
directed to this end involved till a late hour the pre
sence of Strether — consisted, that is, in the detention
of the latter for full discourse — there was yet an
impression of minor discipline involved for our friend
in the picture Waymarsh made as he sat in trousers
and shirt on the edge of his couch. With his long legs
extended and his large back much bent, he nursed
alternately, for an almost incredible time, his elbows
and his beard. He struck his visitor as extremely, as
almost wilfully uncomfortable ; yet what had this been
for Strether, from that first glimpseof him disconcerted
in the porch of the hotel, but the predominant note ?
The discomfort was in a manner contagious, as well as
also in a manner inconsequent and unfounded; the
visitor felt that unless he should get used to it — or
unless Waymarsh himself should — it would consti
tute a menace for his own prepared, his own already
confirmed, consciousness of the agreeable. On their
first going up together to the room Strether had se
lected for him Waymarsh had looked it over in silence
and with a sigh that represented for his companion, if
not the habit of disapprobation, at least the despair

24

BOOK FIRST

of felicity; and this look had recurred to Strether as
the key of much he had since observed. " Europe,"
he had begun to gather from these things, had up to
now rather failed of its message to him ; he had n't got
into tune with it and had at the end of three months
almost renounced any such expectation.

He really appeared at present to insist on that by
just perching there with the gas in his eyes. This of
itself somehow conveyed the futility of single recti
fications in a multiform failure. He had a large hand
some head and a large sallow seamed face — a strik
ing significant physiognomic total, the upper range
of which, the great political brow, the thick loose
hair, the dark fuliginous eyes, recalled even to a gener
ation whose standard had dreadfully deviated the
impressive image, familiar by engravings and busts,
of some great national worthy of the earlier part of
the mid-century. He was of the personal type — and
it was an element in the power and promise that in
their early time Strether had found in him — of the
American statesman, the statesman trained in "Con
gressional halls," of an elder day. The legend had
been in later years that as the lower part of his face,
which was weak, and slightly crooked, spoiled the
likeness, this was the real reason for the growth of his
beard, which might have seemed to spoil it for those
not in the secret. He shook his mane; he fixed, with
his admirable eyes, his auditor or his observer; he
wore no glasses and had a way, partly formidable,
yet also partly encouraging, as from a representative
to a constituent, of looking very hard at those who
approached him. He met you as if you had knocked

25

THE AMBASSADORS

and he had bidden you enter. Strether, who had n't
seen him for so long an interval, apprehended him now
with a freshness of taste, and had perhaps never done
him such ideal justice. The head was bigger, the eyes
finer, than they need have been for the career; but
that only meant, after all, that the career was itself
expressive. What it expressed at midnight in the
gas-glaring bedroom at Chester was that the subject
of it had, at the end of years, barely escaped, by flight
in time, a general nervous collapse. But this very
proof of the full life, as the full life was understood at
Milrose, would have made to Strether' s imagination
an element in which Waymarsh could have floated
easily had he only consented to float. Alas nothing so
little resembled floating as the rigour with which, on
the edge of his bed, he hugged his posture of pro
longed impermanence. It suggested to his comrade
something that always, when kept up, worried him
— a person established in a railway-coach with a for
ward inclination. It represented the angle at which
poor Waymarsh was to sit through the ordeal of
Europe.

Thanks to the stress of occupation, the strain of
professions, the absorption and embarrassment of
each, they had not, at home, during years before this
sudden brief and almost bewildering reign of com
parative ease> found so much as a day for a meeting;
a fact that was in some degree an explanation of the
sharpness with which most of his friend's features
stood out to Strether. Those he had lost sight of since
the early time came back to him ; others that it was
never possible to forget struck him now as sitting,

26

BOOK FIRST

clustered and expectant, like a somewhat defiant
family-group, on the door-step of their residence. The
room was narrow for its length, and the occupant of
the bed thrust so far a pair of slippered feet that the
visitor had almost to step over them in his recurrent
rebounds from his chair to fidget back and forth.
There were marks the friends made on things to talk
about, and on things not to, and one of the latter in
particular fell like the tap of chalk on the blackboard.
Married at thirty, Waymarsh had not lived with his
wife for fifteen years, and it came up vividly between
them in the glare of the gas that Strether was n't to
ask about her. He knew they were still separate and
that she lived at hotels, travelled in Europe, painted
her face and wrote her husband abusive letters, of
not one of which, to a certainty, that sufferer spared
himself the perusal; but he respected without dif
ficulty the cold twilight that had settled on this side
of his companion's life. It was a province in which
mystery reigned and as to which Waymarsh had never
spoken the informing word. Strether, who wanted to
do him the highest justice wherever he could do it,
singularly admired him for the dignity of this reserve,
and even counted it as one of the grounds — grounds
all handled and numbered — for ranking him, in the
range of their acquaintance, as a success. He was a
success, Waymarsh, in spite of overwork, or prostra
tion, of sensible shrinkage, of his wife's letters and of
his not liking Europe. Strether would have reckoned
his own career less futile had he been able to put into
it anything so handsome as so much fine silence. One
might one's self easily have left Mrs. Waymarsh ; and

27

THE AMBASSADORS

one would assuredly have paid one's tribute to the
ideal in covering with that attitude the derision of
having been left by her. Her husband had held his
tongue and had made a large income ; and these were
in especial the achievements as to which Strether
envied him. Our friend had had indeed on his side
too a subject for silence, which he fully appreciated ;
but it was a matter of a different sort, and the figure
of the income he had arrived at had never been high
enough to look any one in the face.

" I don't know as I quite see what you require it for.
You don't appear sick to speak of." It was of Europe
Waymarsh thus finally spoke.

"Well," said Strether, who fell as much as possible
into step, "I guess I don't feel sick now that I've
started. But I had pretty well run down before I did
start."

Waymarsh raised his melancholy look. " Ain't you
about up to your usual average ? "

It was not quite pointedly sceptical, but it seemed
somehow a plea for the purest veracity, and it thereby
affected our friend as the very voice of Mil rose. He
had long since made a mental distinction — though
never in truth daring to betray it — between the voice
of Milrose and the voice even of Woollett. It was
the former, he felt, that was most in the real tradition.
There had been occasions in his past when the sound
of it had reduced him to temporary confusion, and
the present, for some reason, suddenly became such
another. It was nevertheless no light matter that the
very effect of his confusion should be to make him
again prevaricate. "That description hardly does

28

BOOK FIRST

justice to a man to whom it has done such a lot of
good to see you.1'

Waymarsh fixed on his washing-stand the silent
detached stare with which Milrose in person, as it
were, might have marked the unexpectedness of a
compliment from Woollett; and Strether, for his part,
felt once more like Woollett in person. " I mean," his
friend presently continued, "that your appearance
is n't as bad as I 've seen it : it compares favourably
with what it was when I last noticed it." On this ap
pearance Waymarsh' s eyes yet failed to rest ; it was
almost as if they obeyed an instinct of propriety, and
the effect was still stronger when, always considering
the basin and jug, he added : "You 've filled out some
since then."

"I'm afraid I have," Strether laughed: "one does
fill out some with all one takes in, and I 've taken in,
I dare say, more than I've natural room for. I was
dog-tired when I sailed." It had the oddest sound of
cheerfulness.

"7 was dog-tired," his companion returned, "when
I arrived, and it 's this wild hunt for rest that takes all
the life out of me. The fact is, Strether — and it 's a
comfort to have you here at last to say it to; though
I don't know, after all, that I 've really waited ; I 've
told it to people I Ve met in the cars — the fact is,
such a country as this ain't my kind of country any
way. There ain't a country I've seen over here that
does seem my kind. Oh I don't say but what there are
plenty of pretty places and remarkable old things;
but the trouble is that I don't seem to feel anywhere
in tune. That's one of the reasons why I suppose

29

THE AMBASSADORS

I Ve gained so little. I have n't had the first sign of
that lift I was led to expect." With this he broke out
more earnestly. " Look here — I want to go back."

His eyes were all attached to Strether' s now, for
he was one of the men who fully face you when they
talk of themselves. This enabled his friend to look
at him hard and immediately to appear to the highest
advantage in his eyes by doing so. "That's a genial
thing to say to a fellow who has come out on purpose
to meet you ! "

Nothing could have been finer, on this, than Way-
marsh's sombre glow. "Have you come out on
purpose ?"

"Well — very largely."

" I thought from the way you wrote there was some
thing back of it."

Strether hesitated. " Back of my desire to be with
you?"

" Back of your prostration."

Strether, with a smile made more dim by a certain
consciousness, shook his head. "There are all the
causes of it!"

"And no particular cause that seemed most to
drive you ? "

Our friend could at last conscientiously answer.
"Yes. One. There is a matter that has had much
to do with my coming out."

Waymarsh waited a little. "Too private to men
tion?"

"No, not too private — for you. Only rather com
plicated."

"Well," said Waymarsh, who had waited again,
30

BOOK FIRST

" I may lose my mind over here, but I don't know as
I've done so yet."

"Oh you shall have the whole thing. But not to
night."

Waymarsh seemed to sit stiffer and to hold his
elbows tighter. "Why not — if I can't sleep ?"

"Because, my dear man, I can!"

" Then where 's your prostration ? "

" Just in that — that I can put in eight hours."
And Strether brought it out that if Waymarsh did n't
"gain" it was because he did n't go to bed : the result
of which was, in its order, that, to do the latter
justice, he permitted his friend to insist on his really
getting settled. Strether, with a kind coercive hand
for it, assisted him to this consummation, and again
found his own part in their relation auspiciously en
larged by the smaller touches of lowering the lamp
and seeing to a sufficiency of blanket. It somehow
ministered for him to indulgence to feel Waymarsh,
who looked unnaturally big and black in bed, as
much tucked in as a patient in a hospital and, with his
covering up to his chin, as much simplified by it.
He hovered in vague pity, to be brief, while his com
panion challenged him out of the bedclothes. "Is she
really after you ? Is that what 's behind ? "

Strether felt an uneasiness at the direction taken
by his companion's insight, but he played a little at
uncertainty. " Behind my coming out ? "

" Behind your prostration or whatever. It 's gener
ally felt, you know, that she follows you up pretty
close."

Strether's candour was never very far off. "Oh

31

THE AMBASSADORS

it has occurred to you that I'm literally running
away from Mrs. Newsome ? "

"Well, I have n't known but what you are. You're
a very attractive man, Strether. You've seen for
yourself," said Waymarsh, "what that lady down
stairs makes of it. Unless indeed," he rambled on
with an effect between the ironic and the anxious,
"it's you who are after her. Is Mrs. Newsome over
here ? " He spoke as with a droll dread of her.

It made his friend — though rather dimly — smile.
" Dear no ; she 's safe, thank goodness — as I think
I more and more feel — at home. She thought of
coming, but she gave it up. I've come in a manner
instead of her; and come to that extent — for you 're
right in your inference — on her business. So you see
there is plenty of connexion."

Waymarsh continued to see at least all there was.
"Involving accordingly the particular one I've re
ferred to ? "

Strether took another turn about the room, giving
a twitch to his companion's blanket and finally gain
ing the door. His feeling was that of a nurse who had
earned personal rest by having made everything
straight. " Involving more things than I can think of
breaking ground on now. But don't be afraid — you
shall have them from me : you '11 probably find your
self having quite as much of them as you can do with.
I shall — if we keep together — very much depend
on your impression of some of them."

Waymarsh's acknowledgement of this tribute was
characteristically indirect. "You mean to say you
don't believe we will keep together ? "

32

BOOK FIRST

"I only glance at the danger," Strether paternally
said, " because when I hear you wail to go back I seem
to see you open up such possibilities of folly."

Waymarsh took it — silent a little — like a large
snubbed child. " What are you going to do with me ? "

It was the very question Strether himself had put
to Miss Gostrey, and he wondered if he had sounded
like that. But he at least could be more definite.
"I'm going to take you right down to London."

"Oh I 've been down to London !" Waymarsh more
softly moaned. "I've no use, Strether, for anything
down there."

"Well," said Strether, good-humouredly, "I guess
you've some use for me"

"So I've got to go?"

"Oh you've got to go further yet."

"Well," Waymarsh sighed, "do your damnedest!
Only you will tell me before you lead me on all the
way — ?"

Our friend had again so lost himself, both for
amusement and for contrition, in the wonder of
whether he had made, in his own challenge that after
noon, such another figure, that he for an instant
missed the thread. "Tell you — ?"

" Why what you 've got on hand."

Strether hesitated. "Why it's such a matter as
that even if I positively wanted I should n't be able to
keep it from you."

Waymarsh gloomily gazed. "What does that mean
then but that your trip is just for her ?"

"For Mrs. Newsome ? Oh it certainly is, as I say.
Very much."

33

THE AMBASSADORS

"Then why do you also say it's for me?"

Strether, in impatience, violently played with his
latch. " It 's simple enough. It 's for both of you."

Waymarsh at last turned over with a groan. "Well,
/ won't marry you ! "

"Neither, when it comes to that — !" But the
visitor had already laughed and escaped.

Ill

HE had told Miss Gostrey he should probably take,
for departure with Waymarsh, some afternoon train,
and it thereupon in the morning appeared that this
lady had made her own plan for an earlier one. She
had breakfasted when Strether came into the coffee-
room; but, Waymarsh not having yet emerged, he
was in time to recall her to the terms of their under
standing and to pronounce her discretion overdone.
She was surely not to break away at the very moment
she had created a want. He had met her as she rose
from her little table in a window, where, with the
morning papers beside her, she reminded him, as
he let her know, of Major Pendennis breakfasting at
his club — a compliment of which she professed a
deep appreciation ; and he detained her as pleadingly
as if he had already — and notably under pressure of
the visions of the night — learned to be unable to do
without her. She must teach him at all events, before
she went, to order breakfast as breakfast was ordered
in Europe, and she must especially sustain him in the
problem of ordering for Waymarsh. The latter had
laid upon his friend, by desperate sounds through the
door of his room, dreadful divined responsibilities in
respect to beefsteak and oranges — responsibilities
which Miss Gostrey took over with an alertness of
action that matched her quick intelligence. She had
before this weaned the expatriated from traditions

35

THE AMBASSADORS

compared with which the matutinal beefsteak was but
the creature of an hour, and it was not for her, with
some of her memories, to falter in the path ; though she
freely enough declared, on reflexion, that there was
always in such cases a choice of opposed policies.
"There are times when to give them their head, you
know—!"

They had gone to wait together in the garden for
the dressing of the meal, and Strether found her more
suggestive than ever. "Well, what ?"

"Is to bring about for them such a complexity of
relations — unless indeed we call it a simplicity ! —
that the situation has to wind itself up. They want to
go back."

"And you want them to go!" Strether gaily con
cluded.

" I always want them to go, and I send them as fast
as I can."

"Oh I know — you take them to Liverpool."

"Any port will serve in a storm. I'm — with all
my other functions — an agent for repatriation. I
want to re-people our stricken country. What will
become of it else ? I want to discourage others."

The ordered English garden, in the freshness of
the day, was delightful to Strether, who liked the
sound, under his feet, of the tight fine gravel, packed
with the chronic damp, and who had the idlest eye
for the deep smoothness of turf and the clean curves
of paths. " Other people ? "

"Other countries. Other people — yes. I want
to encourage our own."

Strether wondered. "Not to come ? Why then do

36

BOOK FIRST

you 'meet ' them ? — since it does n't appear to be
to stop them ? "

" Oh that they should n't come is as yet too much to
ask. What I attend to is that they come quickly and
return still more so. I meet them to help it to be over
as soon as possible, and though I don't stop them I 've
my way of putting them through. That's my little
system ; and, if you want to know," said Maria Gos-
trey, "it's my real secret, my innermost mission and
use. I only seem, you see, to beguile and approve;
but I 've thought it all out and I 'm working all the
while underground. I can't perhaps quite give you
my formula, but I think that practically I succeed.
I send you back spent. So you stay back. Passed
through my hands — "

" We don't turn up again ? " The further she went
the further he always saw himself able to follow. " I
don't want your formula — I feel quite enough, as I
hinted yesterday, your abysses. Spent!" he echoed.
" If that 's how you 're arranging so subtly to send me
I thank you for the warning."

For a minute, amid the pleasantness — poetry in
tariffed items, but all the more, for guests already
convicted, a challenge to consumption — they smiled
at each other in confirmed fellowship. "Do you call
it subtly ? It 's a plain poor tale. Besides, you 're a
special case."

" Oh special cases — that 's weak ! " She was weak
enough, further still, to defer her journey and agree
to accompany the gentlemen on their own, might a
separate carriage mark her independence; though it
was in spite of this to befall after luncheon that she

37

THE AMBASSADORS

went off alone and that, with a tryst taken for a day of
her company in London, they lingered another night.
She had, during the morning — spent in a way that
he was to remember later on as the very climax of his
foretaste, as warm with presentiments, with what
he would have called collapses — had all sorts of
things out with Strether; and among them the fact
that though there was never a moment of her life
when she wasn't "due" somewhere, there was yet
scarce a perfidy to others of which she was n't capable
for his sake. She explained moreover that wherever
she happened to be she found a dropped thread to
pick up, a ragged edge to repair, some familiar appe
tite in ambush, jumping out as she approached, yet
appeasable with a temporary biscuit. It became, on
her taking the risk of the deviation imposed on him
by her insidious arrangement of his morning meal, a
point of honour for her not to fail with Waymarsh of
the larger success too; and her subsequent boast to
Strether was that she had made their friend fare —
and quite without his knowing what was the matter
— as Major Pendennis would have fared at the Me
gatherium. She had made him breakfast like a gentle
man, and it was nothing, she forcibly asserted, to
what she would yet make him do. She made him par
ticipate in the slow reiterated ramble with which, for
Strether, the new day amply filled itself; and it was
by her art that he somehow had the air, on the ram
parts and in the Rows, of carrying a point of his own.
The three strolled and stared and gossiped, or at
least the two did; the case really yielding for their
comrade, if analysed, but the element of stricken

38

BOOK FIRST

silence. This element indeed affected Strether as
charged with audible rumblings, but he was conscious
of the care of taking it explicitly as a sign of pleasant
peace. He would n't appeal too much, for that pro
voked stiffness ; yet he would n't be too freely tacit,
for that suggested giving up. Waymarsh himself ad
hered to an ambiguous dumbness that might have
represented either the growth of a perception or the
despair of one; and at times and in places — where the
low-browed galleries were darkest, the opposite gables
queerest, the solicitations of every kind densest —
the others caught him fixing hard some object of
minor interest, fixing even at moments nothing dis
cernible, as if he were indulging it with a truce. When
he met Strether's eye on such occasions he looked
guilty and furtive, fell the next minute into some atti
tude of retractation. Our friend could n't show him the
right things for fear of provoking some total renounce
ment, and was tempted even to show him the wrong
in order to make him differ with triumph. There were
moments when he himself felt shy of professing the
full sweetness of the taste of leisure, and there were
others when he found himself feeling as if his pass
ages of interchange with the lady at his side might
fall upon the third member of their party very much
as Mr. Burchell, at Dr. Primrose's fireside, was influ
enced by the high flights of the visitors from London.
The smallest things so arrested and amused him that
he repeatedly almost apologised — brought up afresh
in explanation his plea of a previous grind. He was
aware at the same time that his grind had been as
nothing to Waymarsh's, and he repeatedly confessed

39

THE AMBASSADORS

that, to cover his frivolity, he was doing his best for
his previous virtue. Do what he might, in any case,
his previous virtue was still there, and it seemed fairly
to stare at him out of the windows of shops that were
not as the shops of Woollett, fairly to make him want
things that he should n't know what to do with. It
was by the oddest, the least admissible of laws de
moralising him now; and the way it boldly took was
to make him want more wants. These first walks in
Europe were in fact a kind of finely lurid intimation of
what one might find at the end of that process. Had
he come back after long years, in something already
so like the evening of life, only to be exposed to it ?
It was at all events over the shop-windows that he
made, with Waymarsh, most free; though it would
have been easier had not the latter most sensibly
yielded to the appeal of the merely useful trades. He
pierced with his sombre detachment the plate-glass
of ironmongers and saddlers, while Strether flaunted
an affinity with the dealers in stamped letter-paper
and in smart neckties. Strether was in fact recur
rently shameless in the presence of the tailors, though
it was just over the heads of the tailors that his coun
tryman most loftily looked. This gave Miss Gostrey
a grasped opportunity to back up Waymarsh at his
expense. The weary lawyer — it was unmistakeable
— had a conception of dress; but that, in view of
some of the features of the effect produced, was just
what made the danger of insistence on it. Strether
wondered if he by this time thought Miss Gostrey
less fashionable or Lambert Strether more so ; and it
appeared probable that most of the remarks ex-

40

BOOK FIRST

changed between this latter pair about passers, fig
ures, faces, personal types, exemplified in their degree
the disposition to talk as "society" talked.

Was what was happening to himself then, was what
already had happened, really that a woman of fashion
was floating him into society and that an old friend
deserted on the brink was watching the force of the
current ? When the woman of fashion permitted
Strether — as she permitted him at the most — the
purchase of a pair of gloves, the terms she made about
it, the prohibition of neckties and other items till she
should be able to guide him through the Burlington
Arcade, were such as to fall upon a sensitive ear as a
challenge to just imputations. Miss Gostrey was such
a woman of fashion as could make without a symp
tom of vulgar blinking an appointment for the Bur
lington Arcade. Mere discriminations about a pair of
gloves could thus at any rate represent — always for
such sensitive ears as were in question — possibil
ities of something that Strether could make a mark
against only as the peril of apparent wantonness. He
had quite the consciousness of his new friend, for
their companion, that he might have had of a Jesuit
in petticoats, a representative of the recruiting inter
ests of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church,
for Waymarsh — that was to say the enemy, the
monster of bulging eyes and far-reaching quivering
groping tentacles — was exactly society, exactly the
multiplication of shibboleths, exactly the discrimina
tion of types and tones, exactly the wicked old Rows
of Chester, rank with feudalism; exactly in short
Europe.

41

THE AMBASSADORS

There was light for observation, however, in an
incident that occurred just before they turned back to
luncheon. Waymarsh had been for a quarter of an
hour exceptionally mute and distant, and something,
or other — Strether was never to make out exactly
what — proved, as it were, too much for him after his
comrades had stood for three minutes taking in, while
they leaned on an old balustrade that guarded the
edge of the Row, a particularly crooked and huddled
street-view. "He thinks us sophisticated, he thinks
us worldly, he thinks us wicked, he thinks us all sorts
of queer things," Strether reflected; for wondrous
were the vague quantities our friend had within a
couple of short days acquired the habit of conven
iently and conclusively lumping together. There
seemed moreover a direct connexion between some
such inference and a sudden grim dash taken by Way-
marsh to the opposite side. This movement was
startlingly sudden, and his companions at first sup
posed him to have espied, to be pursuing, the glimpse
of an acquaintance. They next made out, however,
that an open door had instantly received him, and
they then recognised him as engulfed in the establish
ment of a jeweller, behind whose glittering front he
was lost to view. The act had somehow the note of
a demonstration, and it left each of the others to
show a face almost of fear. But Miss Gostrey broke
into a laugh. "What's the matter with him ?"

"Well," said Strether, "he can't stand it."

" But can't stand what ? "

"Anything. Europe."

"Then how will that jeweller help him?"
42

BOOK FIRST

Strether seemed to make it out, from their position,
between the interstices of arrayed watches, of close-
hung dangling gewgaws. "You'll see."

"Ah that's just what — if he buys anything —
I 'm afraid of: that I shall see something rather dread
ful."

Strether studied the finer appearances. "He may
buy everything."

"Then don't you think we ought to follow him ?"

"Not for worlds. Besides we can't. We're para
lysed. We exchange a long scared look, we publicly
tremble. The thing is, you see, we * realise.' He has
struck for freedom."

She wondered but she laughed. "Ah what a price
to pay ! And I was preparing some for him so cheap."

"No, no," Strether went on, frankly amused now;
"don't call it that : the kind of freedom you deal in is
dear." Then as to justify himself: "Am I not in my
way trying it ? It 's this."

"Being here, you mean, with me?"

"Yes, and talking to you as I do. I 've known you a
few hours, and I 've known him all my life; so that if
the ease I thus take with you about him is n't magni
ficent" — and the thought of it held him a moment
— "why it's rather base."

"It's magnificent!" said Miss Gostrey to make an
end of it. "And you should hear," she added, "the
ease / take — and I above all intend to take — with
Mr. Waymarsh."

Strether thought. "About me? Ah that's no equi
valent. The equivalent would be Waymarsh's himself
serving me up — his remorseless analysis of me. And

43

THE AMBASSADORS

he'll never do that" — he was sadly clear. "He'll
never remorselessly analyse me." He quite held her
with the authority of this. " He '11 never say a word to
you about me."

She took it in; she did it justice; yet after an instant
her reason, her restless irony, disposed of it. "Of
course he won't. For what do you take people, that
they're able to say words about anything, able re
morselessly to analyse ? There are not many like you
and me. It will be only because he 's too stupid."

It stirred in her friend a sceptical echo which was
at the same time the protest of the faith of years.
"Waymarsh stupid?"

"Compared with you."

Strether had still his eyes on the jeweller's front, and
he waited a moment to answer. " He 's a success of a
kind that I have n't approached."

"Do you mean he has made money?"

" He makes it — to my belief. And I," said Strether,
"though with a back quite as bent, have never made
anything. I'm a perfectly equipped failure."

He feared an instant she'd ask him if he meant he
was poor; and he was glad she did n't, for he really
did n't know to what the truth on this unpleasant
point might n't have prompted her. She only, how
ever, confirmed his assertion. "Thank goodness
you 're a failure — it 's why I so distinguish you !
Anything else to-day is too hideous. Look about you
— look at the successes. Would you be one, on your
honour ? Look, moreover," she continued, " at me."

For a little accordingly their eyes met. "I see,"
Strether returned. "You too are out of it."

44

BOOK FIRST

"The superiority you discern in me," she con
curred, " announces my futility. If you knew," she
sighed, " the dreams of my youth ! But our realities
are what has brought us together. We're beaten
brothers in arms."

He smiled at her kindly enough, but he shook his
head. " It does n't alter the fact that you 're expens
ive. You 've cost me already — ! "

But he had hung fire. "Cost you what ?"

"Well, my past — in one great lump. But no mat
ter," he laughed : " I '11 pay with my last penny."

Her attention had unfortunately now been engaged
by their comrade's return, for Waymarsh met their
view as he came out of his shop. "I hope he has n't
paid," she said, "with his last; though I'm convinced
he has been splendid, and has been so for you."

"Ah no — not that!"

"Then for me?"

"Quite as little." Waymarsh was by this time near
enough to show signs his friend could read, though he
seemed to look almost carefully at nothing in par
ticular.

"Then for himself?"

"For nobody. For nothing. For freedom."

"But what has freedom to do with it?"

Strether's answer was indirect. "To be as good as
you and me. But different."

She had had time to take in their companion's face;
and with it, as such things were easy for her, she took
in all. " Different — yes. But better ! "

If Waymarsh was sombre he was also indeed almost
sublime. He told them nothing, left his absence unex-

45

THE AMBASSADORS

plained, and though they were convinced he had
made some extraordinary purchase they were never
to learn its nature. He only glowered grandly at the
tops of the old gables. "It's the sacred rage,"
Strether had had further time to say; and this sacred
rage was to become between them, for convenient
comprehension, the description of oneof his periodical
necessities. It was Strether who eventually contended
that it did make him better than they. But by that
time Miss Gostrey was convinced that she did n':
want to be better than Strether.

BOOK SECOND

THOSE occasions on which Strether was, in association
with the exile from Milrose, to see the sacred rage
glimmer through would doubtless have their due peri
odicity; but our friend had meanwhile to find names
for many other matters. On no evening of his life per
haps, as he reflected, had he had to supply so many
as on the third of his short stay in London ; an evening
spent by Miss Gostrey's side at one of the theatres, to
which he had found himself transported, without his
own hand raised, on the mere expression of a con
scientious wonder. She knew her theatre, she knew
her play, as she had triumphantly known, three days
running, everything else, and the moment filled to the
brim, for her companion, that apprehension of the
interesting which, whether or no the interesting hap
pened to filter through his guide, strained now to its
limits his brief opportunity. Waymarsh had n't come
with them; he had seen plays enough, he signified, be
fore Strether had joined him — an affirmation that had
its full force when his friend ascertained by questions
that he had seen two and a circus. Questions as to
what he had seen had on him indeed an effect only less
favourable than questions as to what he had n't. He
liked the former to be discriminated ; but how could it
be done, Strether asked of their constant counsellor,
without discriminating the latter ?

49

THE AMBASSADORS

/

Miss Gostrey had dined with him at his hotel, face
to face over a small table on which the lighted candles
had rose-coloured shades; and the rose-coloured
shades and the small table and the soft fragrance of
the lady — had anything to his mere sense ever been
so soft ? — were so many touches in he scarce knew
what positive high picture. He had been to the theatre,
even to the opera, in Boston, with Mrs. Newsome,
more than once acting as her only escort; but there
had been no little confronted dinner, no pink lights, no
whiff of vague sweetness, as a preliminary : one of the
results of which was that at present, mildly rueful,
though with a sharpish accent, he actually asked him
self why there had n't. There was much the same
difference in his impression of the noticed state of his
companion, whose dress was "cut down," as he be
lieved the term to be, in respect to shoulders and
bosom, in a manner quite other than Mrs. Newsome's,
and who wore round her throat a broad red velvet
band with an antique jewel — he was rather com
placently sure it was antique — attached to it in front.
Mrs. Newsome's dress was never in any degree " cut
down," and she never wore round her throat a broad
red velvet band : if she had, moreover, would it ever
have served so to carry on and complicate, as he now
almost felt, his vision ?

It would have been absurd of him to trace into ram
ifications the effect of the ribbon from which Miss
Gostrey's trinket depended, had he not for the hour,
at the best, been so given over to uncontrolled per
ceptions. What was it but an uncontrolled perception
that his friend's velvet band somehow added, in her

50

BOOK SECOND

appearance, to the value of every other item — to that
of her smile and of the way she carried her head, to
that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes,
her hair ? What, certainly, had a man conscious of
a man's work in the world to do with red velvet bands ?
He would n't for anything have so exposed himself
as to tell Miss Gostrey how much he liked hers, yet
he had none the less not only caught himself in the
act — frivolous, no doubt, idiotic, and above all un
expected — of liking it : he had in addition taken it as a
' starting-point for fresh backward, fresh forward, fresh
lateral flights. The manner in which Mrs. Newsome's
throat was encircled suddenly represented for him,
in an alien order, almost as many things as the man
ner in which Miss Gostrey's was. Mrs. Newsome
wore, at operatic hours, a black silk dress — very hand
some, he knew it was "handsome" — and an orna
ment that his memory was able further to identify
as a ruche. He had his association indeed with the
ruche, but it was rather imperfectly romantic. He
had once said to the wearer — and it was as "free" a
remark as he had ever made to her — that she looked,
with her ruff and other matters, like Queen Elizabeth ;
and it had after this in truth been his fancy that,
as a consequence of that tenderness and an accept
ance of the idea, the form of this special tribute to the
"frill" had grown slightly more marked. The con
nexion, as he sat there and let his imagination roam,
was to strike him as vaguely pathetic ; but there it all
was, and pathetic was doubtless in the conditions the
best thing it could possibly be. It had assuredly ex
isted at any rate; for it seemed now to come over him

51

THE AMBASSADORS

that no gentleman of his age at Woollett could ever,
to a lady of Mrs. Newsome's, which was not much
less than his, have embarked on such a simile.

All sorts of things in fact now seemed to come over
him, comparatively few of which his chronicler can
hope for space to mention. It came over him for in
stance that Miss Gostrey looked perhaps like Mary
Stuart: Lambert Strether had a candour of fancy
which could rest for an instant gratified in such an
antithesis. It came over him that never before — no,
literally never — had a lady dined with him at a pub
lic place before going to the play. The publicity of the
place was just, in the matter, for Strether, the rare
strange thing; it affected him almost as the achieve
ment of privacy might have affected a man of a dif
ferent experience. He had married, in the far-away
years, so young as to have missed the time natural in
Boston for taking girls to the Museum; and it was
absolutely true of him that — even after the close of
the period of conscious detachment occupying the
centre of his life, the grey middle desert of the two
deaths, that of his wife and that, ten years later, of his
boy — he had never taken any one anywhere. It came
over him in especial — though the monition had, as
happened, already sounded, fitfully gleamed, in other
forms — that the business he had come out on had n't
yet been so brought home to him as by the sight of
the people about him. She gave him the impression,
his friend, at first, more straight than he got it for him
self — gave it simply by saying with off-hand illumin
ation: "Oh yes, they're types!" — but after he had
taken it he made to the full his own use of it; both

52

BOOK SECOND

while he kept silence for the four acts and while he
talked in the intervals. It was an evening, it was a
world of types, and this was a connexion above all
in which the figures and faces in the stalls were inter
changeable with those on the stage.

He felt as if the play itself penetrated him with the
naked elbow of his neighbour, a great stripped hand
some red-haired lady who conversed with a gentleman
on her other side in stray dissyllables which had for
his ear, in the oddest way in the world, so much sound
that he wondered they had n't more sense; and he
recognised by the same law, beyond the footlights,
what he was pleased to take for the very flush of Eng
lish life. He had distracted drops in which he could n't
have said if it were actors or auditors who were most
true, and the upshot of which, each time, was the con
sciousness of new contacts. However he viewed his
job it was "types" he should have to tackle. Those
before him and around him were not as the types of
Woollett, where, for that matter, it had begun to seem
to him that there must only have been the male and the
female. These made two exactly, even with the indi
vidual varieties. Here, on the other hand, apart from
the personal and the sexual range — which might be
greater or less — a series of strong stamps had been
applied, as it were, from without; stamps that his
observation played with as, before a glass case on a
table, it might have passed from medal to medal and
from copper to gold. It befell that in the drama pre
cisely there was a bad woman in a yellow frock who
made a pleasant weak good-looking young man in per
petual evening dress do the most dreadful things.

53

THE AMBASSADORS

Strether felt himself on the whole not afraid of the
yellow frock, but he was vaguely anxious over a cer
tain kindness into which he found himself drifting
for its victim. He had n't come out, he reminded
himself, to be too kind, or indeed to be kind at all,
to Chadwick Newsome. Would Chad also be in per
petual evening dress ? He somehow rather hoped it

— it seemed so to add to this young man's general
amenability; though he wondered too if, to fight him
with his own weapons, he himself (a thought almost
startling) would have likewise to be. This young
man furthermore would have been much more easy
to handle — at least for him — than appeared prob
able in respect to Chad.

It came up for him with Miss Gostrey that there
were things of which she would really perhaps after
all have heard ; and she admitted when a little pressed
that she was never quite sure of what she heard as
distinguished from things such as, on occasions like
the present, she only extravagantly guessed. "I seem
with this freedom, you see, to have guessed Mr. Chad.
He's a young man on whose head high hopes are
placed at Woollett ; a young man a wicked woman has
got hold of and whom his family over there have sent
you out to rescue. You've accepted the mission of
separating him from the wicked woman. Are you
quite sure she 's very bad for him ? "

Something in his manner showed it as quite pulling
him up. " Of course we are. Would n't you be ? "

"Oh I don't know. One never does — does one?

— beforehand. One can only judge on the facts.
Yours are quite new to me; I 'm really not in the least,

54 i

BOOK SECOND

as you see, in possession of them : so it will be awfully
interesting to have them from you. If you 're satis
fied, that's all that's required. I mean if you're sure"
you are sure : sure it won't do."

"That he should lead such a life? Rather!"

"Oh but I don't know, you see, about his life;
you've not told me about his life. She may be
charming — his life ! "

" Charming ? " — Strether stared before him.
"She's base, venal — out of the streets."

"I see. And be — ?"

"Chad, wretched boy?"

" Of what type and temper is he ? " she went on as
Strether had lapsed.

" Well — the obstinate." It was as if for a moment
he had been going to say more and had then con
trolled himself.

That was scarce what she wished. "Do you like
him?"

This time he was prompt. "No. How can I ?"

"Do you mean because of your being so saddled
with him ? "

"I'm thinking of his mother," said Strether after a
moment. "He has darkened her admirable life." He
spoke with austerity. "He has worried her half to
death."

"Oh that's of course odious." She had a pause as
if for renewed emphasis of this truth, but it ended on
another note. "Is her life very admirable?"

" Extraordinarily."

There was so much in the tone that Miss Gostrey
had to devote another pause to the appreciation of it.

55

THE AMBASSADORS

"And has he only her? I don't mean the bad woman
in Paris," she quickly added — " for I assure you I
should n't even at the best be disposed to allow him
more than one. But has he only his mother ? "

" He has also a sister, older than himself and mar
ried; and they're both remarkably fine women."

"Very handsome, you mean ?"

This promptitude — almost, as he might have
thought, this precipitation, gave him a brief drop ; but
he came up again. " Mrs. Newsome, I think, is hand
some, though she 's not of course, with a son of twenty-
eight and a daughter of thirty, in her very first youth.
She married, however, extremely young."

" And is wonderful," Miss Gostrey asked, " for her
age?"

Strether seemed to feel with a certain disquiet the
pressure of it. "I don't say she's wonderful. Or
rather," he went on the next moment, "I do say it.
It 's exactly what she is — wonderful. But I was n't
thinking of her appearance," he explained — "strik
ing as that doubtless is. I was thinking — well, of
many other things." He seemed to look at these as if
to mention some of them ; then took, pulling himself
up, another turn. "About Mrs. Pocock people may
differ."

" Is that the daughter's name — ' Pocock ' ? "

"That's the daughter's name," Strether sturdily
confessed.

"And people may differ, you mean, about her
beauty ? "

"About everything."

" But you admire her ? "

56

BOOK SECOND

He gave his friend a glance as to show how he could
bear this. " I 'm perhaps a little afraid of her."

"Oh," said Miss Gostrey, "I see her from here!
You may say then I see very fast and very far, but
I Ve already shown you I do. The young man and
the two ladies," she went on, " are at any rate all the
family?"

"Quite all. His father has been dead ten years, and
there 's no brother, nor any other sister. They 'd do,"
said Strether, "anything in the world for him."

"And you'd do anything in the world for them?"

He shifted again; she had made it perhaps just a
shade too affirmative for his nerves. "Oh I don't
know!"

"You'd do at any rate this, and the 'anything*
they'd do is represented by their making you do it."

"Ah they couldn't have come — either of them.
They 're very busy people and Mrs. Newsome in par
ticular has a large full life. She's moreover highly
nervous — and not at all strong."

"You mean she's an American invalid?"

He carefully distinguished. "There's nothing she
likes less than to be called one, but she would consent
to be one of those things, I think," he laughed, "if it
were the only way to be the other."

"Consent to be an American in order to be an
invalid?"

"No," said Strether, "the other way round. She's
at any rate delicate sensitive high-strung. She puts
so much of herself into everything — "

Ah Maria knew these things! "That she has no
thing left for anything else ? Of course she has n't.

57

THE AMBASSADORS

To whom do you say it ? High-strung ? Don't I spend
my life, for them, jamming down the pedal ? I see
moreover how it has told on you."

Strether took this more lightly. "Oh I jam down
the pedal too!"

"Well," she lucidly returned, "we must from this
moment bear on it together with all our might." And
she forged ahead. " Have they money ? '

But it was as if, while her energetic image still held
him, her enquiry fell short. "Mrs. Newsome," he
wished further to explain, " has n't moreover your
courage on the question of contact. If she had come
it would have been to see the person herself."

"The woman ? Ah but that's courage."

" No — it 's exaltation, which is a very different
thing. Courage," he, however, accommodatingly
threw out, "is what you have."

She shook her head. "You say that only to patch
me up — to cover the nudity of my want of exaltation.
I Ve neither the one nor the other. I 've mere battered
indifference. I see that what you mean," Miss Gos-
trey pursued, "is that if your friend had come she
would take great views, and the great views, to put it
simply, would be too much for her."

Strether looked amused at her notion of the simple,
but he adopted her formula. "Everything's too
much for her."

"Ah then such a service as this of yours — "

" Is more for her than anything else ? Yes — far
more. But so long as it is n't too much for me — ! "

" Her condition does n't matter ? Surely not ; we
leave her condition out; we take it, that is, for granted.

58

BOOK SECOND

I see it, her condition, as behind and beneath you ;
yet at the same time I see it as bearing you up."

"Oh it does bear me up!" Strether laughed.

"Well then as yours bears me nothing more's
needed." With which she put again her question.
"Has Mrs. Newsome money?"

This time he heeded. " Oh plenty. That 's the root
of the evil. There 's money, to very large amounts,
in the concern. Chad has had the free use of a great
deal. But if he'll pull himself together and come
home, all the same, he'll find his account in it."

She had listened with all her interest. "And I hope
to goodness you'll find yours!"

"He'll take up his definite material reward," said
Strether without acknowledgement of this. "He's at
the parting of the ways. He can come into the business
now — he can't come later."

" Is there a business ? "

" Lord, yes — a big brave bouncing business. A
roaring trade."

"A great shop?"

"Yes — a workshop; a great production, a great
industry. The concern 's a manufacture — and a
manufacture that, if it 's only properly looked after,
may well be on the way to become a monopoly. It 's
a little thing they make — make better, it appears,
than other people can, or than other people, at any rate,
do. Mr. Newsome, being a man of ideas, at least in
that particular line," Strether explained, "put them
on it with great effect, and gave the place altogether,
in his time, an immense lift."

"It's a place in itself?"

59

THE AMBASSADORS

"Well, quite a number of buildings; almost a little
industrial colony. But above all it's a thing. The
article produced."

"And what is the article produced ?"

Strether looked about him as in slight reluctance to
say; then the curtain, which he saw about to rise,
came to his aid. "I'll tell you next time." But when
the next time came he only said he 'd tell her later on
— after they should have left the theatre; for she had
immediately reverted to their topic, and even for him
self the picture of the stage was now overlaid with an
other image. His postponements, however, made her
wonder — wonder if the article referred to were any
thing bad. And she explained that she meant im
proper or ridiculous or wrong. But Strether, so far as
that went, could satisfy her. "Unmentionable? Oh
no, we constantly talk of it; we are quite familiar and
brazen about it. Only, as a small, trivial, rather
ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use, it's
just wanting in — what shall I say ? Well, dignity, or
the least approach to distinction. Right here therefore,
with everything about us so grand — ! " In short he
shrank.

"It's a false note?"

"Sadly. It's vulgar."

" But surely not vulgarer than this." Then on his
wondering as she herself had done : "Than everything
about us." She seemed a trifle irritated. "What do
you take this for ? "

" Why for — comparatively — divine ! "

"This dreadful London theatre? It's impossible,
if you really want to know."

60

BOOK SECOND

"Oh then," laughed Strether, "I don't really want
to know!"

It made between them a pause, which she, how
ever, still fascinated by the mystery of the production
at Woollett, presently broke. " ' Rather ridiculous ' ?
Clothes-pins? Saleratus ? Shoe-polish?"

It brought him round. "No — you don't even
'burn/ I don't think, you know, you'll guess it."

"How then can I judge how vulgar it is ?"

"You'll judge when I do tell you" — and he per
suaded her to patience. But it may even now frankly
be mentioned that he in the sequel never was to tell her.
He actually never did so, and it moreover oddly oc
curred that by the law, within her, of the incalculable,
her desire for the information dropped and her atti
tude to the question converted itself into a positive
cultivation of ignorance. In ignorance she could
humour her fancy, and that proved a useful freedom.
She could treat the little nameless object as indeed
unnameable — she could make their abstention enor
mously definite. There might indeed have been for
Strether the portent of this in what she next said.

"Is it perhaps then because it's so bad — because
your industry, as you call it, is so vulgar — that Mr.
Chad won't come back ? Does he feel the taint ? Is
he staying away not to be mixed up in it ? "

"Oh," Strether laughed, "it wouldn't appear —
would it ? — that he feels * taints '! He's glad enough
of the money from it, and the money 's his whole basis.
There 's appreciation in that — I mean as to the allow
ance his mother has hitherto made him. She has of
course the resource of cutting this allowance off; but

61

THE AMBASSADORS

even then he has unfortunately, and on no small
scale, his independent supply — money left him by his
grandfather, her own father."

"Would n't the fact you mention then," Miss Gos-
trey asked, "make it just more easy for him to be par
ticular ? Is n't he conceivable as fastidious about the
source — the apparent and public source — of his
income ?"

Strether was able quite good-humouredly to enter
tain the proposition. "The source of his grandfather's
wealth — and thereby of his own share in it — was
not particularly noble."

"And what source was it?"

Strether cast about. " Well — practices."

" In business ? Infamies ? He was an old swin
dler?"

"Oh," he said with more emphasis than spirit,
"I shan't describe him nor narrate his exploits."

"Lord, what abysses! And the late Mr. Newsome
then?"

"Well, what about him?"

"Was he like the grandfather?"

"No — he was on the other side of the house. And
he was different."

Miss Gostrey kept it up. "Better?"

Her friend for a moment hung fire. "No."

Her comment on his hesitation was scarce the less
marked for being mute. "Thank you. Now don't
you see," she went on, "why the boy does n't come
home? He's drowning his shame."

"His shame? What shame?"

"What shame? Comment done? The shame."
62

BOOK SECOND

"But where and when," Strether asked, "is 'the
shame* — where is any shame — to-day ? The men
I speak of — they did as everyone does; and (besides
being ancient history) it was all a matter of apprecia
tion."

She showed how she understood. " Mrs. Newsome
has appreciated ? "

"Ah I can't speak for her!"

" In the midst of such doings — and, as I under
stand you, profiting by them, she at least has re
mained exquisite ? "

"Oh I can't talk of her!" Strether said.

"I thought she was just what you could talk of.
You don't trust me," Miss Gostrey after a moment
declared.

It had its effect. "Well, her money is spent, her
life conceived and carried on with a large bene
ficence — "

" That 's a kind of expiation of wrongs ? Gracious,"
she added before he could speak, "how intensely you
make me see her!"

"If you see her," Strether dropped, "it's all that's
necessary."

She really seemed to have her. "I feel that. SheiV,
in spite of everything, handsome."

This at least enlivened him. " What do you mean
by everything ? "

"Well, I mean you" With which she had one of
her swift changes of ground. "You say the concern
needs looking after; but does n't Mrs. Newsome look
after it?"

"So far as possible. She's wonderfully able, but

63

THE AMBASSADORS

it's not her affair, and her life's a good deal over
charged. She has many, many things."

"And you also?"

" Oh yes — I 've many too, if you will."

"I see. But what I mean is," Miss Gostrey
amended, " do you also look after the business ? "

"Oh no, I don't touch the business."

" Only everything else ? "

" Well, yes — some things."

"As for instance — ?"

Strether obligingly thought. "Well, the Review."

"The Review? — you have a Review?"

" Certainly. Woollett has a Review — which Mrs.
Newsome, for the most part, magnificently pays for
and which I, not at all magnificently, edit. My name 's
on the cover," Strether pursued, "and I'm really
rather disappointed and hurt that you seem never
to have heard of it."

She neglected for a moment this grievance. "And
what kind of a Review is it ? "

His serenity was now completely restored. "Well,
it's green."

" Do you mean in political colour as they say here
— in thought ? "

"No; I mean the cover's green — of the most
lovely shade."

"And with Mrs. Newsome's name on it too ?"

He waited a little. " Oh as for that you must judge
if she peeps out. She's behind the whole thing; but
she's of a delicacy and a discretion — !"

Miss Gostrey took it all. " I 'm sure. She would be.
I don't underrate her. She must be rather a swell."

BOOK SECOND

"Oh yes, she's rather a swell!"

"A Woollett swell — Ion! I like the idea of a
Woollett swell. And you must be rather one too, to be
so mixed up with her."

"Ah no," said Strether, "that's not the way it
works."

But she had already taken him up. "The way it
works — you need n't tell me ! — is of course that you
efface yourself."

" With my name on the cover ? " he lucidly objected.

"Ah but you don't put it on for yourself."

" I beg your pardon — that's exactly what I do put
it on for. It 's exactly the thing that I 'm reduced to
doing for myself. It seems to rescue a little, you see,
from the wreck of hopes and ambitions, the refuse-
heap of disappointments and failures, my one pre
sentable little scrap of an identity."

On this she looked at him as to say many things,
but what she at last simply said was : " She likes to see
it there. You 're the bigger swell of the two," she im
mediately continued, " because you think you 're not
one. She thinks she is one. However," Miss Gostrey
added, "she thinks you're one too. You're at all
events the biggest she can get hold of." She embroid
ered, she abounded. "I don't say it to interfere be
tween you, but on the day she gets hold of a bigger
one — !" Strether had thrown back his head as in
silent mirth over something that struck him in her
audacity or felicity, and her flight meanwhile was
already higher. "Therefore close with her — !"

"Close with her ?" he asked as she seemed to hang
poised.

65

THE AMBASSADORS

" Before you lose your chance."

Their eyes met over it. "What do you mean by
closing ? "

"And what do I mean by your chance ? I '11 tell you
when you tell me all the things you don't. Is it her
greatest fad ? " she briskly pursued.

"The Review?" He seemed to wonder how he
could best describe it. This resulted however but in
a sketch. "It's her tribute to the ideal."

"I see. You go in for tremendous things."

"We go in for the unpopular side — that is so far
as we dare."

"And how far do you dare?"

"Well, she very far. I much less. I don't begin to
have her faith. She provides," said Strether, "three
fourths of that. And she provides, as I 've confided to
you, all the money."

It evoked somehow a vision of gold that held for a
little Miss Gostrey's eyes, and she looked as if she
heard the bright dollars shovelled in. "I hope then
you make a good thing — "

"I never made a good thing!" he at once returned.

She just waited. " Don't you call it a good thing to
beloved?"

"Oh we 're not loved. We 're not even hated. We're
only just sweetly ignored."

She had another pause. "You don't trust me ! " she
once more repeated.

" Don't I when I lift the last veil ? — tell you the
very secret of the prison-house ? "

Again she met his eyes, but to the result that after
an instant her own turned away with impatience.

66

BOOK SECOND

"You don't sell? Oh I'm glad of that!" After which
however, and before he could protest, she was off
again. "She's just a moral swell."

He accepted gaily enough the definition. " Yes — I
really think that describes her."

But it had for his friend the oddest connexion.
"How does she do her hair ?"

He laughed out. " Beautifully ! "

"Ah that doesn't tell me. However, it doesn't
matter — I know. It's tremendously neat — a real
reproach ; quite remarkably thick and without, as yet,
a single strand of white. There ! "

He blushed for her realism, but gaped at her truth.
"You're the very deuce."

" What else should I be ? It was as the very deuce
I pounced on you. But don't let it trouble you, for
everything but the very deuce — at our age — is a
bore and a delusion, and even he himself, after all,
but half a joy." With which, on a single sweep of
her wing, she resumed. "You assist her to expiate
— which is rather hard when you've yourself not
sinned."

"It's she who hasn't sinned," Strether replied.
"I've sinned the most."

"Ah," Miss Gostrey cynically laughed, "what a
picture of her! Have you robbed the widow and the
orphan ?"

"I've sinned enough," said Strether.

" Enough for whom ? Enough for what ? "

"Well, to be where I am."

"Thank you!" They were disturbed at this mo
ment by the passage between their knees and the back

67

THE AMBASSADORS

of the seats before them of a gentleman who had been
absent during a part of the performance and who now
returned for the close; but the interruption left Miss
Gostrey time, before the subsequent hush, to express
as a sharp finality her sense of the moral of all their
talk. "I knew you had something up your sleeve!"
This finality, however, left them in its turn, at the end
of the play, as disposed to hang back as if they had
still much to say; so that they easily agreed to let
every one go before them — they found an interest in
waiting. They made out from the lobby that the night
had turned to rain ; yet Miss Gostrey let her friend
know that he was n't to see her home. He was simply
to put her, by herself, into a four-wheeler; she liked so
in London, of wet nights after wild pleasures, thinking
things over, on the return, in lonely four-wheelers.
This was her great time, she intimated, for pulling
herself together. The delays caused by the weather,
the struggle for vehicles at the door, gave them occa
sion to subside on a divan at the back of the vestibule
and just beyond the reach of the fresh damp gusts
from the street. Here Strether's comrade resumed
that free handling of the subject to which his own
imagination of it already owed so much. "Does your
young friend in Paris like you ? "

It had almost, after the interval, startled him. " Oh
I hope not ! Why should he ? "

"Why should n't he ?" Miss Gostrey asked. "That
you 're coming down on him need have nothing to do
with it."

"You see more in it," he presently returned,
"than I."

68

BOOK SECOND

"Of course I see you in it."

"Well then you see more in 'me'!"

"Than you see in yourself? Very likely. That's
always one's right. What I was thinking of," she ex
plained, " is the possible particular effect on him of his
titilieu."

"Oh his milieu — !" Strether really felt he could
imagine it better now than three hours before.

" Do you mean it can only have been so lowering ? "

"Why that's my very starting-point."

"Yes, but you start so far back. What do his letters
say?"

"Nothing. He practically ignores us — or spares
us. He does n't write."

" I see. But there are all the same," she went on,
" two quite distinct things that — given the wonder
ful place he 's in — may have happened to him. One
is that he may have got brutalised. The other is that
he may have got refined."

Strether stared — this was a novelty. " Refined ? "

"Oh," she said quietly, "there are refinements."

The way of it made him, after looking at her, break
into a laugh. "You have them!"

"As one of the signs," she continued in the same
tone, "they constitute perhaps the worst."

He thought it over and his gravity returned. "Is it
a refinement not to answer his mother's letters ? "

She appeared to have a scruple, but she brought it
out. " Oh I should say the greatest of all."

"Well," said Strether, "I'm quite content to let it,
as one of the signs, pass for the worst that I know he
believes he can do what he likes with me."
• 69

THE AMBASSADORS

This appeared to strike her. "How do you know
it?"

" Oh I 'm sure of it. I feel it in my bones."

" Feel he can do it?"

" Feel that he believes he can. It may come to the
same thing!" Strether laughed.

She wouldn't, however, have this. "Nothing for
you will ever come to the same thing as anything else."
And she understood what she meant, it seemed, suf
ficiently to go straight on. "You say that if he does
break he '11 come in for things at home ? "

"Quite positively. He'll come in for a particular
chance — a chance that any properly constituted
young man would jump at. The business has so de
veloped that an opening scarcely apparent three years
ago, but which his father's will took account of as
in certain conditions possible and which, under that
will, attaches to Chad's availing himself of it a large
contingent advantage — this opening, the conditions
having come about, now simply awaits him. His
mother has kept it for him, holding out against strong
pressure, till the last possible moment. It requires,
naturally, as it carries with it a handsome 'part,' a
large share in profits, his being on the spot and mak
ing a big effort for a big result. That's what I mean
by his chance. If he misses it he comes in, as you say,
for nothing. And to see that he does n't miss it is, in
a word, what I've come out for."

She let it all sink in. "What you've come out for
then is simply to render him an immense service."

Well, poor Strether was willing to take it so. "Ah
if you like."

70

BOOK SECOND

" He stands, as they say, if you succeed with him,
to gain — "

"Oh a lot of advantages." Strether had them
clearly at his fingers' ends.

" By which you mean of course a lot of money."

" Well, not only. I 'm acting with a sense for him
of other things too. Consideration and comfort and
security — the general safety of being anchored by a
strong chain. He wants, as I see him, to be protected.
Protected I mean from life."

"Ah voila!" — her thought fitted with a click.
"From life. What you really want to get him home
for is to marry him."

"Well, that's about the size of it."

"Of course," she said, "it's rudimentary. But to
any one in particular?"

He smiled at this, looking a little more conscious.
"You get everything out."

For a moment again their eyes met.* "You put
everything in!"

He acknowledged the tribute by telling her. "To
Mamie Pocock."

She wondered ; then gravely, even exquisitely, as if
to make the oddity also fit : " His own niece ? "

"Oh you must yourself find a name for the rela
tion. His brother-in-law's sister. Mrs. Jim's sister-
in-law."

It seemed to have on Miss Gostrey a certain
hardening effect. "And who in the world's Mrs.
Jim?"

" Chad's sister — who was Sarah Newsome. She 's
married — did n't I mention it ? — to Jim Pocock."

71

THE AMBASSADORS

"Ah yes," she tacitly replied ; but he had mentioned
things — ! Then, however, with all the sound it could
have, "Who in the world's Jim Pocock?" she
asked.

"Why Sally's husband. That's the only way we
distinguish people at Woollett," he good-humoredly
explained.

"And is it a great distinction — being Sally's
husband ?"

He considered. "I think there can be scarcely a
greater — unless it may become one, in the future, to
be Chad's wife."

"Then how do they distinguish you?"

"They don't — except, as I've told you, by the
green cover."

Once more their eyes met on it, and she held him an
instant. " The green cover won't — nor will any cover
• — avail you with me. You 're of a depth of duplic
ity ! " Still, she could in her own large grasp of the
real condone it. "Is Mamie a great parti?"

" Oh the greatest we have — our prettiest brightest
girl.';

Miss Gostrey seemed to fix the poor child. " I know
what they can be. And with money ? "

"Not perhaps with a great deal of that — but with
so much of everything else that we don't miss it. We
dont miss money much, you know," Strether added,
"in general, in America, in pretty girls."

"No," she conceded; " but I know also what you do
sometimes miss. And do you," she asked, "yourself
admire her ? "

It was a question, he indicated, that there might be
72

BOOK SECOND

several ways of taking; but he decided after an instant
for the humorous. " Have n't I sufficiently showed
you how I admire any pretty girl ? "

Her interest in his problem was by this time such
that it scarce left her freedom, and she kept close to
the facts. "I supposed that at Woollett you wanted
them — what shall I call it ? — blameless. I mean
your young men for your pretty girls."

"So did I!" Strether confessed. "But you strike
there a curious fact — the fact that Woollett too
accommodates itself to the spirit of the age and the
increasing mildness of manners. Everything changes,
and I hold that our situation precisely marks a date.
We should prefer them blameless, but we have to
make the best of them as we find them. Since the
spirit of the age and the increasing mildness send
them so much more to Paris — "

"You've to take them back as they come. When
they do come. Bon!" Once more she embraced it all,
but she had a moment of thought. " Poor Chad ! "

"Ah," said Strether cheerfully, "Mamie will save
him!"

She was looking away, still in her vision, and she
spoke with impatience and almost as if he had n't
understood her. "Tou'll save him. That's who'll
save him."

"Oh but with Mamie's aid. Unless indeed you
mean," he added, "that I shall effect so much more
with yours!"

It made her at last again look at him. "You'll do
more — as you're so much better — than all of us put
together."

73

THE AMBASSADORS

"I think I'm only better since I've known you!"
Strether bravely returned.

The depletion of the place, the shrinkage of the
crowd and now comparatively quiet withdrawal of its
last elements had already brought them nearer the
door and put them in relation with a messenger of
whom he bespoke Miss Gostrey's cab. But this left
them a few minutes more, which she was clearly in no
mood not to use. " You 've spoken to me of what —
by your success — Mr. Chad stands to gain. But
you 've not spoken to me of what you do."

" Oh I 've nothing more to gain," said Strether very
simply.

She took it as even quite too simple. "You mean
you've got it all 'down'? You've been paid in
advance ?"

"Ah don't talk about payment!" he groaned.

Something in the tone of it pulled her up, but as
their messenger still delayed she had another chance
and she put it in another way. " What — by failure —
do you stand to lose ? "

He still, however, would n't have it. " Nothing ! "
he exclaimed, and on the messenger's at this instant
reappearing he was able to sink the subject in their
responsive advance. When, a few steps up the street,
under a lamp, he had put her into her four-wheeler
and she had asked him if the man had called for him
no second conveyance, he replied before the door was
closed. " You won't take me with you ? "

"Not for the world."

"Then I shall walk."

"In the rain?"

74

BOOK SECOND

" I like the rain," said Strether. " Good-night ! "

She kept him a moment, while his hand was on the
door, by not answering; after which she answered by
repeating her question. "What do you stand to
lose?"

Why the question now affected him as other he
could n't have said ; he could only this time meet it
otherwise. " Everything."

"So I thought. Then you shall succeed. And to
that end I'm yours — "

"Ah, dear lady!" he kindly breathed.

"Till death ! " said Maria Gostrey. " Good-night."

II

STRETHER called, his second morning in Paris, on the
bankers of the Rue Scribe to whom his letter of credit
was addressed, and he made this visit attended by
Waymarsh, in whose company he had crossed from
London two days before. They had hastened to the
Rue Scribe on the morrow of their arrival, but
Strether had not then found the letters the hope of
which prompted this errand. He had had as yet none
at all ; had n't expected them in London, but had
counted on several in Paris, and, disconcerted now,
had presently strolled back to the Boulevard with a
sense of injury that he felt himself taking for as good
a start as any other. It would serve, this spur to his
spirit, he reflected, as, pausing at the top of the street,
he looked up and down the great foreign avenue, it
would serve to begin business with. His idea was to
begin business immediately, and it did much for him
the rest of his day that the beginning of business
awaited him. He did little else till night but ask him
self what he should do if he had n't fortunately had so
much to do ; but he put himself the question in many
different situations and connexions. What carried
him hither and yon was an admirable theory that
nothing he could do would n't be in some manner
related to what he fundamentally had on hand, or
would be — should he happen to have a scruple —
wasted for it. He did happen to have a scruple — a

76

BOOK SECOND

scruple about taking no definite step till he should get
letters ; but this reasoning carried it off. A single day
to feel his feet — he had felt them as yet only at
Chester and in London — was, he could consider,
none too much ; and having, as he had often privately
expressed it, Paris to reckon with, he threw these
hours of freshness consciously into the reckoning.
They made it continually greater, but that was what
it had best be if it was to be anything at all, and he
gave himself up till far into the evening, at the theatre
and on the return, after the theatre, along the bright
congested Boulevard, to feeling it grow. Waymarsh
had accompanied him this time to the play, and the
two men had walked together, as a first stage, from
the Gymnase to the Cafe Riche, into the crowded
"terrace" of which establishment — the night, or
rather the morning, for midnight had struck, being
bland and populous — they had wedged themselves
for refreshment. Waymarsh, as a result of some dis
cussion with his friend, had made a marked virtue of
his having now let himself go; and there had been ele
ments of impression in their half-hour over their wa
tered beer-glasses that gave him his occasion for con
veying that he held this compromise with his stiffer
self to have become extreme. He conveyed it — for it
was still, after all, his stiffer self who gloomed out of
the glare of the terrace — in solemn silence ; and
there was indeed a great deal of critical silence, every
way, between the companions, even till they gained
the Place de POpera, as to the character of their
nocturnal progress.
This morning there were letters — letters which

77

THE AMBASSADORS

had reached London, apparently all together, the day
of Strether' s journey, and had taken their time to fol
low him; so that, after a controlled impulse to go into
them in the reception-room of the bank, which, re
minding him of the post-office at Woollett, affected
him as the abutment of some transatlantic bridge, he
slipped them into the pocket of his loose grey over
coat with a sense of the felicity of carrying them off.
Waymarsh, who had had letters yesterday, had had
them again to-day, and Waymarsh suggested in this
particular no controlled impulses. The last one he was
at all events likely to be observed to struggle with was
clearly that of bringing to a premature close any visit
to the Rue Scribe. Strether had left him there yester
day ; he wanted to see the papers, and he had spent, by
what his friend could make out, a succession of hours
with the papers. He spoke of the establishment, with
emphasis, as a post of superior observation; just as he
spoke generally of his actual damnable doom as a
device for hiding from him what was going on. Eu
rope was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate
engine for dissociating the confined American from
that indispensable knowledge, and was accordingly
only rendered bearable by these occasional stations of
relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs.
Strether, on his side, set himself to walk again — he
had his relief in his pocket; and indeed, much as
he had desired his budget, the growth of restlessness
might have been marked in him from the moment he
had assured himself of the superscription of most of
the missives it contained. This restlessness became
therefore his temporary law ; he knew he should recog-

78

BOOK SECOND

nise as soon as see it the best place of all for settling
down with his chief correspondent. He had for the
next hour an accidental air of looking for it in the
windows of shops ; he came down the Rue de la Paix
in the sun and, passing across the Tuileries and the
river, indulged more than once — as if on finding
himself determined — in a sudden pause before the
book-stalls of the opposite quay. In the garden of the
Tuileries he had lingered, on two or three spots, to
look; it was as if the wonderful Paris spring had
stayed him as he roamed. The prompt Paris morning
struck its cheerful notes — in a soft breeze and a
sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the garden-floor,
of bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong
boxes, in the type of ancient thrifty persons basking
betimes where terrace-walls were warm, in the blue-
frocked brass-labelled officialism of humble rakers
and scrapers, in the deep references of a straight-
pacing priest or the sharp ones of a white-gaitered red-
legged soldier. He watched little brisk figures, figures
whose movement was as the tick of the great Paris
clock, take their smooth diagonal from point to point;
the air had a taste as of something mixed with art,
something that presented nature as a white-capped
master-chef. The palace was gone, Strether remem
bered the palace; and when he gazed into the irreme
diable void of its site the historic sense in him might
have been freely at play — the play under which in
Paris indeed it so often winces like a touched nerve.
He filled out spaces with dim symbols of scenes ; he
caught the gleam of white statues at the base of
which, with his letters out, he could tilt back a straw-

79

THE AMBASSADORS

bottomed chair. But his drift was, for reasons, to the
other side, and it floated him unspent up the Rue de
Seine and as far as the Luxembourg.

In the Luxembourg Gardens he pulled up ; here at
last he found his nook, and here, on a penny chair
from which terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains, little
trees in green tubs, little women in white caps and
shrill little girls at play all sunnily "composed" to
gether, he passed an hour in which the cup of his
impressions seemed truly to overflow. But a week
had elapsed since he quitted the ship, and there were
more things in his mind than so few days could
account for. More than once, during the time, he had
regarded himself as admonished ; but the admonition
this morning was formidably sharp. It took as it
had n't done yet the form of a question — the ques
tion of what he was doing with such an extraordinary
sense of escape. This sense was sharpest after he had
read his letters, but that was also precisely why the
question pressed. Four of the letters were from Mrs.
Newsome and none of them short; she had lost no
time, had followed on his heels while he moved, so
expressing herself that he now could measure the
probable frequency with which he should hear. They
would arrive, it would seem, her communications, at
the rate of several a week ; he should be able to count,
it might even prove, on more than one by each mail.
If he had begun yesterday with a small grievance he
had therefore an opportunity to begin to-day with its
opposite. He read the letters successively and slowly,
putting others back into his pocket but keeping these
for a long time afterwards gathered in his lap. He

80

BOOK SECOND

held them there, lost in thought, as if to prolong the
presence of what they gave him ; or as if at the least
to assure them their part in the constitution of some
lucidity. His friend wrote admirably, and her tone
was even more in her style than in her voice — he
might almost, for the hour, have had to come this dis
tance to get its full carrying quality ; yet the plentitude
of his consciousness of difference consorted perfectly
with the deepened intensity of the connexion. It was
the difference, the difference of being just where he
was and as he was, that formed the escape — this
difference was so much greater than he had dreamed
it would be; and what he finally sat there turning over
was the strange logic of his finding himself so free.
He felt it in a manner his duty to think out his state,
to approve the process, and when he came in fact to
trace the steps and add up the items they sufficiently
accounted for the sum. He had never expected —
that was the truth of it — again to find himself young,
and all the years and other things it had taken to make
him so were exactly his present arithmetic. He had
to make sure of them to put his scruple to rest.

It all sprang at bottom from the beauty of Mrs.
Newsome's desire that he should be worried with
nothing that was not of the essence of his task; by
insisting that he should thoroughly intermit and
break she had so provided for his freedom that she
would, as it were, have only herself to thank. Strether
could not at this point indeed have completed his
thought by the image of what she might have to
thank herself for: the image, at best, of his own like
ness — poor Lambert Strether washed up on the

81

THE AMBASSADORS

sunny strand by the waves of a single day, poor Lam
bert Strether thankful for breathing-time and stiffen
ing himself while he gasped. There he was, and with
nothing in his aspect or his posture to scandalise : it
was only true that if he had seen Mrs. Newsome com
ing he would instinctively have jumped up to walk
away a little. He would have come round and back
to her bravely, but he would have had first to pull
himself together. She abounded in news of the situa
tion at home, proved to him how perfectly she was
arranging for his absence, told him who would take
up this and who take up that exactly where he had
left it, gave him in fact chapter and verse for the
moral that nothing would suffer. It filled for him,
this tone of hers, all the air; yet it struck him at the
same time as the hum of vain things. This latter
effect was what he tried to justify — and with the
success that, grave though the appearance, he at last
lighted on a form that was happy. He arrived at it by
the inevitable recognition of his having been a fort
night before one of the weariest of men. If ever a man
had come off tired Lambert Strether was that man ;
and had n't it been distinctly on the ground of his
fatigue that his wonderful friend at home had so felt
for him and so contrived ? It seemed to him somehow
at these instants that, could he only maintain with
sufficient firmness his grasp of that truth, it might
become in a manner his compass and his helm. What
he wanted most was some idea that would simplify,
and nothing would do this so much as the fact that he
was done for and finished. If it had been in such a
light that he had just detected in his cup the dregs of

82

BOOK SECOND

youth, that was a mere flaw of the surface of his
scheme. He was so distinctly fagged-out that it must
serve precisely as his convenience, and if he could but
consistently be good for little enough he might do
everything he wanted.

Everything he wanted was comprised moreover
in a single boon — the common unattainable art of
taking things as they came. He appeared to himself
to have given his best years to an active appreciation
of the way they did n't come; but perhaps — as they
would seemingly here be things quite other — this
long ache might at last drop to rest. He could easily
see that from the moment he should accept the notion
of his foredoomed collapse the last thing he would lack
would be reasons and memories. Oh if he should do
the sum no slate would hold the figures ! The fact that
he had failed, as he considered, in everything, in each
relation and in half a dozen trades, as he liked luxuri
ously to put it, might have made, might still make, for
an empty present; but it stood solidly for a crowded
past. It had not been, so much achievement missed,
a light yoke nor a short load. It was at present as
if the backward picture had hung there, the long
crooked course, grey in the shadow of his solitude.
It had been a dreadful cheerful sociable solitude, a
solitude of life or choice, of community; but though
there had been people enough all round it there had
been but three or four persons in it. Waymarsh was
one of these, and the fact struck him just now as mark
ing the record. Mrs. Newsome was another, and Miss
Gostrey had of a sudden shown signs of becoming a
third. Beyond, behind them was the pale figure of his

83

THE AMBASSADORS

real youth, which held against its breast the two pre
sences paler than itself — the young wife he had early
lost and the young son he had stupidly sacrificed. He
had again and again made out for himself that he
might have kept his little boy, his little dull boy who
had died at school of rapid diphtheria, if he had not
in those years so insanely given himself to merely
missing the mother. It was the soreness of his re
morse that the child had in all likelihood not really
been dull — had been dull, as he had been banished
and neglected, mainly because the father had been
unwittingly selfish. This was doubtless but the secret
habit of sorrow, which had slowly given way to time ;
yet there remained an ache sharp enough to make the
spirit, at the sight now and again of some fair young
man just growing up, wince with the thought of an
opportunity lost. Had ever a man, he had finally
fallen into the way of asking himself, lost so much
and even done so much for so little ? There had been
particular reasons why all yesterday, beyond other
days, he should have had in one ear this cold enquiry.
His name on the green cover, where he had put it for
Mrs. Newsome, expressed him doubtless just enough
to make the world — the world as distinguished, both
for more and for less, from Woollett — ask who he
was. He had incurred the ridicule of having to have
his explanation explained. He was Lambert Strether
because he was on the cover, whereas it should have
been, for anything like glory, that he was on the cover
because he was Lambert Strether. He would have
done anything for Mrs. Newsome, have been still
more ridiculous — as he might, for that matter, have

BOOK SECOND

occasion to be yet; which came to saying that this ac
ceptance of fate was all he had to show at fifty-five.
He judged the quantity as small because ir was
small, and all the more egregiously since it could n't,
as he saw the case, so much as thinkably have been
larger. He had n't had the gift of making the most
of what he tried, and if he had tried and tried again —
no one but himself knew how often — it appeared to
have been that he might demonstrate what else, in
default of that, could be made. Old ghosts of experi
ments came back to him, old drudgeries and delusions,
and disgusts, old recoveries with their relapses, old
fevers with their chills, broken moments of good faith,
others of still better doubt; adventures, for the most
part, of the sort qualified as lessons. The special
spring that had constantly played for him the day be
fore was the recognition — frequent enough to sur
prise him — of the promises to himself that he had
after his other visit never kept. The reminiscence
to-day most quickened for him was that of the vow
taken in the course of the pilgrimage that, newly-
married, with the War just over, and helplessly young
in spite of it, he had recklessly made with the creature
who was so much younger still. It had been a bold
dash, for which they had taken money set apart for ne
cessities, but kept sacred at the moment in a hundred
ways, and in none more so than by this private pledge
of his own to treat the occasion as a relation formed
with the higher culture and see that, as they said at
Woollett, it should bear a good harvest. He had be
lieved, sailing home again, that he had gained some
thing great, and his theory — with an elaborate in-

85

THE AMBASSADORS

nocent plan of reading, digesting, coming back even,
every few years — had then been to preserve, cherish
and extend it. As such plans as these had come to
nothing, however, in respect to acquisitions still more
precious, it was doubtless little enough of a marvel that
he should have lost account of that handful of seed.
Buried for long years in dark corners at any rate these
few germs had sprouted again under forty-eight hours
of Paris. The process of yesterday had really been the
process of feeling the general stirred life of connexions
long since individually dropped. Strether had become
acquainted even on this ground with short gusts of
speculation — sudden flights of fancy in Louvre gal
leries, hungry gazes through clear plates behind which
lemon-coloured volumes were as fresh as fruit on the
tree.

There were instants at which he could ask whether,
since there had been fundamentally so little question
of his keeping anything, the fate after all decreed for
him had n't been only to be kept. Kept for something,
in that event, that he did n't pretend, did n't possibly
dare as yet to divine; something that made him hover
and wonder and laugh and sigh, made him advance
and retreat, feeling half ashamed of his impulse to
plunge and more than half afraid of his impulse to
wait. He remembered for instance how he had gone
back in the sixties with lemon-coloured volumes in
general on the brain as well as with a dozen — se
lected for his wife too — in his trunk ; and nothing
had at the moment shown more confidence than this
invocation of the finer taste. They were still some
where at home, the dozen — stale and soiled and

86

BOOK SECOND

never sent to the binder; but what had become of the
sharp initiation they represented ? They represented
now the mere sallow paint on the door of the temple
of taste that he had dreamed of raising up — a struct
ure he had practically never carried further. Streth-
er's present highest flights were perhaps those in
which this particular lapse figured to him as a symbol,
a symbol of his long grind and his want of odd mo
ments, his want moreover of money, of opportunity,
of positive dignity. That the memory of the vow of his
youth should, in order to throb again, have had to wait
for this last, as he felt it, of all his accidents — that
was surely proof enough of how his conscience had
been encumbered. If any further proof were needed it
would have been to be found in the fact that, as he
perfectly now saw, he had ceased even to measure his
meagreness, a meagreness that sprawled, in this retro
spect, vague and comprehensive, stretching back like
some unmapped Hinterland from a rough coast-set
tlement. His conscience had been amusing itself for the
forty-eight hours by forbidding him the purchase of a
book; he held off from that, held off from everything;
from the moment he did n't yet call on Chad he would
n't for the world have taken any other step. On this
evidence, however, of the way they actually affected
him he glared at the lemon-coloured covers in confes
sion of the subconsciousness that, all the same, in the
great desert of the years, he must have had of them.
The green covers at home comprised, by the law of
their purpose, no tribute to letters; it was of a mere
rich kernel of economics, politics, ethics that, glazed
and, as Mrs. Newsome maintained rather against his

87

THE AMBASSADORS

view, pre-eminently pleasant to touch, they formed
the specious shell. Without therefore any needed in
stinctive knowledge of what was coming out, in Paris,
on the bright highway, he struck himself at present as
having more than once flushed with a suspicion : he
could n't otherwise at present be feeling so many fears
confirmed. There were " movements " he was too late
for: were n't they, with the fun of them, already
spent ? There were sequences he had missed and great
gaps in the procession : he might have been watching
it all recede in a golden cloud of dust. If the playhouse
was n't closed his seat had at least fallen to somebody
else. He had had an uneasy feeling the night before
that if he was at the theatre at all — though he indeed
justified the theatre, in the specific sense, and with a
grotesqueness to which his imagination did all honour,
as something he owed poor Waymarsh — he should
have been there with, and as might have been said,
for Chad.

This suggested the question of whether he could
properly have taken him to such a play, and what
effect — it was a point that suddenly rose — his pe
culiar responsibility might be held in general to have
on his choice of entertainment. It had literally been
present to him at the Gymnase — where one was held
moreover comparatively safe — that having his young
friend at his side would have been an odd feature of
the work of redemption ; and this quite in spite of the
fact that the picture presented might well, confronted
with Chad's own private stage, have seemed the pat
tern of propriety. He clearly had n't come out in the
name of propriety but to visit unattended equivocal

BOOK SECOND

performances; yet still less had he done so to under
mine his authority by sharing them with the graceless
youth. Was he to renounce all amusement for the
sweet sake of that authority ? and would such re
nouncement give him for Chad a moral glamour?
The little problem bristled the more by reason of poor
Strether's fairly open sense of the irony of things.
Were there then sides on which his predicament
threatened to look rather droll to him ? Should he
have to pretend to believe — either to himself or the
wretched boy — that there was anything that could
make the latter worse ? Was n't some such pretence
on the other hand involved in the assumption of pos
sible processes that would make him better? His
greatest uneasiness seemed to peep at him out of the
imminent impression that almost any acceptance of
Paris might give one's authority away. It hung before
him this morning, the vast bright Babylon, like some
huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard,
in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differ
ences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled
and melted together, and what seemed all surface one
moment seemed all depth the next. It was a place of
which, unmistakeably, Chad was fond; wherefore
if he, Strether, should like it too much, what on earth,
with such a bond, would become of either of them ?
It all depended of course — which was a gleam of
light — on how the "too much" was measured;
though indeed our friend fairly felt, while he prolonged
the meditation I describe, that for himself even al
ready a certain measure had been reached. It will
have been sufficiently seen that he was not a man to

THE AMBASSADORS

neglect any good chance for reflexion. Was it at all
possible for instance to like Paris enough without
liking it too much ? He luckily however had n't pro
mised Mrs. Newsome not to like it at all. He was
ready to recognise at this stage that such an engage
ment would have tied his hands. The Luxembourg
Gardens were incontestably just so adorable at this
hour by reason — in addition to their intrinsic charm
— of his not having taken it. The only engagement
he had taken, when he looked the thing in the face,
was to do what he reasonably could.

It upset him a little none the less and after a while
to find himself at last remembering on what current
of association he had been floated so far. Old imagin
ations of the Latin Quarter had played their part for
him, and he had duly recalled its having been with
this scene of rather ominous legend that, like so many
young men in fiction as well as in fact, Chad had be
gun'. He was now quite out of it, with his " home,"
as Strether figured the place, in the Boulevard Males-
herbes; which was perhaps why, repairing, not to
fail of justice either, to the elder neighbourhood, our
friend had felt he could allow for the element of the
usual, the immemorial, without courting perturba
tion. He was not at least in danger of seeing the youth
and the particular Person flaunt by together; and yet
he was in the very air of which — just to feel what the
early natural note must have been — he wished most
to take counsel. It became at once vivid to him that
he had originally had, for a few days, an almost envi
ous vision of the boy's romantic privilege. Melancholy
Miirger, with Francine and Musette and Rodolphe,

90

BOOK SECOND

at home, in the company of the tattered, ojie — if he
not in his single self two or three — of the unbound,
the paper-covered dozen on the shelf; and when Chad
had written, five years ago, after a sojourn then al
ready prolonged to six months, that he had decided to
go in for economy and the real thing, Strether's fancy
had quite fondly accompanied him in this migration,
which was to convey him, as they somewhat confus
edly learned at Woollett, across the bridges and up the
Montagne Sainte-Genevieve. This was the region —
Chad had been quite distinct about it — in which the
best French, and many other things, were to be learned
at least cost, and in which all sorts of clever fellows,
compatriots there for a purpose, formed an awfully
pleasant set. The clever fellows, the friendly country
men were mainly young painters, sculptors, architects,
medical students ; but they were, Chad sagely opined,
a much more profitable lot to be with — even on the
footing of not being quite one of them — than the
"terrible toughs" (Strether remembered the edifying
discrimination) of the American bars and banks
roundabout the Opera. Chad had thrown out, in the
communications following this one — for at that time
he did once in a while communicate — that several
members of a band of earnest workers under one of
the great artists had taken him right in, making him
dine every night, almost for nothing, at their place, and
even pressing him not to neglect the hypothesis of there
being as much "in him" as in any of them. There
had been literally a moment at which it appeared
there might be something in him; there had been
at any rate a moment at which he had written that

91

THE AMBASSADORS

he did n't know but what a month or two more might
see him enrolled in some atelier. The season had been
one at which Mrs. Newsome was moved to gratitude
for small mercies ; it had broken on them all as a bless
ing that their absentee had perhaps a conscience —
that he was sated in fine with idleness, was ambitious
of variety. The exhibition was doubtless as yet not
brilliant, but Strether himself, even by that time much
enlisted and immersed, had determined, on the part
of the two ladies, a temperate approval and in fact, as
he now recollected, a certain austere enthusiasm.

But the very next thing that happened had been
a dark drop of the curtain. The son and brother had
not browsed long on the Montagne Sainte-Genevieve
— his effective little use of the name of which, like his
allusion to the best French, appeared to have been but
one of the notes of his rough cunning. The light re
freshment of these vain appearances had not accord
ingly carried any of them very far. On the other hand
it had gained Chad time; it had given him a chance,
unchecked, to strike his roots, had paved the way for
initiations more direct and more deep. It was Streth-
er's belief that he had been comparatively innocent
before this first migration, and even that the first ef
fects of the migration would not have been, without
some particular bad accident, to have been deplored.
There had been three months — he had sufficiently
figured it out — in which Chad had wanted to try.
He had tried, though not very hard — he had had his
little hour of good faith. The weakness of this prin
ciple in him was that almost any accident attestedly
bad enough was stronger. Such had at any rate

92

BOOK SECOND

markedly been the case for the precipitation of a spe
cial series of impressions. They had proved, success
ively, these impressions — all of Musette and Fran-
cine, but Musette and Francine vulgarised by the
larger evolution of the type — irresistibly sharp : he
had "taken up,'* by what was at the time to be shrink-
ingly gathered, as it was scantly mentioned, with one
ferociously "interested" little person after another.
Strether had read somewhere of a Latin motto, a de
scription of the hours, observed on a clock by a trav
eller in Spain; and he had been led to apply it in
thought to Chad's number one, number two, number
three. Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat — they had all
morally wounded, the last had morally killed. The
last had been longest in possession — in possession,
that is, of whatever was left of the poor boy's finer
mortality. And it had n't been she, it had been one
of her early predecessors, who had determined the
second migration, the expensive return and relapse,
the exchange again, as was fairly to be presumed,
of the vaunted best French for some special variety
of the worst.

He pulled himself then at last together for his own
progress back ; not with the feeling that he had taken
his walk in vain. He prolonged it a little, in the imme
diate neighbourhood, after he had quitted his chair;
and the upshot of the whole morning for him was
that his campaign had begun. He had wanted to put
himself in relation, and he would be hanged if he were
not in relation. He was that at no moment so much as
while, under the old arches of the Odeon, he lingered
before the charming open-air array of literature classic

93

THE AMBASSADORS

and casual. He found the effect of tone and tint,
in the long charged tables and shelves, delicate and
appetising; the impression — substituting one kind
of low-priced consommation for another — might
have been that of one of the pleasant cafes that over
lapped, under an awning, to the pavement; but he
edged along, grazing the tables, with his hands firmly
behind him. He was n't there to dip, to consume —
he was there to reconstruct. He was n't there for his
own profit — not, that is, the direct ; he was there on
some chance of feeling the brush of the wing of the
stray spirit of youth. He felt it in fact, he had it be
side him; the old arcade indeed, as his inner sense
listened, gave out the faint sound, as from far off, of
the wild waving of wings. They were folded now over
the breasts of buried generations ; but a flutter or two
lived again in the turned page of shock-headed
slouch-hatted loiterers whose young intensity of type,
in the direction of pale acuteness, deepened his vi
sion, and even his appreciation, of racial differences,
and whose manipulation of the uncut volume was too
often, however, but a listening at closed doors. He
reconstructed a possible groping Chad of three or four
years before, a Chad who had, after all, simply —
for that was the only way to see it — been too vulgar
for his privilege. Surely it was a privilege to have been
young and happy just there. Well, the best thing
Strether knew of him was that he had had such a
dream.

But his own actual business half an hour later was
with a third floor on the Boulevard Malesherbes — so
much as that was definite; and the fact of the enjoy-

94

BOOK SECOND

ment by the third-floor windows of a continuous bal
cony, to which he was helped by this knowledge, had
perhaps something to do with his lingering for five
minutes on the opposite side of the street. There were
points as to which he had quite made up his mind,
and one of these bore precisely on the wisdom of the
abruptness to which events had finally committed
him, a policy that he was pleased to find not at all
shaken as he now looked at his watch and wondered.
He had announced himself — six months before; had
written out at least that Chad was n't to be surprised
should he see him some day turn up. Chad had there
upon, in a few words of rather carefully colourless
answer, offered him a general welcome ; and Strether,
ruefully reflecting that he might have understood the
warning as a hint to hospitality, a bid for an invita
tion, had fallen back upon silence as the corrective
most to his own taste. He had asked Mrs. Newsome
moreover not to announce him again; he had so dis
tinct an opinion on his attacking his job, should he
attack it at all, in' his own way. Not the least of this
lady's high merits for him was that he could absolutely
rest on her word. She was the only woman he had
known, even at Woollett, as to whom his conviction
was positive that to lie was beyond her art. Sarah
Pocock, for instance, her own daughter, though with
social ideals, as they said, in some respects different
— Sarah who was, in her way, aesthetic, had never
refused to human commerce that mitigation of rig
our; there were occasions when he had distinctly
seen her apply it. Since, accordingly, at all events, he
had had it from Mrs. Newsome that she had, at what-

95

THE AMBASSADORS

ever cost to her more strenuous view, conformed, in
the matter of preparing Chad, wholly to his restric
tions, he now looked up at the fine continuous balcony
with a safe sense that if the case had been bungled the
mistake was at least his property. Was there perhaps
just a suspicion of that in his present pause on the
edge of the Boulevard and well in the pleasant light ?
Many things came over him here, and one of them
was that he should doubtless presently know whether
he had been shallow or sharp. Another was that the
balcony in question did n't somehow show as a con
venience easy to surrender. Poor Strether had at this
very moment to recognise the truth that wherever one
paused in Paris the imagination reacted before one
could stop it. This perpetual reaction put a price, if
one would, on pauses ; but it piled up consequences till
there was scarce room to pick one's steps among them.
What call had he, at such a juncture, for example, to
like Chad's very house ? High broad clear — he was
expert enough to make out in a moment that it was
admirably built — it fairly embarrassed our friend by
the quality that, as he would have said, it "sprang"
on him. He had struck off the fancy that it might,
as a preliminary, be of service to him to be seen, by
a happy accident, from the third-story windows, which
took all the March sun, but of what service was it to
find himself making out after a moment that the
quality "sprung," the quality produced by measure
and balance, the fine relation of part to part and space
to space, was probably — aided by the presence of
ornament as positive as it was discreet, and by the
complexion of the stone, a cold fair grey, warmed and

BOOK SECOND

polished a little by life — neither more nor less than a
case of distinction, such a case as he could only feel
unexpectedly as a sort of delivered challenge ? Mean
while, however, the chance he had allowed for — the
chance of being seen in time from the balcony — had
become a fact. Two or three of the windows stood
open to the violet air; and, before Strether had cut the
knot by crossing, a young man had come out and
looked about him, had lighted a cigarette and tossed
the match over, and then, resting on the rail, had
given himself up to watching the life below while he
smoked. His arrival contributed, in its order, to keep
ing Strether in position; the result of which in turn
was that Strether soon felt himself noticed. The
young man began to look at him as in acknowledge
ment of his being himself in observation.

This was interesting so far as it went, but the inter
est was affected by the young man's not being Chad.
Strether wondered at first if he were perhaps Chad
altered, and then saw that this was asking too much
of alteration. The young man was light bright and
alert — with an air too pleasant to have been arrived
at by patching. Strether had conceived Chad as
patched, but not beyond recognition. He was in pre
sence, he felt, of amendments enough as they stood ;
it was a sufficient amendment that the gentleman up
there should be Chad's friend. He was young too
then, the gentleman up there — he was very young;
young enough apparently to be amused at an elderly
watcher, to be curious even to see what the elderly
watcher would do on finding himself watched. There
was youth in that, there was youth in the surrender

97

THE AMBASSADORS

to the balcony, there was youth for Strether at this
moment in everything but his own business; and
Chad's thus pronounced association with youth bad
given the next instant an extraordinary quick lift to
the issue. The balcony, the distinguished front, testi
fied suddenly, for Strether's fancy, to something that
was up and up ; they placed the whole case materially,
and as by an admirable image, on a level that he
found himself at the end of another moment rejoicing
to think he might reach. The young man looked at
him still, he looked at the young man ; and the issue,
by a rapid process, was that this knowledge of a
perched privacy appeared to him the last of luxuries.
To him too the perched privacy was open, and he saw
it now but in one light — that of the only domicile,
the only fireside, in the great ironic city, on which he
had the shadow of a claim. Miss Gostrey had a fire
side ; she had told him of it, and it was something that
doubtless awaited him ; but Miss Gostrey had n't yet
arrived — she might n't arrive for days ; and the sole
attenuation of his excluded state was his vision of the
small, the admittedly secondary hotel in the bye-street
from the Rue de la Paix, in which her solicitude for
his purse had placed him, which affected him some
how as all indoor chill, glass-roofed court and slip
pery staircase, and which, by the same token, ex
pressed the presence of Waymarsh even at times when
Waymarsh might have been certain to be round at the
bank. It came to pass before he moved that Way-
marsh, and Waymarsh alone, Waymarsh not only
undiluted but positively strengthened, struck him as
the present alternative to the young man in the bal-

BOOK SECOND

cony. When he did move it was fairly to escape that
alternative. Taking his way over the street at last
and passing through the porte-cochere of the house
was like consciously leaving Waymarsh out. How
ever, he would tell him all about it.

BOOK THIRD

STRETHER told Waymarsh all about it that very even
ing, on their dining together at the hotel; which
need n't have happened, he was all the while aware,
had n't he chosen to sacrifice to this occasion a rarer
opportunity. The mention to his companion of the
sacrifice was moreover exactly what introduced his
recital — or, as he would have called it with more
confidence in his interlocutor, his confession. His
confession was that he had been captured and that
one of the features of the affair had just failed to be
his engaging himself on the spot to dinner. As by such
a freedom Waymarsh would have lost him he had
obeyed his scruple; and he had likewise obeyed an
other scruple — which bore on the question of his
himself bringing a guest.

Waymarsh looked gravely ardent, over the finished
soup, at this array of scruples; Strether had n't yet got
quite used to being so unprepared for the conse
quences of the impression he produced. It was com
paratively easy to explain, however, that he had n't
felt sure his guest would please. The person was a
young man whose acquaintance he had made but that
afternoon in the course of rather a hindered enquiry
for another person — an enquiry his new friend had
just prevented in fact from being vain. "Oh," said
Strether, " I 've all sorts of things to tell you ! " — and
he put it in a way that was a virtual hint to Waymarsh

103

THE AMBASSADORS

to help him to enjoy the telling. He waited for his fish,
he drank of his wine, he wiped his long moustache, he
leaned back in his chair, he took in the two English
ladies who had just creaked past them and whom he
would even have articulately greeted if they had n't
rather chilled the impulse ; so that all he could do was
— by way of doing something — to say " Merci,
Francois ! " out quite loud when his fish was brought.
Everything was there that he wanted, everything that
could make the moment an occasion, that would do
beautifully — everything but what Waymarsh might
give. The little waxed salle-a-manger was sallow and
sociable; Francois, dancing over it, all smiles, was a
man and a brother; the high-shouldered patronne,
with her high-held, much-rubbed hands, seemed al
ways assenting exuberantly to something unsaid; the
Paris evening in short was, for Strether, in the very
taste of the soup, in the goodness, as he was inno
cently pleased to think it, of the wine, in the pleasant
coarse texture of the napkin and the crunch of the
thick-crusted bread. These all were things congruous
with his confession, and his confession was that he
had — it would come out properly just there if Way-
marsh would only take it properly — agreed to break
fast out, at twelve literally, the next day. He did n't
quite know where; the delicacy of the case came
straight up in the remembrance of his new friend's
"We'll see; I'll take you somewhere!" — for it had
required little more than that, after all, to let him right
in. He was affected after a minute, face to face with
his actual comrade, by the impulse to overcolour.
There had already been things in respect to which he

104

BOOK THIRD

knew himself tempted by this perversity. If Way-
marsh thought them bad he should at least have his
reason for his discomfort; so Strether showed them
as worse. Still, he was now, in his way, sincerely
perplexed.

Chad had been absent from the Boulevard Males-
herbes — was absent from Paris altogether; he had
learned that from the concierge, but had nevertheless
gone up, and gone up — there were no two ways
about it — from an uncontrollable, a really, if one
would, depraved curiosity. The concierge had men
tioned to him that a friend of the tenant of the
troisieme was for the time in possession ; and this had
been Strether's pretext for a further enquiry, an ex
periment carried on, under Chad's roof, without his
knowledge. " I found his friend in fact there keeping
the place warm, as he called it, for him; Chad himself
being, as appears, in the south. He went a month ago
to Cannes and though his return begins to be looked
for it can't be for some days. I might, you see, per
fectly have waited a week; might have beaten a
retreat as soon as I got this essential knowledge. But
I beat no retreat; I did the opposite; I stayed, I
dawdled, I trifled; above all I looked round. I saw, in
fine; and — I don't know what to call it — I sniffed.
It 's a detail, but it 's as if there were something —
something very good — to sniff."

Waymarsh's face had shown his friend an attention
apparently so remote that the latter was slightly sur
prised to find it at this point abreast with him. "Do
you mean a smell ? What of ? "

"A charming scent. But I don't know."
105

THE AMBASSADORS

Waymarsh gave an inferential grunt. " Does he live
there with a woman ? "

"I don't know."

Waymarsh waited an instant for more, then
resumed. "Has he taken her off with him ?"

"And will he bring her back ?" — Strether fell into
the enquiry. But he wound it up as before. " I don't
know."

The way he wound it up, accompanied as this was
with another drop back, another degustation of the
Leoville, another wipe of his moustache and another
good word for Francois, seemed to produce in his
companion a slight irritation. "Then what the devil
do you know ? "

" Well," said Strether almost gaily, " I guess I don't
know anything!" His gaiety might have been a
tribute to the fact that the state he had been reduced
to did for him again what had been done by his talk of
the matter with Miss Gostrey at the London theatre.
It was somehow enlarging; and the air of that ampli
tude was now doubtless more or less — and all for
Waymarsh to feel — in his further response. " That 's
what I found out from the young man."

"But I thought you said you found out nothing."

"Nothing but that — that I don't know anything."

"And what good does that do you ?"

"It's just," said Strether, "what I've come to you
to help me to discover. I mean anything about any
thing over here. I felt that, up there. It regularly rose
before me in its might. The young man moreover —
Chad's friend — as good as told me so."

"As good as told you you know nothing about any-
106

BOOK THIRD

thing ? " Waymarsh appeared to look at some one who
might have as good as told him. " How old is he ? "

"Well, I guess not thirty."

"Yet you had to take that from him ?"

"Oh I took a good deal more — since, as I tell you,
I took an invitation to dejeuner."

"And are you going to that unholy meal ?"

" If you '11 come with me. He wants you too, you
know. I told him about you. He gave me his card,"
Strether pursued, "and his name's rather funny. It's
John Little Bilham, and he says his two surnames
are, on account of his being small, inevitably used
together."

"Well," Waymarsh asked with due detachment
from these details, "what's he doing up there ?"

"His account of himself is that he's 'only a little
artist-man.' That seemed to me perfectly to describe
him. But he's yet in the phase of study; this, you
know, is the great art-school — to pass a certain num
ber of years in which he came over. And he 's a great
friend of Chad's, and occupying Chad's rooms just
now because they 're so pleasant. He 's very pleasant
and curious too," Strether added — "though he's not
from Boston."

Waymarsh looked already rather sick of him.
" Where is he from?"

Strether thought. "I don't know that, either. But
he's 'notoriously,' as he put it himself, not from
Boston."

"Well," Waymarsh moralised from dry depths,
" every one can't notoriously be from Boston. Why,"
he continued, "is he curious?"

107

THE AMBASSADORS

"Perhaps just for that — for one thing! But
really," Strether added, "for everything. When you
meet him you'll see."

"Oh I don't want to meet him," Waymarsh im
patiently growled. " Why don't he go home ? "

Strether hesitated. "Well, because he likes it over
here."

This appeared in particular more than Waymarsh
could bear. "He ought then to be ashamed of him
self, and, as you admit that you think so too, why drag
him in?"

Strether's reply again took time. "Perhaps I do
think so myself — though I don't quite yet admit it.
I 'm not a bit sure — it 's again one of the things I
want to find out. I liked him, and can you like peo
ple — ? But no matter." He pulled himself up.
"There's no doubt I want you to come down on me
and squash me."

Waymarsh helped himself to the next course, which,
however, proving not the dish he had just noted as
supplied to the English ladies, had the effect of caus
ing his imagination temporarily to wander. But it
presently broke out at a softer spot. " Have they got
a handsome place up there ? "

"Oh a charming place; full of beautiful and valu
able things. I never saw such a place " — and
Strether's thought went back to it. "For a little
artist-man — !" He could in fact scarce express it.

But his companion, who appeared now to have a
view, insisted. " Well ? "

"Well, life can hold nothing better. Besides,
they 're things of which he 's in charge."

108

BOOK THIRD

"So that he does doorkeeper for your precious pair ?
Can life," Waymarsh enquired, "hold nothing better
than that?" Then as Strether, silent, seemed even
yet to wonder, "Does n't he know what she is ?" he
went on.

"/ don't know. I did n't ask him. I could n't. It
was impossible. You would n't either. Besides I
did n't want to. No more would you." Strether in
short explained it at a stroke. "You can't make out
over here what people do know."

"Then what did you come over for?"

"Well, I suppose exactly to see for myself — with
out their aid."

"Then what do you want mine for?"

"Oh," Strether laughed, "you're not one of them!
I do know what you know."

As, however, this last assertion caused Waymarsh
again to look at him hard — such being the latter's
doubt of its implications — he felt his justification
lame. Which was still more the case when Waymarsh
presently said : " Look here, Strether. Quit this."

Our friend smiled with a doubt of his own. " Do
you mean my tone ? "

"No — damn your tone. I mean your nosing
round. Quit the whole job. Let them stew in their
juice. You're being used for a thing you ain't fit for.
People don't take a fine-tooth comb to groom a horse."

"Am I a fine-tooth comb ?" Strether laughed. "It's
something I never called myself!"

"It's what you are, all the same. You ain't so
young as you were, but you 've kept your teeth."

He acknowledged his friend's humour. "Take care
109

tTHE AMBASSADORS

I don't get them into you! You'd like them, my
friends at home, Waymarsh," he declared; "you'd
really particularly like them. And I know " — it was
slightly irrelevant, but he gave it sudden and singular
force — "I know they 'd like you ! "

"Oh don't work them off on me!" Waymarsh
groaned.

Yet Strether still lingered with his hands in his
pockets. "It's really quite as indispensable as I say
that Chad should be got back."

" Indispensable to whom ? To you ? "

"Yes," Strether presently said.

" Because if you get him you also get Mrs. New-
some ? "

Strether faced it. "Yes."

" And if you don't get him you don't get her ? "

It might be merciless, but he continued not to flinch.
"I think it might have some effect on our personal
understanding. Chad 's of real importance — or can
easily become so if he will — to the business."

"And the business is of real importance to his
mother's husband ?"

"Well, I naturally want what my future wife wants.
And the thing will be much better if we have our own
man in it."

" If you have your own man in it, in other words,"
Waymarsh said, "you'll marry — you personally —
more money. She 's already rich, as I understand you,
but she'll be richer still if the business can be made to
boom on certain lines that you 've laid down."

"/ haven't laid them down," Strether promptly
returned. "Mr. Newsome — who knew extraordin-

no

BOOK THIRD

arily well what he was about — laid them down ten
years ago."

Oh well, Waymarsh seemed to indicate with a shake
of his mane, that did n't matter ! " You 're fierce for
the boom anyway.'*

His friend weighed a moment in silence the justice
of the charge. " I can scarcely be called fierce, I think,
when I so freely take my chance of the possibility, the
danger, of being influenced in a sense counter to Mrs.
Newsome's own feelings."

Waymarsh gave this proposition a long hard look.
" I see. You 're afraid yourself of being squared. But
you're a humbug," he added, "all the same."

"Oh!" Strether quickly protested.

"Yes, you ask me for protection — which makes
you very interesting; and then you won't take it. You
say you want to be squashed — "

"Ah but not so easily ! Don't you see," Strether de
manded, "where my interest, as already shown you,
lies ? It lies in my not being squared. If I 'm squared
where 's my marriage ? If I miss my errand I miss
that ; and if I miss that I miss everything — I 'm no
where."

Waymarsh — but all relentlessly — took this in.
" What do I care where you are if you 're spoiled ? "

Their eyes met on it an instant. "Thank you aw
fully," Strether at last said. " But don't you think
her judgement of that — ? "

" Ought to content me ? No."

It kept them again face to face, and the end of this
was that Strether again laughed. "You do her in
justice. You really must know her. Good-night."

in

THE AMBASSADORS

He breakfasted with Mr. Bilham on the morrow,
and, as inconsequently befell, with Waymarsh mass
ively of the party. The latter announced, at the
eleventh hour and much to his friend's surprise, that,
damn it, he would as soon join him as do anything
else ; on which they proceeded together, strolling in a
state of detachment practically luxurious for them
to the Boulevard Malesherbes, a couple engaged that
day with the sharp spell of Paris as confessedly, it
might have been seen, as any couple among the daily
thousands so compromised. They walked, wandered,
wondered and, a little, lost themselves; Strether
had n't had for years so rich a consciousness of time —
a bag of gold into which he constantly dipped for a
handful. It was present to him that when the little
business with Mr. Bilham should be over he would
still have shining hours to use absolutely as he liked.
There was no great pulse of haste yet in this process
of saving Chad ; nor was that effect a bit more marked
as he sat, half an hour later, with his legs under
Chad's mahogany, with Mr. Bilham on one side, with
a friend of Mr. Bilham's on the other, with Way-
marsh stupendously opposite, and with the great hum
of Paris coming up in softness, vagueness — for
Strether himself indeed already positive sweetness —
through the sunny windows toward which, the day
before, his curiosity had raised its wings from below.
The feeling strongest with him at that moment had
borne fruit almost faster than he could taste it, and
Strether literally felt at the present hour that there was
a precipitation in his fate. He had known nothing and
nobody as he stood in the street; but had n't his view

112

BOOK THIRD

now taken a bound in the direction of every one and
of every thing ?

" What 's he up to, what 's he up to ? " — something
like that was at the back of his head all the while in
respect to little Bilham ; but meanwhile, till he should
make out, every one and every thing were as good as
represented for him by the combination of his host and
the lady on his left. The lady on his left, the lady thus
promptly and ingeniously invited to "meet" Mr.
Strether and Mr. Waymarsh — it was the way she
herself expressed her case — was a very marked per
son, a person who had much to do with our friend's
asking himself if the occasion were n't in its essence
the most baited, the most gilded of traps. Baited it
could properly be called when the repast was of so
wise a savour, and gilded surrounding objects seemed
inevitably to need to be when Miss Barrace — which
was the lady's name — looked at them with convex
Parisian eyes and through a glass with a remarkably
long tortoise-shell handle. Why Miss Barrace, ma
ture meagre erect and eminently gay, highly adorned,
perfectly familiar, freely contradictious and reminding
him of some last-century portrait of a clever head
without powder — why Miss Barrace should have
been in particular the note of a "trap" Strether
could n't on the spot have explained ; he blinked in the
light of a conviction that he should know later on, and
know well — as it came over him, for that matter,
with force, that he should need to. He wondered what
he was to think exactly of either of his new friends ;
since the young man, Chad's intimate and deputy,
had, in thus constituting the scene, practised so much

THE AMBASSADORS

more subtly than he had been prepared for, and since
in especial Miss Barrace, surrounded clearly by every
consideration, had n't scrupled to figure as a familiar
object. It was interesting to him to feel that he was
in the presence of new measures, other standards, a
different scale of relations, and that evidently here
were a happy pair who did n't think of things at all as
he and Waymarsh thought. Nothing was less to have
been calculated in the business than that it should now
be for him as if he and Waymarsh were comparatively
quite at one.

The latter was magnificent — this at least was an
assurance privately given him by Miss Barrace.
" Oh your friend 's a type, the grand old American —
what shall one call it ? The Hebrew prophet, Ezekiel,
Jeremiah, who used when I was a little girl in the Rue
Montaigne to come to see my father and who was
usually the American Minister to theTuileries or some
other court. I have n't seen one these ever so many
years ; the sight of it warms my poor old chilled heart ;
this specimen is wonderful; in the right quarter, you
know, he '11 have a succes foil," Strether had n't failed
to ask what the right quarter might be, much as he
required his presence of mind to meet such a change
in their scheme. "Oh the artist-quarter and that kind
of thing; here already, for instance, as you see." He
had been on the point of echoing "'Here' ? — is this
the artist-quarter ? " but she had already disposed of
the question with a wave of all her tortoise-shell and
an easy "Bring him to me!" He knew on the spot how
little he should be able to bring him, for the very air
was by this time, to his sense, thick and hot with

114

BOOK THIRD

poor Waymarsh's judgement of it. He was in the trap
still more than his companion and, unlike his com
panion, not making the best of it ; which was precisely
what doubtless gave him his admirable sombre glow.
Little did Miss Barrace know that what was behind
it was his grave estimate of her own laxity. The gen
eral assumption with which our two friends had ar
rived had been that of finding Mr. Bilham ready to
conduct them to one or other of those resorts of the
earnest, the aesthetic fraternity which were shown
among the sights of Paris. In this character it would
have justified them in a proper insistence on discharg
ing their score. Waymarsh's only proviso at the last
had been that nobody should pay for him; but he
found himself, as the occasion developed, paid for on
a scale as to which Strether privately made out that
he already nursed retribution. Strether was conscious
across the table of what worked in him, conscious
when they passed back to the small salon to which,
the previous evening, he himself had made so rich a
reference ; conscious most of all as they stepped out
to the balcony in which one would have had to be an
ogre not to recognise the perfect place for easy after
tastes. These things were enhanced for Miss Barrace
by a succession of excellent cigarettes — acknow
ledged, acclaimed, as a part of the wonderful supply
left behind him by Chad — in an almost equal ab
sorption of which Strether found himself blindly,
almost wildly pushing forward. He might perish by
the sword as well as by famine, and he knew that his
having abetted the lady by an excess that was rare
with him would count for little in the sum — as Way-

THE AMBASSADORS

marsh might so easily add it up — of her licence.
Waymarsh had smoked of old, smoked hugely ; but
Waymarsh did nothing now, and that gave him his
advantage over people who took things up lightly just
when others had laid them heavily down. Strether
had never smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted at his
friend that this had been only because of a reason.
The reason, it now began to appear even to himself,
was that he had never had a lady to smoke with.

It was this lady's being there at all, however, that
was the strange free thing; perhaps, since she was
there, her smoking was the least of her freedoms. If
Strether had been sure at each juncture of what —
with Bilham in especial — she talked about, he might
have traced others and winced at them and felt Way-
marsh wince; but he was in fact so often at sea that his
sense of the range of reference was merely general and
that he on several different occasions guessed and inter
preted only to doubt. He wondered what they meant,
but there were things he scarce thought they could be
supposed to mean, and "Oh no — not that!" was at
the end of most of his ventures. This was the very be
ginning with him of a condition as to which, later on,
it will be seen, he found cause to pull himself up ; and
he was to remember the moment duly as the first step
in a process. The central fact of the place was neither
more nor less, when analysed — and a pressure super
ficial sufficed — than the fundamental impropriety
of Chad's situation, round about which they thus
seemed cynically clustered. Accordingly, since they
took it for granted, they took for granted all that was
in connexion with it taken for granted at Woollett —

116

BOOK THIRD

matters as to which, verily, he had been reduced with
Mrs. Newsome to the last intensity of silence. That
was the consequence of their being too bad to be
talked about, and was the accompaniment, by the
same token, of a deep conception of their badness.
It befell therefore that when poor Strether put it to
himself that their badness was ultimately, or perhaps
even insolently, what such a scene as the one before
him was, so to speak, built upon, he could scarce
shirk the dilemma of reading a roundabout echo of
them into almost anything that came up. This, he was
well aware, was a dreadful necessity; but such was the
stern logic, he could only gather, of a relation to
the irregular life.

It was the way the irregular life sat upon Bilham
and Miss Barrace that was the insidious, the delicate
marvel. He was eager to concede that their relation
to it was all indirect, for anything else in him would
have shown the grossness of bad manners; but the
indirectness was none the less consonant — that was
striking — with a grateful enjoyment of everything
that was Chad's. They spoke of him repeatedly, in
voking his good name and good nature, and the worst
confusion of mind for Strether was that all their
mention of him was of a kind to do him honour. They
commended his munificence and approved his taste,
and in doing so sat down, as it seemed to Strether, in
the very soil out of which these things flowered. Our
friend's final predicament was that he himself was
sitting down, for the time, with them, and there was
a supreme moment at which, compared with his col
lapse, Waymarsh's erectness affected him as really

117

THE AMBASSADORS

high. One thing was certain — he saw he must make
up his mind. He must approach Chad, must wait for
him, deal with him, master him, but he must n't dis
possess himself of the faculty of seeing things as they
were. He must bring him to him — not go himself,
as it were, so much of the way. He must at any rate
be clearer as to what — should he continue to do that
for convenience — he was still condoning. It was on
the detail of this quantity — and what could the fact
be but mystifying.? — that Bilham and Miss Barrace
threw so little light. So there they were.

II

WHEN Miss Gostrey arrived, at the end of a week, she
made him a sign; he went immediately to see her,
and it was n't till then that he could again close his
grasp on the idea of a corrective. This idea however
was luckily all before him again from the moment he
crossed the threshold of the little entresol of the Quar-
tier Marboeuf into which she had gathered, as she said,
picking them up in a thousand flights and funny little
passionate pounces, the makings of a final nest. He
recognised in an instant that there really, there only,
he should find the boon with the vision of which he
had first mounted Chad's stairs. He might have been
a little scared at the picture of how much more, in this
place, he should know himself "in" had n't his friend
been on the spot to measure the amount to his ap
petite. Her compact and crowded little chambers,
almost dusky, as they at first^, struck him, with accu
mulations, represented a supreme general adjustment
to opportunities and conditions. Wherever he looked
he saw an old ivory or an old brocade, and he scarce
knew where to sit for fear of a misappliance. The
life of the occupant struck him of a sudden as more
charged with possession even than Chad's or than
Miss Barrace's; wide as his glimpse had lately be
come of the empire of " things," what was before him
still enlarged it ; the lust of the eyes and the pride of
life had indeed thus their temple. It was the inner-

119

THE AMBASSADORS

most nook of the shrine — as brown as a pirate's
cave. In the brownness were glints of gold ; patches
of purple were in the gloom; objects all that caught,
through the muslin, with their high rarity, the light
of the low windows. Nothing was clear about them
but that they were precious, and they brushed his
ignorance with their contempt as a flower, in a liberty
taken with him, might have been whisked under his
nose. But after a full look at his hostess he knew none
the less what most concerned him. The circle in
which they stood together was warm with life, and
every question between them would live there as no
where else. A question came up as soon as they had
spoken, for his answer, with a laugh, was quickly:
" Well, they 've got hold of me ! " Much of their talk
on this first occasion was his development of that
truth. He was extraordinarily glad to see her, ex
pressing to her frankly what she most showed him,
that one might live for years without a blessing un
suspected, but that to know it at last for no more than
three days was to need it or miss it for ever. She was
the blessing that had now become his need, and what
could prove it better than that without her he had
lost himself?

"What do you mean ?" she asked with an absence
of alarm that, correcting him as if he had mistaken
the " period " of one of her pieces, gave him afresh a
sense of her easy movement through the maze he had
but begun to tread. "What in the name of all the
Pococks have you managed to do ? "

" Why exactly the wrong thing. I Ve made a frantic
friend of little Bilham."

120

BOOK THIRD

"Ah that sort of thing was of the essence of your case
and to have been allowed for from the first." And it
was only after this that, quite as a minor matter, she
asked who in the world little Bilham might be. When
she learned that he was a friend of Chad's and living
for the time in Chad's rooms in Chad's absence, quite
as if acting in Chad's spirit and serving Chad's cause,
she showed, however, more interest. "Should you
mind my seeing him ? Only once, you know," she
added.

"Oh the oftener the better: he's amusing — he's
original."

" He does n't shock you ? " Miss Gostrey threw out.

"Never in the world! We escape that with a per
fection — ! I feel it to be largely, no doubt, because
I don't half-understand him; but our modus vivendi
is n't spoiled even by that. You must dine with me to
meet him," Strether went on. "Then you'll see."

"Are you giving dinners?"

"Yes — there I am. That's what I mean."

All her kindness wondered. "That you 're spending
too much money ? "

" Dear no — they seem to cost so little. But that
I do it to them. I ought to hold off."

She thought again — she laughed. "The money
you must be spending to think it cheap ! But I must
be out of it — to the naked eye."

He looked for a moment as if she were really failing
him. "Then you won't meet them ?" It was almost
as if she had developed an unexpected personal prud
ence.

She hesitated. "Who are they — first ?"
121

THE AMBASSADORS

"Why little Bilham to begin with." He kept back
for the moment Miss Barrace. "And Chad — when
he comes — you must absolutely see."

"When then does he come?"

"When Bilham has had time to write him, and
hear from him, about me. Bilham, however," he pur
sued, "will report favourably — favourably for Chad.
That will make him not afraid to come. I want you
the more therefore, you see, for my bluff."

"Oh you'll do yourself for your bluff." She was
perfectly easy. "At the rate you 've gone I 'm quiet."

"Ah but I haven't," said Strether, "made one
protest."

She turned it over. " Have n't you been seeing what
there 's to protest about ? "

He let her, with this, however ruefully, have the
whole truth. "I haven't yet found a single thing."

"Is n't there any one with him then ?"

"Of the sort I came out about?" Strether took
a moment. "How do I know? And what do I
care?"

"Oh oh!" — and her laughter spread. He was
struck in fact by the effect on her of his joke. He saw
now how he meant it as a joke. She saw, however,
still other things, though in an instant she had hidden
them. "You've got at no facts at all ?"

He tried to muster them. "Well, he has a lovely
home."

"Ah that, in Paris," she quickly returned, "proves
nothing. That is rather it disproves nothing. They
may very well, you see, the people your mission is
concerned with, have done it for him."

122

BOOK THIRD

" Exactly. And it was on the scene of their doings
then that Waymarsh and I sat guzzling.'*

"Oh if you forbore to guzzle here on scenes of do
ings," she replied, "you might easily die of starva
tion." With which she smiled at him. "You've
worse before you."

"Ah I've everything before me. But on our hypo
thesis, you know, they must be wonderful."

"They are!" said Miss Gostrey. "You're not
therefore, you see," she added, "wholly without facts.
They've been, in effect, wonderful."

To have got at something comparatively definite
appeared at last a little to help — a wave by which
moreover, the next moment, recollection was washed.
" My young man does admit furthermore that they 're
our friend's great interest."

" Is that the expression he uses ? "

Strether more exactly recalled. "No — not quite."

" Something more vivid ? Less ? "

He had bent, with neared glasses, over a group of
articles on a small stand; and at this he came up.
" It was a mere allusion, but, on the lookout as I was,
it struck me. 'Awful, you know, as Chad is ' — those
were Bilham's words."

" ' Awful, you know ' — ? Oh ! " — and Miss Gos
trey turned them over. She seemed, however, satis
fied. "Well, what more do you want ?"

He glanced once more at a bibelot or two, and every
thing sent him back. " But it is all the same as if they
wished to let me have it between the eyes."

She wondered. "Quoi done ?"

"Why what I speak of. The amenity. They
123

THE AMBASSADORS

can stun you with that as well as with anything
else."

"Oh," she answered, "you '11 come round ! I must
see them each," she went on, "for myself. I mean
Mr. Bilham and Mr. Newsome — Mr. Bilham natur
ally first. Once only — once for each ; that will do.
But face to face — for half an hour. What 's Mr.
Chad," she immediately pursued, "doing at Cannes ?
Decent men don't go to Cannes with the — well, with
the kind of ladies you mean."

" Don't they ? " Strether asked with an interest in
decent men that amused her.

"No; elsewhere, but not to Cannes. Cannes is
different. Cannes is better. Cannes is best. I mean
it 's all people you know — when you do know them.
And if he does, why that's different too. He must
have gone alone. She can't be with him."

" I have n't," Strether confessed in his weakness,
" the least idea." There seemed much in what she said,
but he was able after a little to help her to a nearer
impression. The meeting with little Bilham took
place, by easy arrangement, in the great gallery of
the Louvre; and when, standing with his fellow
visitor before one of the splendid Titians > — the over
whelming portrait of the young man with the strangely-
shaped glove and the blue-grey eyes — he turned to
see the third member of their party advance from the
end of the waxed and gilded vista, he had a sense of
having at last taken hold. He had agreed with Miss
Gostrey — it dated even from Chester — for a morn
ing at the Louvre, and he had embraced independ
ently the same idea as thrown out by little Bilham,

124

BOOK THIRD

whom he had already accompanied to the museum
of the Luxembourg. The fusion of these schemes
presented no difficulty, and it was to strike him again
that in little Bilham's company contrarieties in gen
eral dropped.

"Oh he's all right — he's one of us!" Miss Gos-
trey, after the first exchange, soon found a chance to
murmur to her companion; and Strether, as they
proceeded and paused and while a quick unanimity
between the two appeared to have phrased itself in
half a dozen remarks — Strether knew that he knew
almost immediately what she meant, and took it as
still another sign that he had got his job in hand. This
was the more grateful to him that he could think of
the intelligence now serving him as an acquisition pos
itively new. He would n't have known even the day
before what she meant — that is if she meant, what
he assumed, that they were intense Americans to
gether. He had just worked round — and with a
sharper turn of the screw than any yet — to the con
ception of an American intense as little Bilham was
intense. The young man was his first specimen; the
specimen had profoundly perplexed him; at present
however there was light. It was by little Bilham's
amazing serenity that he had at first been affected,
but he had inevitably, in his circumspection, felt it as
the trail of the serpent, the corruption, as he might
conveniently have said, of Europe; whereas the
promptness with which it came up for Miss Gostrey
but as a special little form of the oldest thing they
knew justified it at once to his own vision as well. He
wanted to be able to like his specimen with a clear

125

THE AMBASSADORS

good conscience, and this fully permitted it. What
had muddled him was precisely the small artist-
man's way — it was so complete — of being more
American than anybody. But it now for the time
put Strether vastly at his ease to have this view of a
new way.

The amiable youth then looked out, as it had first
struck Strether, at a world in respect to which he
had n't a prejudice. The one our friend most instantly
missed was the usual one in favour of an occupation
accepted. Little Bilham had an occupation, but it was
only an occupation declined ; and it was by his general
exemption from alarm, anxiety or remorse on this
score that the impression of his serenity was made.
He had come out to Paris to paint — to fathom, that
is, at large, that mystery; but study had been fatal to
him so far as anything could be fatal, and his product
ive power faltered in proportion as his knowledge
grew. Strether had gathered from him that at the mo
ment of his finding him in Chad's rooms he had n't
saved from his shipwreck a scrap of anything but his
beautiful intelligence and his confirmed habit of
Paris. He referred to these things with an equal fond
familiarity, and it was sufficiently clear that, as an
outfit, they still served him. They were charming to
Strether through the hour spent at the Louvre, where
indeed they figured for him as an unseparated part of
the charged iridescent air, the glamour of the name,
the splendour of the space, the colour of the masters.
Yet they were present too wherever the young man
led, and the day after the visit to the Louvre they
hung, in a different walk, about the steps of our party.

126

BOOK THIRD

He had invited his companions to cross the river with
him, offering to show them his own poor place; and
his own poor place, which was very poor, gave to his
idiosyncrasies, for Strether — the small sublime indif
ferences and independences that had struck the latter
as fresh — an odd and engaging dignity. He lived at
the end of an alley that went out of an old short cob
bled street, a street that went in turn out of a new long
smooth avenue — street and avenue and alley having,
however, in common a sort of social shabbiness; and
he introduced them to the rather cold and blank little
studio which he had lent to a comrade for the term of
his elegant absence. The comrade was another in
genuous compatriot, to whom he had wired that tea
was to await them "regardless," and this reckless
repast, and the second ingenuous compatriot, and the
faraway makeshift life, with its jokes and its gaps, its
delicate daubs and its three or four chairs, its overflow
of taste and conviction and its lack of nearly all else —
these things wove round the occasion a spell to which
our hero unreservedly surrendered.

He liked the ingenuous compatriots — for two or
three others soon gathered ; he liked the delicate daubs
and the free discriminations — involving references
indeed, involving enthusiasms and execrations that
made him, as they said, sit up; he liked above all the
legend of good-humoured poverty, of mutual accom
modation fairly raised to the romantic, that he soon
read into the scene. The ingenuous compatriots
showed a candour, he thought, surpassing even the
candour of Woollett ; they were red-haired and long-
legged, they were quaint and queer and dear and

127

THE AMBASSADORS

droll ; they made the place resound with the vernacu
lar, which he had never known so marked as when
figuring for the chosen language, he must suppose, of
contemporary art. They twanged with a vengeance
the aesthetic lyre — they drew from it wonderful airs.
This aspect of their life had an admirable innocence;
and he looked on occasion at Maria Gostrey to see to
what extent that element reached her. She gave him
however for the hour, as she had given him the pre
vious day, no further sign than to show how she dealt
with boys; meeting them with the air of old Parisian
practice that she had for every one, for everything, in
turn. Wonderful about the delicate daubs, masterful
about the way to make tea, trustful about the legs of
chairs and familiarly reminiscent of those, in the other
time, the named, the numbered or the caricatured,
who had flourished or failed, disappeared or arrived,
she had accepted with the best grace her second course
of little Bilham, and had said to Strether, the previous
afternoon, on his leaving them, that, since her impres
sion was to be renewed, she would reserve judgement
till after the new evidence.

The new evidence was to come, as it proved, in a
day or two. He soon had from Maria a message to the
effect that an excellent box at the Francais had been
lent her for the following night; it seeming on such
occasions not the least of her merits that she was sub
ject to such approaches. The sense of how she was
always paying for something in advance was equalled
on Strether' s part only by the sense of how she was
always being paid; all of which made for his con
sciousness, in the larger air, of a lively bustling traffic,

128

BOOK THIRD

the exchange of such values as were not for him to
handle. She hated, he knew, at the French play, any
thing but a box — just as she hated at the English
anything but a stall; and a box was what he was
already in this phase girding himself to press upon
her. But she had for that matter her community with
little Bilham: she too always, on the great issues,
showed as having known in time. It made her con
stantly beforehand with him and gave him mainly the
chance to ask himself how on the day of their settle
ment their account would stand. He endeavoured
even now to keep it a little straight by arranging that
if he accepted her invitation she should dine with him
first; but the upshot of this scruple was that at eight
o'clock on the morrow he awaited her with Waymarsh
under the pillared portico. She had n't dined with
him, and it was characteristic of their relation that she
had made him embrace her refusal without in the
least understanding it. She ever caused her rearrange
ments to affect him as her tenderest touches. It was
on that principle for instance that, giving him the op
portunity to be amiable again to little Bilham, she had
suggested his offering the young man a seat in their
box. Strether had dispatched for this purpose a small
blue missive to the Boulevard Malesherbes, but up to
the moment of their passing into the theatre he had
received no response to his message. He held, how
ever, even after they had been for some time con
veniently seated, that their friend, who knew his way
about, would come in at his own right moment. His
temporary absence moreover seemed, as never yet, to
make the right moment for Miss Gostrey. Strether

129

THE AMBASSADORS

had been waiting till to-night to get back from her in
some mirrored form her impressions and conclusions.
She had elected, as they said, to see little Bilham
once ; but now she had seen him twice and had never
theless not said more than a word.

Waymarsh meanwhile sat opposite him with their
hostess between; and Miss Gostrey spoke of herself
as an instructor of youth introducing her little charges
to a work that was one of the glories of literature. The
glory was happily unobjectionable, and the little
charges were candid; for herself she had travelled that
road and she merely waited on their innocence. But
she referred in due time to their absent friend, whom
it was clear they should have to give up. " He either
won't have got your note," she said, "or you won't
have got his : he has had some kind of hindrance, and,
of course, for that matter, you know, a man never
writes about coming to a box." She spoke as if, with
her look, it might have been Waymarsh who had
written to the youth, and the latter's face showed a
mixture of austerity and anguish. She went on how
ever as if to meet this. "He's far and away, you
know, the best of them."

"The best of whom, ma'am ?"

"Why of all the long procession — the boys, the
girls, or the old men and old women as they sometimes
really are ; the hope, as one may say, of our country.
They 've all passed, year after year; but there has been
no one in particular I 've ever wanted to stop. I feel —
don't you? — that I want to stop little Bilham; he's
so exactly right as he is." She continued to talk to
Waymarsh. " He 's too delightful. If he '11 only not

130

BOOK THIRD

spoil it! But they always will; they always do; they
always have."

"I don't think Waymarsh knows," Strether said
after a moment, "quite what it's open to Bilham to
spoil."

"It can't be a good American," Waymarsh lucidly
enough replied ; " for it did n't strike me the young
man had developed much in that shape."

"Ah," Miss Gostrey sighed, "the name of the good
American is as easily given as taken away ! What is it,
to begin with, to be one, and what 's the extraordinary
hurry ? Surely nothing that 's so pressing was ever so
little defined. It's such an order, really, that before
we cook you the dish we must at least have your
receipt. Besides, the poor chicks have time! What
I Ve seen so often spoiled," she pursued, " is the happy
attitude itself, the state of faith and — what shall I
call it ? — the sense of beauty. You 're right about
him" — she now took in Strether; "little Bilham has
them to a charm ; we must keep little Bilham along."
Then she was all again for Waymarsh. "The others
have all wanted so dreadfully to do something, and
they've gone and done it in too many cases indeed. It
leaves them never the same afterwards; the charm's
always somehow broken. Now be, I think, you know,
really won't. He won't do the least dreadful little
thing. We shall continue to enjoy him just as he is.
No — he 's quite beautiful. He sees everything. He
is n't a bit ashamed. He has every scrap of the cour
age of it that one could ask. Only think what he might
do. One wants really — for fear of some accident —
to keep him in view. At this very moment perhaps

THE AMBASSADORS

•

what may n't he be up to ? I Ve had my disappoint
ments — the poor things are never really safe ; or only
at least when you have them under your eye. One
can never completely trust them. One 's uneasy, and
I think that's why I most miss him now."

She had wound up with a laugh of enjoyment over her
embroidery of her idea — an enjoyment that her face
communicated to Strether, who almost wished none
the less at this moment that she would let poor Way-
marsh alone. He knew more or less what she meant ;
but the fact was n't a reason for her not pretending to
Waymarsh that he did n't. It was craven of him per
haps, but he would, for the high amenity of the occa
sion, have liked Waymarsh not to be so sure of his wit.
Her recognition of it gave him away and, before she
had done with him or with that article, would give him
worse. What was he, all the same, to do ? He looked
across the box at his friend ; their eyes met ; something
queer and stiff, something that bore on the situation
but that it was better not to touch, passed in silence
between them. Well, the effect of it for Strether was
an abrupt reaction, a final impatience of his own
tendency to temporise. Where was that taking him
anyway ? It was one of the quiet instants that some
times settle more matters than the outbreaks dear to
the historic muse. The only qualification of the quiet
ness was the synthetic "Oh hang it!" into which
Strether's share of the silence soundlessly flowered.
It represented, this mute ejaculation, a final impulse
to burn his ships. These ships, to the historic muse,
may seem of course mere cockles, but when he pre
sently spoke to Miss Gostrey it was with the sense at

132

BOOK THIRD

least of applying the torch. "Is it then a conspir
acy?"

" Between the two young men ? Well, I don't pre
tend to be a seer or a prophetess," she presently
replied ; " but if I 'm simply a woman of sense he 's
working for you to-night. I don't quite know how —
but it 's in my bones." And she looked at him at last
as if, little material as she yet gave him, he'd really
understand. " For an opinion that 's my opinion. He
makes you out too well not to."

"Not to work for me to-night?" Strether won
dered. "Then I hope he isn't doing anything very
bad."

"They've got you," she portentously answered.

" Do you mean he is — ? "

"They've got you," she merely repeated. Though
she disclaimed the prophetic vision she was at this
instant the nearest approach he had ever met to the
priestess of the oracle. The light was in her eyes.
"You must face it now."

He faced it on the spot. "They had arranged — ?"

"Every move in the game. And they've been
arranging ever since. He has had every day his little
telegram from Cannes."

It made Strether open his eyes. "Do you know
that?"

" I do better. I see it. This was, before I met him,
what I wondered whether I was to see. But as soon as
I met him I ceased to wonder, and our second meeting
made me sure. I took him all in. He was acting — he
is still — on his daily instructions."

"So that Chad has done the whole thing?"

133

THE AMBASSADORS

" Oh no — not the whole. We 've done some of it.
You and I and * Europe.' "

" Europe — yes," Strether mused.

"Dear old Paris," she seemed to explain. But there
was more, and, with one of her turns, she risked it.
"And dear old Waymarsh. You," she declared,
" have been a good bit of it."

He sat massive. "A good bit of what, ma'am ?"

" Why of the wonderful consciousness of our friend
here. You 've helped too in your way to float him to
where he is."

"And where the devil is he?"

She passed it on with a laugh. "Where the devil,
Strether, are you ? "

He spoke as if he had just been thinking it out.
"Well, quite already in Chad's hands, it would seem."
And he had had with this another thought. "Will that
be — just all through Bilham — the way he's going
to work it ? It would be, for him, you know, an idea.
Afld Chad with an idea — !"

"Well?" she asked while the image held him.

" Well, is Chad — what shall I say ? — mon
strous ? "

"Oh as much as you like! But the idea you speak
of," she said, "won't have been his best. He'll have
a better. It won't be all through little Bilham that
he '11 work it."

This already sounded almost like a hope destroyed.
"Through whom else then ?"

"That's what we shall see!" But quite as she
spoke she turned, and Strether turned; for the door
of the box had opened, with the click of the ouvreuse,

134

BOOK THIRD

from the lobby, and a gentleman, a stranger to them,
had come in with a quick step. The door closed be
hind him, and, though their faces showed him his mis
take, his air, which was striking, was all good confid
ence. The curtain had just again arisen, and, in the
hush of the general attention, Strether's challenge was
tacit, as was also the greeting, with a quickly-depre
cating hand and smile, of the unannounced visitor.
He discreetly signed that he would wait, would stand,
and these things and his face, one look from which
she had caught, had suddenly worked for Miss Gos-
trey. She fitted to them all an answer for Strether's
last question. The solid stranger was simply the an
swer — as she now, turning to her friend, indicated.
She brought it straight out for him — it presented the
intruder. "Why, through this gentleman!" The
gentleman indeed, at the same time, though sounding
for Strether a very short name, did practically as
much to explain. Strether gasped the name back —
then only had he seen. Miss Gostrey had said more
than she knew. They were in presence of Chad him
self.

Our friend was to go over it afterwards again and
again — he was going over it much of the time that
they were together, and they were together constantly
for three or four days : the note had been so strongly
struck during that first half-hour that everything hap
pening since was comparatively a minor development.
The fact was that his perception of the young man's
identity — so absolutely checked for a minute — had
been quite one of the sensations that count in life; he
certainly had never known one that had acted, as he

135

THE AMBASSADORS

might have said, with more of a crowded rush. And
the rush, though both vague and multitudinous, had
lasted a long time, protected, as it were, yet at the same
time aggravated, by the circumstance of its coinciding
with a stretch of decorous silence. They could n't talk
without disturbing the spectators in the part of the
balcony just below them; and it, for that matter, came
to Strether — being a thing of the sort that did come
to him — that these were the accidents of a high civil-

O

isation ; the imposed tribute to propriety, the frequent
exposure to conditions, usually brilliant, in which
relief has to await its time. Relief was never quite
near at hand for kings, queens, comedians and other
such people, and though you might be yourself not
exactly one of those, you could yet, in leading the life
of high pressure, guess a little how they sometimes felt.
It was truly the life of high pressure that Strether had
seemed to feel himself lead while he sat there, close
to Chad, during the long tension of the act. He was
in presence of a fact that occupied his whole mind,
that occupied for the half-hour his senses themselves
all together; but he couldn't without inconvenience
show anything — which moreover might count really
as luck. What he might have shown, had he shown at
all, was exactly the kind of emotion — the emotion of
bewilderment — that he had proposed to himself from
the first, whatever should occur, to show least. The
phenomenon that had suddenly sat down there with
him was a phenomenon of change so complete that his
imagination, which had worked so beforehand, felt
itself, in the connexion, without margin or allowance.
It had faced every contingency but that Chad should

136

BOOK THIRD

not be Chad, and this was what it now had to face with
a mere strained smile and an uncomfortable flush.

He asked himself if, by any chance, before he
should have in some way to commit himself, he might
feel his mind settled to the new vision, might habituate
it, so to speak, to the remarkable truth. But oh it was
too remarkable, the truth; for what could be more
remarkable than this sharp rupture of an identity ?
You could deal with a man as himself — you could n't
deal with him as somebody else. It was a small source
of peace moreover to be reduced to wondering how
little he might know in such an event what a sum he
was setting you. He could n't absolutely not know,
for you could n't absolutely not let him. It was a case
then simply, a strong case, as people nowadays called
such things, a case of transformation unsurpassed,
and the hope was but in the general law that strong
cases were liable to control from without. Perhaps he,
Strether himself, was the only person after all aware of
it. Even Miss Gostrey, with all her science, would n't
be, would she ? — and he had never seen any one less
aware of anything than Waymarsh as he glowered at
Chad. The social sightlessness of his old friend's
survey marked for him afresh, and almost in an
humiliating way, the inevitable limits of direct aid
from this source. He was not certain, however, of not
drawing a shade of compensation from the privilege,
as yet untasted, of knowing more about something in
particular than Miss Gostrey did. His situation too
was a case, for that matter, and he was now so inter
ested, quite so privately agog, about it, that he had
already an eye to the fun it would be to open up to her

137

THE AMBASSADORS

afterwards. He derived during his half-hour no assist
ance from her, and just this fact of her not meeting
his eyes played a little, it must be confessed, into his
predicament.

He had introduced Chad, in the first minutes, under
his breath, and there was never the primness in her of
the person unacquainted; but she had none the less
betrayed at first no vision but of the stage, where she
occasionally found a pretext for an appreciative mo
ment that she invited Waymarsh to share. The latter' s
faculty of participation had never had, all round, such
an assault to meet; the pressure on him being the
sharper for this chosen attitude in her, as Strether
judged it, of isolating, for their natural intercourse,
Chad and himself. This intercourse was meanwhile
restricted to a frank friendly look from the young man,
something markedly like a smile, but falling far short
of a grin, and to the vivacity of Strether's private
speculation as to whether he carried himself like a
fool. He did n't quite see how he could so feel as one
without somehow showing as one. The worst of that
question moreover was that he knew it as a symptom
the sense of which annoyed him. " If I 'm going to be
odiously conscious of how I may strike the fellow," he
reflected, " it was so little what I came out for that I
may as well stop before I begin." This sage consider
ation too, distinctly, seemed to leave untouched the
fact that he was going to be conscious. He was con
scious of everything but of what would have served
him.

He was to know afterwards, in the watches of the
night, that nothing would have been more open to him

.138

BOOK THIRD

than after a minute or two to propose to Chad to seek
with him the refuge of the lobby. He had n't only not
proposed it, but had lacked even the presence of mind
to see it as possible. He had stuck there like a school
boy wishing not to miss a minute of the show ; though
for that portion of the show then presented he had n't
had an instant's real attention. He could n't when the
curtain fell have given the slightest account of what
had happened. He had therefore, further, not at that
moment acknowledged the amenity added by this
acceptance of his awkwardness to Chad's general pa
tience. Had n't he none the less known at the very
time — known it stupidly and without reaction —
that the boy was accepting something ? He was mod
estly benevolent, the boy — that was at least what he
had been capable of the superiority of making out his
chance to be; and one had one's self literally not had
the gumption to get in ahead of him. If we should go
into all that occupied our friend in the watches of the
night we should have to mend our pen; but an instance
or two may mark for us the vividness with which he
could remember. He remembered the two absurdities
that, if his presence of mind bad failed, were the
things that had had most to do with it. He had never
in his life seen a young man come into a box at ten
o'clock at night, and would, if challenged on the ques
tion in advance, have scarce been ready to pronounce
as to different ways of doing so. But it was in spite of
this definite to him that Chad had had a way that was
wonderful : a fact carrying with it an implication that,
as one might imagine it, he knew, he had learned,
how.

139

THE AMBASSADORS

Here already then were abounding results ; he had
on the spot and without the least trouble of intention
taught Strether that even in so small a thing as that
there were different ways. He had done in the same
line still more than this ; had by a mere shake or two
of the head made his old friend observe that the
change in him was perhaps more than anything else,
for the eye, a matter of the marked streaks of grey,
extraordinary at his age, in his thick black hair; as
well as that this new feature was curiously becoming
to him, did something for him, as characterisation,
also even — of all things in the world — as refine
ment, that had been a good deal wanted. Strether
felt, however, he would have had to confess, that it
would n't have been easy just now, on this and other
counts, in the presence of what had been supplied, to
be quite clear as to what had been missed. A reflex
ion a candid critic might have made of old, for in
stance, was that it would have been happier for the
son to look more like the mother; but this was a re
flexion that at present would never occur. The ground
had quite fallen away from it, yet no resemblance
whatever to the mother had supervened. It would
have been hard for a young man's face and air to dis
connect themselves more completely than Chad's at
this juncture from any discerned, from any imagin
able aspect of a New England female parent. That of
course was no more than had been on the cards; but it
produced in Strether none the less one of those fre
quent phenomena of mental reference with which all
judgement in him was actually beset.

Again and again as the days passed he had had a
140

BOOK THIRD

sense of the pertinence of communicating quickly
with Woollett — communicating with a quickness
with which telegraphy alone would rhyme; the fruit
really of a fine fancy in him for keeping things
straight, for the happy forestalment of jerror. No one
could explain better when needful, nor put more con
science into an account or a report; which burden of
conscience is perhaps exactly the reason why his
heart always sank when the clouds of explanation
gathered. His highest ingenuity was in keeping the
sky of life clear of them. Whether or no he had a
grand idea of the lucid, he held that nothing ever was
in fact — for any one else — explained. One went
through the vain motions, but it was mostly a waste of
life. A personal relation was a relation only so long as
people either perfectly understood or, better still,
did n't care if they did n't. From the moment they
cared if they did n't it was living by the sweat of one's
brow ; and the sweat of one's brow was just what one
might buy one's self off from by keeping the ground
free of the wild weed of delusion. It easily grew too
fast, and the Atlantic cable now alone could race with
it. That agency would each day have testified for him
to something that was not what Woollett had argued.
He was not at this moment absolutely sure that the
effect of the morrow's — or rather of the night's —
appreciation of the crisis would n't be to determine
some brief missive. "Have at last seen him, but oh
dear ! " — some temporary relief of that sort seemed
to hover before him. It hovered somehow as prepar
ing them all — yet preparing them for what ? If he
might do so more luminously and cheaply he would

141

THE AMBASSADORS

tick out in four words: "Awfully old — grey hair."
To this particular item in Chad's appearance he con
stantly, during their mute half-hour, reverted ; as if so
very much more than he could have said had been in
volved in it. The most he could have said would have
been : " If he 's going to make me feel young — ! "
which indeed, however, carried with it quite enough.
If Strether was to feel young, that is, it would be be
cause Chad was to feel old; and an aged and hoary
sinner had been no part of the scheme.

The question of Chadwick's true time of life was,
doubtless, what came up quickest after the adjourn
ment of the two, when the play was over, to a cafe in
the Avenue de 1'Opera. Miss Gostrey had in due
course been perfect for such a step ; she had known
exactly what they wanted — to go straight somewhere
and talk; and Strether had even felt she had known
what he wished to say and that he was arranging
immediately to begin. She had n't pretended this,
as she had pretended on the other hand, to have
divined Waymarsh's wish to extend to her an inde
pendent protection homeward ; but Strether neverthe
less found how, after he had Chad opposite to him at
a small table in the brilliant halls that his companion
straightway selected, sharply and easily discriminated
from others, it was quite, to his mind, as if she heard
him speak; as if, sitting up, a mile away, in the little
apartment he knew, she would listen hard enough to
catch. He found too that he liked that idea, and he
wished that, by the same token, Mrs. Newsome might
have caught as well. For what had above all been
determined in him as a necessity of the first order was

142

BOOK THIRD

not to lose another hour, nor a fraction of one ; was to
advance, to overwhelm, with a rush. This was how
he would anticipate — by a night-attack, as might be
— any forced maturity that a crammed consciousness
of Paris was likely to take upon itself to assert on be
half of the boy. He knew to the full, on what he had
just extracted from Miss Gostrey, Chad's marks of
alertness; but they were a reason the more for not
dawdling. If he was himself moreover to be treated as
young he would n't at all events be so treated before
he should have struck out at least once. His arms
might be pinioned afterwards, but it would have been
left on record that he was fifty. The importance of
this he had indeed begun to feel before they left the
theatre; it had become a wild unrest, urging him to
seize his chance. He could scarcely wait for it as they
went ; he was on the verge of the indecency of bringing
up the question in the street; he fairly caught himself
going on — so he afterwards invidiously named it —
as if there would be for him no second chance should
the present be lost. Not till, on the purple divan be
fore the perfunctory bock, he had brought out the
words themselves, was he sure, for that matter, that
the present would be saved.

BOOK FOURTH

"I'VE come, you know, to make you break with
everything, neither more nor less, and take you
straight home; so you'll be so good as immediately
and favourably to consider it ! " — Strether, face to
face with Chad after the play, had sounded these
words almost breathlessly, and with an effect at first
positively disconcerting to himself alone. For Chad's
receptive attitude was that of a person who had been
gracefully quiet while the messenger at last reaching
him has run a mile through the dust. During some
seconds after he had spoken Strether felt as if he had
made some such exertion; he was not even certain
that the perspiration was n't on his brow. It was the
kind of consciousness for which he had to thank the
look that, while the strain lasted, the young man's
eyes gave him. They reflected — and the deuce of the
thing was that they reflected really with a sort of shy
ness of kindness — his momentarily disordered state ;
which fact brought on in its turn for our friend the
dawn of a fear that Chad might simply "take it out"
— take everything out — in being sorry for him. Such
a fear, any fear, was unpleasant. But everything was
unpleasant; it was odd how everything had suddenly
turned so. This however was no reason for letting
the least thing go. Strether had the next minute pro
ceeded as roundly as if with an advantage to follow
up. "Of course I 'm a busybody, if you want to fight

147

THE AMBASSADORS

the case to the death; but after all mainly in the sense
of having known you and having given you such at
tention as you kindly permitted when you were in
jackets and knickerbockers. Yes — it was knicker
bockers, I'm busybody enough to remember that;
and that you had, for your age — I speak of the first
far-away time — tremendously stout legs. Well, we
want you to break. Your mother's heart's passion
ately set upon it, but she has above and beyond that
excellent arguments and reasons. I've not put them
into her head — I need n't remind you how little she 's
a person who needs that. But they exist — you must
take it from me as a friend both of hers and yours —
for myself as well. I did n't invent them, I did n't
originally work them out; but I understand them, I
think I can explain them — by which I mean make
you actively do them justice; and that's why you see
me here. You had better know the worst at once. It 's
a question of an immediate rupture and an immediate
return. I've been conceited enough to dream I can
sugar that pill. I take at any rate the greatest interest
in the question. I took it already before I left home;
and I don't mind telling you that, altered as you are,
I take it still more now that I've seen you. You're
older and — I don't know what to call it ! — more of
a handful ; but you 're by so much the more, I seem to
make out, to our purpose."

" Do I strike you as improved ? " Strether was to
recall that Chad had at this point enquired.

He was likewise to recall — and it had to count for
some time as his greatest comfort — that it had been
"given" him, as they said at Woollett, to reply with

148

BOOK FOURTH

some presence of mind: "I haven't the least idea."
He was really for a while to like thinking he had been
positively hard. On the point of conceding that Chad
had improved in appearance, but that to the question
of appearance the remark must be confined, he
checked even that compromise and left his reserva
tion bare. Not only his moral, but also, as it were, his
aesthetic sense had a little to pay for this, Chad being
unmistakeably — and was n't it a matter of the con
founded grey hair again ? — handsomer than he had
ever promised. That however fell in perfectly with
what Strether had said. They had no desire to keep
down his proper expansion, and he would n't be less
to their purpose for not looking, as he had too often
done of old, only bold and wild. There was indeed a
signal particular in which he would distinctly be more
so. Strether did n't, as he talked, absolutely follow
himself; he only knew he was clutching his thread and
that he held it from moment to moment a little tighter;
his mere uninterruptedness during the few minutes
helped him to do that. He had frequently, for a
month, turned over what he should say on this very
occasion, and he seemed at last to have said nothing
he had thought of — everything was so totally differ
ent.

But in spite of all he had put the flag at the window.
This was what he had done, and there was a minute
during which he affected himself as having shaken it
hard, flapped it with a mighty flutter, straight in front
of his companion's nose. It gave him really almost the
sense of having already acted his part. The moment
ary relief — as if from the knowledge that nothing of

149

THE AMBASSADORS

that at least could be undone — sprang from a par
ticular cause, the cause that had flashed into opera
tion, in Miss Gostrey's box, with direct apprehension,
with amazed recognition, and that had been con
cerned since then in every throb of his consciousness.
What it came to was that with an absolutely new
quantity to deal with one simply could n't know. The
new quantity was represented by the fact that Chad
had been made over. That was all; whatever it was it
was everything. Strether had never seen the thing so
done before — it was perhaps a speciality of Paris.
If one had been present at the process one might little
by little have mastered the result; but he was face to
face, as matters stood, with the finished business. It
had freely been noted for him that he might be received
as a dog among skittles, but that was on the basis of
the old quantity. He had originally thought of lines
and tones as things to be taken, but these possibilities
had now quite melted away. There was no computing
at all what the young man before him would think or
feel or say on any subject whatever. This intelligence
Strether had afterwards, to account for his nervous
ness, reconstituted as he might, just as he had also
reconstituted the promptness with which Chad had
corrected his uncertainty. An extraordinarily short
time had been required for the correction, and there
had ceased to be anything negative in his compan
ion's face and air as soon as it was made. "Your
engagement to my mother has become then what they
call here a fait accompli?" — it had consisted, the
determinant touch, in nothing more than that.

Well, that was enough, Strether had felt while his
150

BOOK FOURTH

answer hung fire. He had felt at the same time, how
ever, that nothing could less become him than that it
should hang fire too long. "Yes/' he said brightly,
"it was on the happy settlement of the question that
I started. You see therefore to what tune I 'm in your
family. Moreover," he added, "I've been supposing
you'd suppose it."

"Oh I've been supposing it for a long time, and
what you tell me helps me to understand that you
should want to do something. To" do something, I
mean," said Chad, "to commemorate an event so —
what do they call it ? — so auspicious. I see you make
out, and not unnaturally," he continued, "that bring
ing me home in triumph as a sort of wedding-present
to Mother would commemorate it better than any
thing else. You want to make a bonfire in fact," he
laughed, "and you pitch me on. Thank you, thank
you!" he laughed again.

He was altogether easy about it, and this made
Strether now see how at bottom, and in spite of the
shade of shyness that really cost him nothing, he had
from the first moment been easy about everything.
The shade of shyness was mere good taste. People
with manners formed could apparently have, as one
of their best cards, the shade of shyness too. He had
leaned a little forward to speak; his elbows were on
the table; and the inscrutable new face that he had
got somewhere and somehow was brought by the
movement nearer to his critic's. There was a fascina
tion for that critic in its not being, this ripe physi
ognomy, the face that, under observation at least, he
had originally carried away from Woollett. Strether

THE AMBASSADORS

found a certain freedom on his own side in defining it
as that of a man of the world — a formula that indeed
seemed to come now in some degree to his relief; that
of a man to whom things had happened and were
variously known. In gleams, in glances, the past did
perhaps peep out of it; but such lights were faint and
instantly merged. Chad was brown and thick and
strong, and of old Chad had been rough. Was all the
difference therefore that he was actually smooth ?
Possibly; for that he was smooth was as marked as in
the taste of a sauce or in the rub of a hand. The effect
of it was general — it had retouched his features,
drawn them with a cleaner line. It had cleared his
eyes and settled his colour and polished his fine square
teeth — the main ornament of his face ; and at the
same time that it had given him a form and a surface,
almost a design, it had toned his voice, established his
accent, encouraged his smile to more play and his
other motions to less. He had formerly, with a great
deal of action, expressed very little; and he now ex
pressed whatever was necessary with almost none at
all. It was as if in short he had really, copious per
haps but shapeless, been put into a firm mould and
turned successfully out. The phenomenon — Strether
kept eyeing it as a phenomenon, an eminent case —
was marked enough to be touched by the finger. He
finally put his hand across the table and laid it on
Chad's arm. " If you '11 promise me — here on the
spot and giving me your word of honour — to break
straight off, you'll make the future the real right
thing for all of us alike. You '11 ease off the strain of
this decent but none the less acute suspense in which

152

BOOK FOURTH

I Ve for so many days been waiting for you, and let
me turn in to rest. I shall leave you with my blessing
and go to bed in peace."

Chad again fell back at this and, his hands pocketed,
settled himself a little; in which posture he looked,
though he rather anxiously smiled, only the more
earnest. Then Strether seemed to see that he was
really nervous, and he took that as what he would have
called a wholesome sign. The only mark of it hitherto
had been his more than once taking off and putting on
his wide-brimmed crush hat. He had at this moment
made the motion again to remove it, then had only
pushed it back, so that it hung informally on his
strong young grizzled crop. It was a touch that gave
the note of the familiar — the intimate and the be
lated — to their quiet colloquy; and it was indeed by
some such trivial aid that Strether became aware at
the same moment of something else. The observation
was at any rate determined in him by some light too
fine to distinguish from so many others, but it was
none the less sharply determined. Chad looked un-
mistakeably during these instants — well, as Strether
put it to himself, all he was worth. Our friend had a
sudden apprehension of what that would on certain
sides be. He saw him in a flash as the young man
marked out by women ; and for a concentrated minute
the dignity, the comparative austerity, as he funnily
fancied it, of this character affected him almost with
awe. There was an experience on his interlocutor's
part that looked out at him from under the displaced
hat, and that l<poked out moreover by a force of its
own, the deep fact of its quantity and quality, and not

153

THE AMBASSADORS

through Chad's intending bravado or swagger. That
was then the way men marked out by women were —
and also the men by whom the women were doubtless
in turn sufficiently distinguished. It affected Strether
for thirty seconds as a relevant truth; a truth which,
however, the next minute, had fallen into its relation.
"Can't you imagine there being some questions,"
Chad asked, "that a fellow — however much im
pressed by your charming way of stating things —
would like to put to you first ? "

" Oh yes — easily. I 'm here to answer everything.
I think I can even tell you things, of the greatest inter
est to you, that you won't know enough to ask me.
We '11 take as many days to it as you like. But I want,"
Strether wound up, "to go to bed now."

"Really?"

Chad had spoken in such surprise that he was
amused. " Can't you believe it ? — with what you put
me through ? "

The young man seemed to consider. "Oh I have
n't put you through much — yet."

" Do you mean there 's so much more to come ? "
Strether laughed. "All the more reason then that I
should gird myself." And as if to mark what he felt
he could by this time count on he was already on his
feet.

Chad, still seated, stayed him, with a hand against
him, as he passed between their table and the next.
"Oh we shall get on!"

The tone was, as who should say, everything
Strether could have desired; and quite as good the
expression of face with which the speaker had looked

154

BOOK FOURTH

up at him and kindly held him. All these things
lacked was their not showing quite so much as the
fruit of experience. Yes, experience was what Chad
did play on him, if he did n't play any grossness of
defiance. Of course experience was in a manner defi
ance ; but it was n't, at any rate — rather indeed quite
the contrary ! — grossness ; which was so much gained.
He fairly grew older, Strether thought, while he him
self so reasoned. Then with his mature pat of his
visitor's arm he also got up; and there had been
enough of it all by this time to make the visitor feel
that something was settled. Was n't it settled that he
had at least the testimony of Chad's own belief in a
settlement ? Strether found himself treating Chad's
profession that they would get on as a sufficient basis
for going to bed. He had n't nevertheless after this
gone to bed directly; for when they had again passed
out together into the mild bright night a check had
virtually sprung from nothing more than a small cir
cumstance which might have acted only as confirming
quiescence. There were people, expressive sound,
projected light, still abroad, and after they had taken
in for a moment, through everything, the great clear
architectural street, they turned off in tacit union to
the quarter of Strether' s hotel. "Of course," Chad
here abruptly began, "of course Mother's making
things out with you about me has been natural — and
of course also you've had a good deal to go upon.
Still, you must have filled out."

He had stopped, leaving his friend to wonder a little
what point he wished to make; and this it was that
enabled Strether meanwhile to make one. "Oh we 've

155

THE AMBASSADORS

never pretended to go into detail. We were n't in the
least bound to that. It was ' filling out ' enough to miss
you as we did."

But Chad rather oddly insisted, though under the
high lamp at their corner, where they paused, he had
at first looked as if touched by Strether's allusion to
the long sense, at home, of his absence. "What I
mean is you must have imagined."

" Imagined what ? "

"Well — horrors."

It affected Strether : horrors were so little — super
ficially at least — in this robust and reasoning image.
But he was none the less there to be veracious. "Yes,
I dare say we have imagined horrors. But where 's
the harm if we have n't been wrong ? "

Chad raised his face to the lamp, and it was one of
the moments at which he had, in his extraordinary
way, most his air of designedly showing himself. It
was as if at these instants he just presented himself,
his identity so rounded off, his palpable presence and
his massive young manhood, as such a link in the
chain as might practically amount to a kind of demon
stration. It was as if — and how but anomalously ? —
he could n't after all help thinking sufficiently well of
these things to let them go for what they were worth.
What could there be in this for Strether but the hint
of some self-respect, some sense of power, oddly per
verted ; something latent and beyond access, ominous
and perhaps enviable ? The intimation had the next
thing, in a flash, taken on a name — a name on which
our friend seized as he asked himself if he were n't
perhaps really dealing with an irreducible young Pa-

BOOK FOURTH

gan. This description — he quite jumped at it — had
a sound that gratified his mental ear, so that of a sud
den he had already adopted it. Pagan — yes, that
was, was n't it ? what Chad would logically be. It was
what he must be. It was what he was. The idea was
a clue and, instead of darkening the prospect, pro
jected a certain clearness. Strether made out in this
quick ray that a Pagan was perhaps, at the pass they
had come to, the thing most wanted at Woollett.
They'd be able to do with one — a good one; he'd
find an opening — yes; and Strether's imagination
even now prefigured and accompanied the first ap
pearance there of the rousing personage. He had only
the slight discomfort of feeling, as the young man
turned away from the lamp, that his thought had in
the momentary silence possibly been guessed. "Well,
I've no doubt," said Chad, "you've come near
enough. The details, as you say, don't matter. It has
been generally the case that I 've let myself go. But
I 'm coming round — I 'm not so bad now." With
which they walked on again to Strether's hotel.

"Do you mean," the latter asked as they ap
proached the door, " that there is n't any woman with
you now ? "

" But pray what has that to do with it ? "

"Why it's the whole question."

"Of my going home ?" Chad was clearly surprised.
" Oh not much ! Do you think that when I want to go
any one will have any power — "

"To keep you " — Strether took him straight up —
"from carrying out your wish? Well, our idea has
been that somebody has hitherto — or a good many

157

THE AMBASSADORS

persons perhaps — kept you pretty well from * want
ing.' That 's what — if you 're in anybody's hands —
may again happen. You don't answer my question "
— he kept it up ; " but if you are n't in anybody's
hands so much the better. There 's nothing then but
what makes for your going."

Chad turned this over. " I don't answer your ques
tion ?" He spoke quite without resenting it. "Well,
such questions have always a rather exaggerated side.
One does n't know quite what you mean by being in
women's 'hands.' It 's all so vague. One is when one
is n't. One is n't when one is. And then one can't
quite give people away." He seemed kindly to explain.
" I 've never got stuck — so very hard ; and, as against
anything at any time really better, I don't think I've
ever been afraid." There was something in it that
held Strether to wonder, and this gave him time to go
on. He broke out as with a more helpful thought.
" Don't you know how I like Paris itself ? "

The upshot was indeed to make our friend marvel.
" Oh if that 's all that 's the matter with you — ! " It
was be who almost showed resentment.

Chad's smile of a truth more than met it. " But
is n't that enough ? "

Strether hesitated, but it came out. "Not enough
for your mother!" Spoken, however, it sounded a
trifle odd — the effect of which was that Chad broke
into a laugh. Strether, at this, succumbed as well,
though with extreme brevity. " Permit us to have still
our theory. But if you are so free and so strong you 're
inexcusable. I'll write in the morning," he added
with decision. " I '11 say I 've got you."

158

BOOK FOURTH

This appeared to open for Chad a new interest.
" How often do you write ? "

"Oh perpetually."

"And at great length ?"

Strether had become a little impatient. "I hope
it's not found too great."

"Oh I 'm sure not. And you hear as often ? "

Again Strether paused. "As often as I deserve."

" Mother writes," said Chad, " a lovely letter."

Strether, before the closed porte-cochere, fixed him a
moment. " It 's more, my boy, than you do ! But our
suppositions don't matter," he added, "if you're
actually not entangled."

Chad's pride seemed none the less a little touched.
" I never was that — let me insist. I always had my
own way." With which he pursued : "And I have it at
present."

"Then what are you here for? What has kept
you," Strether asked, " if you have been able to leave ? "

It made Chad, after a stare, throw himself back.
" Do you think one 's kept only by women ? " His sur
prise and his verbal emphasis rang out so clear in the
still street that Strether winced till he remembered
the safety of their English speech. "Is that," the
young man demanded, " what they think at Woollett ?"
At the good faith in the question Strether had changed
colour, feeling that, as he would have said, he had put
his foot in it. He had appeared stupidly to misrepre
sent what they thought at Woollett ; but before he had
time to rectify Chad again was upon him. "I must
say then you show a low mind ! "

It so fell in, unhappily for Strether, with that re-
159

THE AMBASSADORS

flexion of his own prompted in him by the pleasant air
of the Boulevard Malesherbes, that its disconcerting
force was rather unfairly great. It was a dig that,
administered by himself — and administered even to
poor Mrs. Newsome — was no more than salutary;
but administered by Chad — and quite logically — it
came nearer drawing blood. They bad nt a low mind —
nor any approach to one ; yet incontestably they had
worked, and with a certain smugness, on a basis that
might be turned against them. Chad had at any rate
pulled his visitor up; he had even pulled up his ad
mirable mother; he had absolutely, by a turn of the
wrist and a jerk of the far-flung noose, pulled up, in a
bunch, Woollett browsing in its pride. There was no
doubt Woollett bad insisted on his coarseness; and
what he at present stood there for in the sleeping street
was, by his manner of striking the other note, to make
of such insistence a preoccupation compromising to
the insisters. It was exactly as if they had imputed to
him a vulgarity that he had by a mere gesture caused
to fall from him. The devil of the case was that
Strether felt it, by the same stroke, as falling straight
upon himself. He had been wondering a minute ago
if the boy were n't a Pagan, and he found himself won
dering now if he were n't by chance a gentleman. It
did n't in the least, on the spot, spring up helpfully
for him that a person could n't at the same time be
both. There was nothing at this moment in the air
to challenge the combination ; there was everything to
give it on the contrary something of a flourish. It
struck Strether into the bargain as doing something
to meet the most difficult of the questions ; though per-

160

BOOK FOURTH

haps indeed only by substituting another. Would n't
it be precisely by having learned to be a gentleman
that he had mastered the consequent trick of looking
so well that one could scarce speak to him straight ?
But what in the world was the clue to such a prime
producing cause ? There were too many clues then
that Strether still lacked, and these clues to clues were
among them. What it accordingly amounted to for
him was that he had to take full in the face a fresh at
tribution of ignorance. He had grown used by this
time to reminders, especially from his own lips, of
what he did n't know; but he had borne them because
in the first place they were private and because in the
second they practically conveyed a tribute. He did n't
know what was bad, and — as others did n't know
how little he knew it — he could put up with his state.
But if he did n't know, in so important a particular,
what was good, Chad at least was now aware he
did n't; and that, for some reason, affected our friend
as curiously public. It was in fact an exposed condi
tion that the young man left him in long enough for
him to feel its chill — till he saw fit, in a word, gener
ously again to cover him. This last was in truth what
Chad quite gracefully did. But he did it as with a
simple thought that met the whole of the case. " Oh
I 'm all right ! " It was what Strether had rather be-
wilderedly to go to bed on.

II

IT really looked true moreover from the way Chad
was to behave after this. He was full of attentions to
his mother's ambassador; in spite of which, all the
while, the latter's other relations rather remarkably
contrived to assert themselves. Strether's sittings pen
in hand with Mrs. Newsome up in his own room were
broken, yet they were richer; and they were more than
ever interspersed with the hours in which he reported
himself, in a different fashion, but with scarce less
earnestness and fulness, to Maria Gostrey. Now that,
as he would have expressed it, he had really something
to talk about he found himself, in respect to any odd
ity that might reside for him in the double connexion,
at once more aware and more indifferent. He had
been fine to Mrs. Newsome about his useful friend,
but it had begun to haunt his imagination that Chad,
taking up again for her benefit a pen too long disused,
might possibly be finer. It would n't at all do, he saw,
that anything should come up for him at Chad's hand
but what specifically was to have come; the greatest
divergence from which would be precisely the element
of any lubrication of their intercourse by levity. It
was accordingly to forestall such an accident that he
frankly put before the young man the several facts,
just as they had occurred, of his funny alliance. He
spoke of these facts, pleasantly and obligingly, as "the
whole story," and felt that he might qualify the alliance

162

BOOK FOURTH

as funny if he remained sufficiently grave about it.
He flattered himself that he even exaggerated the
wild freedom of his original encounter with the won
derful lady; he was scrupulously definite about the
absurd conditions in which they had made acquaint
ance — their having picked each other up almost in
the street; and he had (finest inspiration of all !) a con
ception of carrying the war into the enemy's country
by showing surprise at the enemy's ignorance.

He had always had a notion that this last was the
grand style of fighting; the greater therefore the reason
for it, as he could n't remember that he had ever be
fore fought in the grand style. Every one, according
to this, knew Miss Gostrey : how came it Chad did n't
know her ? The difficulty, the impossibility, was really
to escape it ; Strether put on him, by what he took for
granted, the burden of proof of the contrary. This
tone was so far successful as that Chad quite appeared
to recognise her as a person whose fame had reached
him, but against his acquaintance with whom much
mischance had worked. He made the point at the
same time that his social relations, such as they could
be called, were perhaps not to the extent Strether
supposed with the rising flood of their compatriots.
He hinted at his having more and more given way to
a different principle of selection ; the moral of which
seemed to be that he went about little in the " colony."
For the moment certainly he had quite another interest.
It was deep, what he understood; and Strether, for
himself, could only so observe it. He could n't see as
yet how deep. Might he not all too soon ! For there
was really too much of their question that Chad had

163

THE AMBASSADORS

already committed himself to liking. He liked, to be
gin with, his prospective stepfather; which was dis
tinctly what had not been on the cards. His hating
him was the untowardness for which Strether had
been best prepared; he had n't expected the boy's ac
tual form to give him more to do than his imputed. It
gave him more through suggesting that he must some
how make up to himself for not being sure he was
sufficiently disagreeable. That had really been present
to him as his only way to be sure he was sufficiently
thorough. The point was that if Chad's tolerance of
his thoroughness were insincere, were but the best
of devices for gaining time, it none the less did treat
everything as tacitly concluded.

That seemed at the end of ten days the upshot
of the abundant, the recurrent talk through which
Strether poured into him all it concerned him to know,
put him in full possession of facts and figures. Never
cutting these colloquies short by a minute, Chad be
haved, looked and spoke as if he were rather heavily,
perhaps even a trifle gloomily, but none the less fun
damentally and comfortably free. He made no crude
profession of eagerness to yield, but he asked the most
intelligent questions, probed, at moments, abruptly,
even deeper than his friend's layer of information,
justified by these touches the native estimate of his
latent stuff, and had in every way the air of trying to
live, reflectively, into the square bright picture. He
walked up and down in front of this production, so
ciably took Strether's arm at the points at which he
stopped, surveyed it repeatedly from the right and
from the left, inclined a critical head to either quarter,

164

BOOK FOURTH

and, while he puffed a still more critical cigarette, an
imadverted to his companion on this passage and that.
Strether sought relief — there were hours when he re
quired it — in repeating himself; it was in truth not
to be blinked that Chad had a way. The main ques
tion as yet was of what it was a way to. It made vul
gar questions no more easy; but that was unimport
ant when all questions save those of his own asking
had dropped. That he was free was answer enough,
and it was n't quite ridiculous that this freedom
should end by presenting itself as what was difficult to
move. His changed state, his lovely home, his beauti
ful things, his easy talk, his very appetite for Strether,
insatiable and, when all was said, flattering — what
were such marked matters all but the notes of his free
dom ? He had the effect of making a sacrifice of it just
in these handsome forms to his visitor; which was
mainly the reason the visitor was privately, for the
time, a little out of countenance. Strether was at this
period again and again thrown back on a felt need to
remodel somehow his plan. He fairly caught himself
shooting rueful glances, shy looks of pursuit, toward
the embodied influence, the definite adversary, who
had by a stroke of her own failed him and on a fond
theory of whose palpable presence he had, under Mrs.
Newsome's inspiration, altogether proceeded. He
had once or twice, in secret, literally expressed the
irritated wish that she would come out and find her.
He could n't quite yet force it upon Woollett that
such a career, such a perverted young life, showed
after all a certain plausible side, did in the case before
them flaunt something like an impunity for the social

THE AMBASSADORS

man ; but he could at least treat himself to the state
ment that would prepare him for the sharpest echo.
This echo — as distinct over there in the dry thin air
as some shrill "heading" above a column of print —
seemed to reach him even as he wrote. "He says
there's no woman," he could hear Mrs. Newsome
report, in capitals almost of newspaper size, to Mrs.
Pocock; and he could focus in Mrs. Pocock the re
sponse of the reader of the journal. He could see in
the younger lady's face the earnestness of her atten
tion and catch the full scepticism of her but slightly
delayed "What is there then ? " Just so he could again
as little miss the mother's clear decision: "There's
plenty of disposition, no doubt, to pretend there
is n't." Strether had, after posting his letter, the
whole scene out; and it was a scene during which,
coming and going, as befell, he kept his eye not least
upon the daughter. He had his fine sense of the con
viction Mrs. Pocock would take occasion to reaffirm
— a conviction bearing, as he had from the first deeply
divined it to bear, on Mr. Strether's essential inapti
tude. She had looked him in his conscious eyes
even before he sailed, and that she did n't believe be
would find the woman had been written in her book.
Had n't she at the best but a scant faith in his ability
to find women ? It was n't even as if he had found her
mother — so much more, to her discrimination, had
her mother performed the finding. Her mother had,
in a case her private judgement of which remained
educative of Mrs. Pocock's critical sense, found the
man. The man owed his unchallenged state, in gen
eral, to the fact that Mrs. Newsome' s discoveries were

166

BOOK FOURTH

accepted at Woollett; but he knew in his bones, our
friend did, how almost irresistibly Mrs. Pocock would
now be moved to show what she thought of his own.
Give her a free hand, would be the moral, and the
woman would soon be found.

His impression of Miss Gostrey after her introduc
tion to Chad was meanwhile an impression of a per
son almost unnaturally on her guard. He struck
himself as at first unable to extract from her what he
wished ; though indeed of what he wished at this spe
cial juncture he would doubtless have contrived to
make but a crude statement. It sifted and settled
nothing to put to her, tout betement, as she often said,
" Do you like him, eh ? " — thanks to his feeling it
actually the least of his needs to heap up the evidence
in the young man's favour. He repeatedly knocked
at her door to let her have it afresh that Chad's case
— whatever else of minor interest it might yield —
was first and foremost a miracle almost monstrous.
It was the alteration of the entire man, and was so
signal an instance that nothing else, for the intelligent
observer, could — could it ? — signify. " It 's a plot,"
he declared — "there's more in it than meets the
eye." He gave the rein to his fancy. " It 's a plant ! "
His fancy seemed to please her. " Whose then ? "
"Well, the party responsible is, I suppose, the fate
that waits for one, the dark doom that rides. What I
mean is that with such elements one can't count. I 've
but my poor individual, my modest human means.
It is n't playing the game to turn on the uncanny. All
one's energy goes to facing it, to tracking it. One
wants, confound it, don't you see ? " he confessed with

167

THE AMBASSADORS

a queer face — "one wants to enjoy anything so rare.
Call it then life " — he puzzled it out — " call it poor
dear old life simply that springs the surprise. Nothing
alters the fact that the surprise is paralysing, or at any
rate engrossing — all, practically, hang it, that one
sees, that one can see."

Her silences were never barren, nor even dull. " Is
that what you 've written home ? "

He tossed it off. " Oh dear, yes ! "

She had another pause while, across her carpets, he
had another walk. " If you don't look out you '11 have
them straight over."

"Oh but I've said he'll go back."

"And will he?" Miss Gostrey asked.

The special tone of it made him, pulling up, look at
her long. "What's that but just the question I've
spent treasures of patience and ingenuity in giving
you, by the sight of him — after everything had led
up — every facility to answer ? What is it but just
the thing I came here to-day to get out of you ? Will
h ?"

"No — he won't," she said at last. "He's not
free."

The air of it held him. "Then you Ve all the while
known — ? "

"I've known nothing but what I've seen; and I
wonder," she declared with some impatience, "that
you did n't see as much. It was enough to be with him
there—"

" In the box ? Yes," he rather blankly urged.

"Well — to feel sure."

"Sure of what?"

168

BOOK FOURTH

She got up from her chair, at this, with a nearer ap
proach than she had ever yet shown to dismay at his
dimness. She even, fairly pausing for it, spoke with a
shade of pity. " Guess ! "

It was a shade, fairly, that brought a flush into his
face ; so that for a moment, as they waited together,
their difference was between them. " You mean that
just your hour with him told you so much of his story ?
Very good ; I 'm not such a fool, on my side, as that I
don't understand you, or as that I did n't in some de
gree understand him. That he has done what he
liked most is n't, among any of us, a matter the least
in dispute. There's equally little question at this time
of day of what it is he does like most. But I 'm not
talking," he reasonably explained, "of any mere
wretch he may still pick up. I 'm talking of some per
son who in his present situation may have held her
own, may really have counted."

"That's exactly what I am!" said Miss Gostrey.
But she as quickly made her point. "I thought you
thought — or that they think at Woollett — that
that's what mere wretches necessarily do. Mere
wretches necessarily don't!" she declared with spirit.
"There must, behind every appearance to the con
trary, still be somebody — somebody who 's not a
mere wretch, since we accept the miracle. What else
but such a somebody can such a miracle be ? "

He took it in. "Because the fact itself is the
woman ? "

"A woman. Some woman or other. It 's one of the
things that have to be."

" But you mean then at least a good one."
169

THE AMBASSADORS

"A good woman ?" She threw up her arms with a
laugh. "I should call her excellent!"

"Then why does he deny her ?"

Miss Gostrey thought a moment. "Because she's
too good to admit! Don't you see," she went on,
" how she accounts for him ? "

Strether clearly, more and more, did see ; yet it made
him also see other things. " But is n't what we want
that he shall account for her?"

"Well, he does. What you have before you is his
way. You must forgive him if it is n't quite outspoken.
In Paris such debts are tacit."

Strether could imagine; but still — ! "Even when
the woman 's good ? "

Again she laughed out. "Yes, and even when the
man is ! There 's always a caution in such cases," she
more seriously explained — "for what it may seem to
show. There's nothing that's taken as showing so
much here as sudden unnatural goodness."

"Ah then you 're speaking now," Strether said, "of
people who are not nice."

"I delight," she replied, "in your classifications.
But do you want me," she asked, "to give you in the
matter, on this ground, the wisest advice I 'm capable
of? Don't consider her, don't judge her at all in her
self. Consider her and judge her only in Chad."

He had the courage at least of his companion's
logic. " Because then I shall like her ? " He almost
looked, with his quick imagination, as if he already
did, though seeing at once also the full extent of how
little it would suit his book. " But is that what I came
out for?"

170

BOOK FOURTH

She had to confess indeed that it was n't. But there
was something else. "Don't make up your mind.
There are all sorts of things. You have n't seen him
all."

This on his side Strether recognised ; but his acute-
ness none the less showed him the danger. " Yes, but
if the more I see the better he seems ? "

Well, she found something. "That may be — but
his disavowal of her is n't, all the same, pure con
sideration. There's a hitch." She made it out. "It's
the effort to sink her."

Strether winced at the image. "To 'sink' — ?"

"Well, I mean there's a struggle, and a part of it is
just what he hides. Take time — that 's the only way
not to make some mistake that you '11 regret. Then
you '11 see. He does really want to shake her off."

Our friend had by this time so got into the vision
that he almost gasped. "After all she has done for
him?"

Miss Gostrey gave him a look which broke the next
moment into a wonderful smile. " He 's not so good as
you think!"

They remained with him, these words, promising
him, in their character of warning, considerable help;
but the support he tried to draw from them found
itself on each renewal of contact with Chad defeated
by something else. What could it be, this disconcert
ing force, he a^ked himself, but the sense, constantly
renewed, that Chad was — quite in fact insisted on
being — as good as he thought ? It seemed somehow
as if he could n't but be as good from the moment he
was n't as bad. There was a succession of days at all

THE AMBASSADORS

events when contact with him — and in its immediate
effect, as if it could produce no other — elbowed out
of Strether' s consciousness everything but itself. Little
Bilham once more pervaded the scene, but little
Bilham became even in a higher degree than he had
originally been one of the numerous forms of the in
clusive relation; a consequence promoted, to our
friend's sense, by two or three incidents with which
we have yet to make acquaintance. Waymarsh him
self, for the occasion, was drawn into the eddy; it
absolutely, though but temporarily, swallowed him
down, and there were days when Strether seemed to
bump against him as a sinking swimmer might brush
a submarine object. The fathomless medium held
them — Chad's manner was the fathomless medium;
and our friend felt as if they passed each other, in their
deep immersion, with the round impersonal eye of
silent fish. It was practically produced between them
that Waymarsh was giving him then his chance; and
the shade of discomfort that Strether drew from the
allowance resembled not a little the embarrassment
he had known at school, as a boy, when members of
his family had been present at exhibitions. He could
perform before strangers, but relatives were fatal, and
it was now as if, comparatively, Waymarsh were a
relative. He seemed to hear him say "Strike up
then ! " and to enjoy a foretaste of conscientious do
mestic criticism. He bad struck up, so far as he actu
ally could ; Chad knew by this time in profusion what
he wanted; and what vulgar violence did his fellow
pilgrim expect of him when he had really emptied his
mind ? It went somehow to and fro that what poor

172

BOOK FOURTH

Waymarsh meant was " I told you so — that you 'd
lose your immortal soul!" but it was also fairly ex
plicit that Strether had his own challenge and that,
since they must go to the bottom of things, he wasted
no more virtue in watching Chad than Chad wasted
in watching him. His dip for duty's sake — where
was it worse than Waymarsh's own ? For he need n't
have stopped resisting and refusing, need n't have
parleyed, at that rate, with the foe.

The strolls over Paris to see something or call
somewhere were accordingly inevitable and natural,
and the late sessions in the wondrous troisieme, the
lovely home, when men dropped in and the picture
composed more suggestively through the haze of
tobacco, of music more or less good and of talk more
or less polyglot, were on a principle not to be distin
guished from that of the mornings and the afternoons.
Nothing, Strether had to recognise as he leaned back
and smoked, could well less resemble a scene of vio
lence than even the liveliest of these occasions. They
were occasions of discussion, none the less, and
Strether had never in his life heard so many opinions
on so many subjects. There were opinions atWoollett,
but only on three or four. The differences were there
to match; if they were doubtless deep, though few,
they were quiet — they were, as might be said, almost
as shy as if people had been ashamed of them. People
showed little diffidence about such things, on the
other hand, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, and were
so far from being ashamed of them — or indeed of
anything else — that they often seemed to have in
vented them to avert those agreements that destroy

173

THE AMBASSADORS

the taste of talk. No one had ever done that at
Woollett, though Strether could remember times
when he himself had been tempted to it without quite
knowing why. He saw why at present — he had but
wanted to promote intercourse.

These, however, were but parenthetic memories;
and the turn taken by his affair on the whole was posi
tively that if his nerves were on the stretch it was
because he missed violence. When he asked himself
if none would then, in connexion with it, ever come
at all, he might almost have passed as wondering how
to provoke it. It would be too absurd if such a vision
as that should have to be invoked for relief; it was
already marked enough as absurd that he should
actually have begun wTith flutters and dignities on the
score of a single accepted meal. What sort of a brute
had he expected Chad to be, anyway ? — Strether had
occasion to make the enquiry but was careful to make
it in private. He could himself, comparatively recent
as it was — it was truly but the fact of a few days
since — focus his primal crudity; but he would on the
approach of an observer, as if handling an illicit pos
session, have slipped the reminiscence out of sight.
There were echoes of it still in Mrs. Newsome's letters,
and there were moments when these echoes made him
exclaim on her want of tact. He blushed of course, at
once, still more for the explanation than for the
ground of it : it came to him in time to save his man
ners that she could n't at the best become tactful as
quickly as he. Her tact had to reckon with the Atlan
tic Ocean, the General Post-Office and the extravag
ant curve of the globe.

174

BOOK FOURTH

Chad had one day offered tea at the Boulevard
Malesherbes to a chosen few, a group again including
the unobscured Miss Barrace; and Strether had on
coming out walked away with the acquaintance
whom in his letters to Mrs. Newsome he always spoke
of as the little artist-man. He had had full occasion to
mention him as the other party, so oddly, to the only
close personal alliance observation had as yet de
tected in Chad's existence. Little Bilham's way this
afternoon was not Strether's, but he had none the less
kindly come with him, and it was somehow a part of
his kindness that as it had sadly begun to rain they
suddenly found themselves seated for conversation at
a cafe in which they had taken refuge. He had passed
no more crowded hour in Chad's society than the one
just ended; he had talked with Miss Barrace, who
had reproached him with not having come to see her,
and he had above all hit on a happy thought for caus
ing Waymarsh's tension to relax. Something might
possibly be extracted for the latter from the idea of
his success with that lady, whose quick apprehension
of what might amuse her had given Strether a free
hand. What had she meant if not to ask whether she
could n't help him with his splendid encumbrance,
and might n't the sacred rage at any rate be kept a
little in abeyance by thus creating for his comrade's
mind even in a world of irrelevance the possibility of a
relation ? What was it but a relation to be regarded as
so decorative and, in especial, on the strength of it, to
be whirled away, amid flounces and feathers, in a
coupe lined, by what Strether could make out, with
dark blue brocade ? He himself had never been

175

THE AMBASSADORS

whirled away — never at least in a coupe and behind
a footman ; he had driven with Miss Gostrey in cabs,
with Mrs. Pocock, a few times, in an open buggy, with
Mrs. Newsome in a four-seated cart and, occasionally
up at the mountains, on a buckboard ; but his friend's
actual adventure transcended his personal experience.
He now showed his companion soon enough indeed
how inadequate, as a general monitor, this last queer
quantity could once more feel itself.

" What game under the sun is he playing ? " He
signified the next moment that his allusion was not to
the fat gentleman immersed in dominoes on whom his
eyes had begun by resting, but to their host of the
previous hour, as to whom, there on the velvet bench,
with a final collapse of all consistency, he treated him
self to the comfort of indiscretion. " Where do you see
him come out ? "

Little Bilham, in meditation, looked at him with a
kindness almost paternal. "Don't you like it over
here?"

Strether laughed out — for the tone was indeed
droll ; he let himself go. " What has that to do with it ?
The only thing I 've any business to like is to feel that
I 'm moving him. That 's why I ask you whether you
believe I am ? Is the creature " — and he did his best
to show that he simply wished to ascertain — " hon
est?"

His companion looked responsible, but looked it
through a small dim smile. "What creature do you
mean ? "

It was on this that they did have for a little a mute
interchange. " Is it untrue that he 's free ? How

176

BOOK FOURTH

then," Strether asked wondering, "does he arrange
his life?"

"Is the creature you mean Chad himself?" little
Bilham said.

Strether here, with a rising hope, just thought, "We
must take one of them at a time." But his coherence
lapsed. "Is there some woman ? Of whom he 's really
afraid of course I mean — or who does with him what
she likes."

" It 's awfully charming of you," Bilham presently
remarked, "not to have asked me that before."

"Oh I'm not fit for my job!"

The exclamation had escaped our friend, but it
made little Bilham more deliberate. "Chad's a rare
case!" he luminously observed. "He's awfully
changed," he added.

"Then you see it too?"

"The way he has improved? Oh yes — I think
every one must see it. But I 'm not sure," said little
Bilham, "that I did n't like him about as well in his
other state."

" Then this is really a new state altogether ? "

"Well," the young man after a moment returned,
" I 'm not sure he was really meant by nature to be
quite so good. It 's like the new edition of an old book
that one has been fond of — revised and amended,
brought up to date, but not quite the thing one knew
and loved. However that may be at all events," he
pursued, "I don't think, you know, that he's really
playing, as you call it, any game. I believe he really
wants to go back and take up a career. He 's capable
of one, you know, that will improve and enlarge him

177

THE AMBASSADORS

still more. He won't then," little Bilham continued to
remark, "be my pleasant well-rubbed old-fashioned
volume at all. But of course I 'm beastly immoral. I 'm
afraid it would be a funny world altogether — a world
with things the way I like them. I ought, I dare say,
to go home and go into business myself. Only I'd
simply rather die — simply. And I 've not the least
difficulty in making up my mind not to, and in know
ing exactly why, and in defending my ground against
all comers. All the same," he wound up, "I assure
you I don't say a word against it — for himself, I mean
— to Chad. I seem to see it as much the best thing for
him. You see he's not happy."

"Do I ?" — Strether stared. "I've been supposing
I see just the opposite — an extraordinary case of the
equilibrium arrived at and assured."

"Oh there's a lot behind it."

"Ah there you are!" Strether exclaimed. "That's
just what I want to get at. You speak of your familiar
volume altered out of recognition. Well, who's the
editor?"

Little Bilham looked before him a minute in si
lence. "He ought to get married. That would do it.
And he wants to."

"Wants to marry her?"

Again little Bilham waited, and, with a sense that
he had information, Strether scarce knew what was
coming. " He wants to be free. He is n't used, you
see," the young man explained in his lucid way, "to
being so good."

Strether hesitated. "Then I may take it from you
that he is good ? "

178

BOOK FOURTH

His companion matched his pause, but making it
up with a quiet fulness. "Do take it from me."

"Well then why isn't he free? He swears to me
he is, but meanwhile does nothing — except of course
that he 's so kind to me — to prove it ; and could n't
really act much otherwise if he were n't. My question
to you just now was exactly on this queer impression
of his diplomacy : as if instead of really giving ground
his line were to keep me on here and set me a bad
example."

As the half-hour meanwhile had ebbed Strether
paid his score, and the waiter was presently in the act
of counting out change. Our friend pushed back to
him a fraction of it, with which, after an emphatic
recognition, the personage in question retreated.
" You give too much," little Bilham permitted himself
benevolently to observe.

" Oh I always give too much ! " Strether helplessly
sighed. "But you don't," he went on as if to get
quickly away from the contemplation of that doom,
" answer my question. Why is n't he free ? "

Little Bilham had got up as if the transaction with
the waiter had been a signal, and had already edged
out between the table and the divan. The effect of
this was that a minute later they had quitted the place,
the gratified waiter alert again at the open door.
Strether had found himself deferring to his compan
ion's abruptness as to a hint that he should be an
swered as soon as they were more isolated. This hap
pened when after a few steps in the outer air they had
turned the next corner. There our friend had kept it
up. "Why is n't he free if he's good ?"

179

THE AMBASSADORS

Little Bilham looked him full in the face. " Because
it's a virtuous attachment."

This had settled the question so effectually for the
time — that is for the next few days — that it had
given Strether almost a new lease of life. It must be
added however that, thanks to his constant habit of
shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine
of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees
rising as usual into his draught. His imagination had
in other words already dealt with his young friend's
assertion ; of which it had made something that suffi
ciently came out on the very next occasion of his seeing
Maria Gostrey. This occasion moreover had been de
termined promptly by a new circumstance — a cir
cumstance he was the last man to leave her for a day
in ignorance of. "When I said to him last night," he
immediately began, " that without some definite word
from him now that will enable me to speak to them
over there of our sailing — or at least of mine, giving
them some sort of date — my responsibility becomes
uncomfortable and my situation awkward; when I
said that to him what do you think was his reply ? "
And then as she this time gave it up : "Why that he
has two particular friends, two ladies, mother and
daughter, about to arrive in Paris — coming back
from an absence; and that he wants me so furiously
to meet them, know them and like them, that I shall
oblige him by kindly not bringing our business to a
crisis till he has had a chance to see them again him
self. Is that," Strether enquired, " the way he 's going
to try to get off ? These are the people," he explained,
" that he must have gone down to see before I arrived.

180

BOOK FOURTH

They're the best friends he has in the world, and they
take more interest than any one else in what concerns
him. As I 'm his next best he sees a thousand reasons
why we should comfortably meet. He has n't broached
the question sooner because their return was un
certain — seemed in fact for the present impossible.
But he more than intimates that — if you can believe
it — their desire to make my acquaintance has had to
do with their surmounting difficulties."

"They're dying to see you ?" Miss Gostrey asked.

"Dying. Of course," said Strether, "they're the
virtuous attachment." He had already told her about
that — had seen her the day after his talk with little
Bilham ; and they had then threshed out together the
bearing of the revelation. She had helped him to put
into it the logic in which little Bilham had left it
slightly deficient. Strether had n't pressed him as to
the object of the preference so unexpectedly described ;
feeling in the presence of it, with one of his irrepressi
ble scruples, a delicacy from which he had in the quest
of the quite other article worked himself sufficiently
free. He had held off, as on a small principle of pride,
from permitting his young friend to mention a name;
wishing to make with this the great point that Chad's
virtuous attachments were none of his business. He
had wanted from the first not to think too much of his
dignity, but that was no reason for not allowing it any
little benefit that might turn up. He had often enough
wondered to what degree his interference might pass
for interested ; so that there was no want of luxury in
letting it be seen whenever he could that he did n't
interfere. That had of course at the same time not

181

THE AMBASSADORS

deprived him of the further luxury of much private
astonishment; which however he had reduced to some
order before communicating his knowledge. When he
had done this at last it was with the remark that, sur
prised as Miss Gostrey might, like himself, at first be,
she would probably agree with him on reflexion that
such an account of the matter did after all fit the con
firmed appearances. Nothing certainly, on all the in
dications, could have been a greater change for him
than a virtuous attachment, and since they had been
in search of the "word" as the French called it, of
that change, little Bilham's announcement — though
so long and so oddly delayed — would serve as well as
another. She had assured Strether in fact after a
pause that the more she thought of it the more it did
serve ; and yet her assurance had n't so weighed with
him as that before they parted he had n't ventured to
challenge her sincerity. Did n't she believe the attach
ment was virtuous ? — he had made sure of her again
with the aid of that question. The tidings he brought
her on this second occasion were moreover such as
would help him to make surer still.

She showed at first none the less as only amused.
" You say there are two ? An attachment to them
both then would, I suppose, almost necessarily be in
nocent."

Our friend took the point, but he had his clue.
" May n't he be still in the stage of not quite know
ing which of them, mother or daughter, he likes
best?"

She gave it more thought. "Oh it must be the
daughter — at his age."

182

BOOK FOURTH

" Possibly. Yet what do we know," Strether asked,
"about hers ? She may be old enough."

" Old enough for what ? "

"Why to marry Chad. That may be, you know,
what they want. And if Chad wants it too, and little
Bilham wants it, and even we, at a pinch, could do
with it — that is if she does n't prevent repatriation —
why it may be plain sailing yet."

It was always the case for him in these counsels that
each of his remarks, as it came, seemed to drop into a
deeper well. He had at all events to wait a moment to
hear the slight splash of this one. " I don't see why if
Mr. Newsome wants to marry the young lady he
has n't already done it or has n't been prepared with
some statement to you about it. And if he both wants
to marry her and is on good terms with them why is n't
he ' free'?"

Strether, responsively, wondered indeed. " Perhaps
the girl herself does n't like him."

"Then why does he speak of them to you as he
does?"

Strether's mind echoed the question, but also again
met it. "Perhaps it's with the mother he's on good
terms."

"As against the daughter?"

"Well, if she's trying to persuade the daughter to
consent to him, what could make him like the mother
more ? Only," Strether threw out, "why should n't
the daughter consent to him ? "

"Oh," said Miss Gostrey, "may n't it be that every
one else is n't quite so struck with him as you ? "

" Does n't regard him you mean as such an ' eligi-

183

THE AMBASSADORS

ble ' young man ? Is that what I Ve come to ? " he
audibly and rather gravely sought to know. "How
ever," he went on, "his marriage is what his mother
most desires — that is if it will help. And ought n't
any marriage to help ? They must want him " — he
had already worked it out — " to be better off. Al
most any girl he may marry will have a direct interest
in his taking up his chances. It won't suit her at least
that he shall miss them."

Miss Gostrey cast about. "No — you reason well !
But of course on the other hand there 's always dear
old Woollett itself."

" Oh yes," he mused — " there 's always dear old
Woollett itself."

She waited a moment. "The young lady mayn't
find herself able to swallow that quantity. She may
think it's paying too much; she may weigh one thing
against another."

Strether, ever restless in such debates, took a vague
turn. "It will all depend on who she is. That of
course — the proved ability to deal with dear old
Woollett, since I 'm sure she does deal with it — is
what makes so strongly for Mamie."

"Mamie?"

He stopped short, at her tone, before her ; then,
though seeing that it represented not vagueness, but a
momentary embarrassed fulness, let his exclamation
come. " You surely have n't forgotten about Mamie ! "

"No, I haven't forgotten about Mamie," she
smiled. "There's no doubt whatever that there's
ever so much to be said for her. Mamie 's my girl ! "
she roundly declared.

184

BOOK FOURTH

Strether resumed for a minute his walk. "She's
really perfectly lovely, you know. Far prettier than
any girl I Ve seen over here yet."

"That's precisely on what I perhaps most build."
And she mused a moment in her friend's way. "I
should positively like to take her in hand!"

He humoured the fancy, though indeed finally to
deprecate it. "Oh but don't, in your zeal, go over
to her! I need you most and can't, you know, be
left."

But she kept it up. " I wish they 'd send her out to
me!"

"If they knew you," he returned, "they would."

"Ah but don't they ? — after all that, as I 've under
stood you, you 've told them about me ? "

He had paused before her again, but he continued
his course. "They will — before, a*s you say, I've
done." Then he came out with the point he had
wished after all most to make. " It seems to give away
now his game. This is what he has been doing

— keeping me along for. He has been waiting for
them."

Miss Gostrey drew in her lips. "You see a good
deal in it!"

" I doubt if I see as much as you. Do you pretend,"
he went on, " that you don't see — ? "

"Well, what?" — she pressed him as he paused.

"Why that there must be a lot between them —
and that it has been going on from the first; even from
before I came."

She took a minute to answer. "Who are they then

— if it 's so grave ? "

THE AMBASSADORS

" It may n't be grave — it may be gay. But at any
rate it's marked. Only I don't know," Strether had
to confess, "anything about them. Their name for
instance was a thing that, after little Bilham's infor
mation, I found it a kind of refreshment not to feel
obliged to follow up."

"Oh," she returned, "if you think you've got
off — !"

Her laugh produced in him a momentary gloom.
" I don't think I 've got off. I only think I 'm breathing
for about five minutes. I dare say I shall have, at the
best, still to get on." A look, over it all, passed be
tween them, and the next minute he had come back
to good humour. " I don't meanwhile take the small
est interest in their name."

"Nor in their nationality? — American, French,
English, Polish?"

"I don't care the least little 'hang,'" he smiled,
"for their nationality. It would be nice if they're
Polish!" he almost immediately added.

"Very nice indeed." The transition kept up her
spirits. "So you see you do care."

He did this contention a modified justice. "I think
I should if they were Polish. Yes," he thought —
"there might be joy in that"

" Let us then hope for it." But she came after this
nearer to the question. " If the girl 's of the right age
of course the mother can't be. I mean for the virtuous
attachment. If the girl's twenty — and she can't be
less — the mother must be at least forty. So it puts
the mother out. She's too old for him."

Strether, arrested again, considered and demurred.
186

BOOK FOURTH

" Do you think so ? Do you think any one would be
too old for him ? I 'm eighty, and I 'm too young.
But perhaps the girl," he continued, "isn't twenty.
Perhaps she 's only ten — but such a little dear that
Chad finds himself counting her in as an attraction of
the acquaintance. Perhaps she's only five. Perhaps
the mother 's but five-and-twenty — a charming
young widow."

Miss Gostrey entertained the suggestion. " She is a
widow then ? "

" I have n't the least idea ! " They once more, in
spite of this vagueness, exchanged a look — a look
that was perhaps the longest yet. It seemed in fact, the
next thing, to require to explain itself; which it did as
it could. "I only feel what I've told you — that he
has some reason."

Miss Gostrey's imagination had taken its own flight.
"Perhaps she's not a widow."

Strether seemed to accept the possibility with
reserve. Still he accepted it. "Then that's why the
attachment — if it 's to her — is virtuous."

But she looked as if she scarce followed. "Why is it
virtuous if — since she's free — there's nothing to
impose on it any condition ? "

He laughed at her question. "Oh I perhaps don't
mean as virtuous as that ! Your idea is that it can be
virtuous — in any sense worthy of the name — only
if she 's not free ? But what does it become then," he
asked, "for her?99

"Ah that's another matter." He said nothing for a
moment, and she soon went on. " I dare say you 're
right, at any rate, about Mr. Newsome's little plan.

187

THE AMBASSADORS

He has been trying you — has been reporting on you
to these friends."

Strether meanwhile had had time to think more.
"Then where 's his straightness ? "

"Well, as we say, it's struggling up, breaking out,
asserting itself as it can. We can be on the side, you
see, of his straightness. We can help him. But he has
made out," said Miss Gostrey, "that you'll do."

"Do for what?"

"Why, for them — for ces dames. He has watched
you, studied you, liked you — and recognised that
they must. It's a great compliment to you, my dear
man; for I'm sure they're particular. You came
out for a success, Well," she gaily declared, " you 're
having it ! "

He took it from her with momentary patience and
then turned abruptly away. It was always convenient
to him that there were so many fine things in her
room to look at. But the examination of two or three
of them appeared soon to have determined a speech
that had little to do with them. "You don't believe
in it!"

"In what?"

"In the character of the attachment. In its in
nocence."

But she defended herself. "I don't pretend to know
anything about it. Everything's possible. We must
see."

" See ? " he echoed with a groan. " Have n't we seen
enough ? "

"7 have n't," she smiled.

" But do you suppose then little Bilham has lied ? "
188

BOOK FOURTH

"You must find out."

It made him almost turn pale. "Find out any
more ? "

He had dropped on a sofa for dismay; but she
seemed, as she stood over him, to have the last word.
" Was n't what you came out for to find out all ? "

BOOK FIFTH

I

THE Sunday of the next week was a wonderful day,
and Chad Newsome had let his friend know in ad
vance that he had provided for it. There had already
been a question of his taking him to see the great
Gloriani, who was at home on Sunday afternoons and
at whose house, for the most part, fewer bores were to
be met than elsewhere; but the project, through some
accident, had not had instant effect, and now revived
in happier conditions. Chad had made the point that
the celebrated sculptor had a queer old garden, for
which the weather — spring at last frank and fair —
was propitious ; and two or three of his other allusions
had confirmed for Strether the expectation of some
thing special. He had by this time, for all introductions
and adventures, let himself recklessly go, cherishing
the sense that whatever the young man showed him he
was showing at least himself. He could have wished
indeed, so far as this went, that Chad were less of a
mere cicerone ; for he was not without the impression
— now that the vision of his game, his plan, his deep
diplomacy, did recurrently assert itself — of his taking
refuge from the realities of their intercourse in pro
fusely dispensing, as our friend mentally phrased it,
panem et circenses. Our friend continued to feel rather
smothered in flowers, though he made in his other
moments the almost angry inference that this was
only because of his odious ascetic suspicion of any

193

THE AMBASSADORS

form of beauty. He periodically assured himself —
for his reactions were sharp — that he should n't
reach the truth of anything till he had at least got
rid of that.

He had known beforehand that Madame de Vion-
net and her daughter would probably be on view, an
intimation to that effect having constituted the only
reference again made by Chad to his good friends from
the south. The effect of Strether's talk about them
with Miss Gostrey had been quite to consecrate his
reluctance to pry; something in the very air of Chad's
silence — judged in the light of that talk — offered it
to him as a reserve he could markedly match. It
shrouded them about with he scarce knew what, a
consideration, a distinction ; he was in presence at any
rate — so far as it placed him there — of ladies ; and
the one thing that was definite for him was that they
themselves should be, to the extent of his responsibil
ity, in presence of a gentleman. Was it because they
were very beautiful, very clever, or even very good —
was it for one of these reasons that Chad was, so to
speak, nursing his effect ? Did he wish to spring them,
in the Woollett phrase, with a fuller force — to con
found his critic, slight though as yet the criticism, with
some form of merit exquisitely incalculable ? The
most the critic had at all events asked was whether
the persons in question were French ; and that enquiry
had been but a proper comment on the sound of their
name. "Yes. That is no!" had been Chad's reply;
but he had immediately added that their English was
the most charming in the world, so that if Strether
were wanting an excuse for not getting on with them

194

BOOK FIFTH

he would n't in the least find one. Never in fact had
Strether — in the mood into which the place had
quickly launched him — felt, for himself, less the need
of an excuse. Those he might have found would have
been, at the worst, all for the others, the people before
him, in whose liberty to be as they were he was aware
that he positively rejoiced. His fellow guests were
multiplying, and these things, their liberty, their in
tensity, their variety, their conditions at large, were
in fusion in the admirable medium of the scene.

The place itself was a great impression — a small
pavilion, clear-faced and sequestered, an effect of pol
ished parquet, of fine white panel and spare sallow gilt,
of decoration delicate and rare, in the heart of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain and on the edge of a cluster
of gardens attached to old noble houses. Far back
from streets and unsuspected by crowds, reached by a
long passage ar.d a quiet court, it was as striking to the
unprepared mind, he immediately saw, as a treasure
dug up ; giving him too, more than anything yet, the
note of the range of the immeasurable town and
sweeping away, as by a last brave brush, his usual
landmarks and terms. It was in the garden, a spa
cious cherished remnant, out of which a dozen per
sons had already passed, that Chad's host presently
met them ; while the tall bird-haunted trees, all of a
twitter with the spring and the weather, and the high
party-walls, on the other side of which grave hotels
stood off for privacy, spoke of survival, transmission,
association, a strong indifferent persistent order. The
day was so soft that the little party had practically
adjourned to the open air, but the open air was in

195

THE AMBASSADORS

such conditions all a chamber of state. Strether had
presently the sense of a great convent, a convent of
missions, famous for he scarce knew what, a nurs
ery of young priests, of scattered shade, of straight
alleys and chapel-bells, that spread its mass in one
quarter; he had the sense of names in the air, of
ghosts at the windows, of signs and tokens, a whole
range of expression, all about him, too thick for
prompt discrimination.

This assault of images became for a moment, in the
address of the distinguished sculptor, almost formid
able : Gloriani showed him, in such perfect confidence,
on Chad's introduction of him, a fine worn handsome
face, a face that was like an open letter in a foreign
tongue. With his genius in his eyes, his manners on
his lips, his long career behind him and his honours
and rewards all round, the great artist, in the course of
a single sustained look and a few words of delight at
receiving him, affected our friend as a dazzling pro
digy of type. Strether had seen in museums — in the
Luxembourg as well as, more reverently, later on,
in the New York of the billionaires — the work of
his hand ; knowing too that after an earlier time in his
native Rome he had migrated, in mid-career, to Paris,
where, with a personal lustre almost violent, he shone
in a constellation : all of which was more than enough
to crown him, for his guest, with the light, with the
romance, of glory. Strether, in contact with that ele
ment as he had never yet so intimately been, had the
consciousness of opening to it, for the happy instant,
all the windows of his mind, of letting this rather grey
interior drink in for once the sun of a clime not marked

196

BOOK FIFTH

in his old geography. He was to remember again
repeatedly the medal-like Italian face, in which every
line was an artist's own, in which time told only as
tone and consecration ; and he was to recall in especial,
as the penetrating radiance, as the communication of
the illustrious spirit itself, the manner in which, while
they stood briefly, in welcome and response, face to
face, he was held by the sculptor's eyes. He was n't
soon to forget them, was to think of them, all uncon
scious, unintending, preoccupied though they were,
as the source of the deepest intellectual sounding to
which he had ever been exposed. He was in fact quite
to cherish his vision of it, to play with it in idle hours ;
only speaking of it to no one and quite aware he
could n't have spoken without appearing to talk non
sense. Was what it had told him or what it had asked
him the greater of the mysteries ? Was it the most
special flare, unequalled, supreme, of the aesthetic
torch, lighting that wondrous world for ever, or was it
above all the long straight shaft sunk by a personal
acuteness that life had seasoned to steel ? Nothing on
earth could have been stranger and no one doubtless
more surprised than the artist himself, but it was for
all the world to Strether just then as if in the matter of
his accepted duty he had positively been on trial.
The deep human expertness in Gloriani's charming
smile — oh the terrible life behind it ! — was flashed
upon him as a test of his stuff.

Chad meanwhile, after having easily named his
companion, had still more easily turned away and
was already greeting other persons present. He was as
easy, clever Chad, with the great artist as with his

197

THE AMBASSADORS

obscure compatriot, and as easy with every one else as
with either: this fell into its place for Strether and
made almost a new light, giving him, as a concatena
tion, something more he could enjoy. He liked
Gloriani, but should never see him again ; of that he
was sufficiently sure. Chad accordingly, who was
wonderful with both of them, was a kind of link for
hopeless fancy, an implication of possibilities — oh if
everything had been different! Strether noted at all
events that he was thus on terms with illustrious
spirits, and also that — yes, distinctly — he had n't in
the least swaggered about it. Our friend had n't come
there only for this figure of Abel Newsome's son, but
that presence threatened to affect the observant mind
as positively central. Gloriani indeed, remembering
something and excusing himself, pursued Chad to
speak to him, and Strether was left musing on many
things. One of them was the question of whether,
since he had been tested, he had passed. Did the
artist drop him from having made out that he
would n't do ? He really felt just to-day that he might
do better than usual. Had n't he done well enough,
so far as that went, in being exactly so dazzled ? and
in not having too, as he almost believed, wholly hidden
from his host that he felt the latter's plummet ? Sud
denly, across the garden, he saw little Bilham ap
proach, and it was a part of the fit that was on him
that as their eyes met he guessed also his knowledge.
If he had said to him on the instant what was upper
most he would have said : "Have I passed ? — for of
course I know one has to pass here." Little Bilham
would have reassured him, have told him that he exag-

BOOK FIFTH

gerated, and have adduced happily enough the argu
ment of little Bilham's own very presence; which, in
truth, he could see, was as easy a one as Gloriani's
own or as Chad's. He himself would perhaps then
after a while cease to be frightened, would get the
point of view for some of the faces — types tremend
ously alien, alien to Woollett — that he had already
begun to take in. Who were they all, the dispersed
groups and couples, the ladies even more unlike those
of Woollett than the gentlemen ? — this was the en
quiry that, when his young friend had greeted him,
he did find himself making.

" Oh they 're every one — all sorts and sizes ; of
course I mean within limits, though limits down per
haps rather more than limits up. There are always
artists — he 's beautiful and inimitable to the cber
confrere; and then gros bonnets of many kinds —
ambassadors, cabinet ministers, bankers, generals,
what do I know ? even Jews. Above all always some
awfully nice women — and not too many ; sometimes
an actress, an artist, a great performer — but only
when they're not monsters; and in particular the right
femmes du monde. You can fancy his history on that
side — I believe it's fabulous : they never give him up.
Yet he keeps them down : no one knows how he man
ages; it's too beautiful and bland. Never too many —
and a mighty good thing too ; just a perfect choice. But
there are not in any way many bores; it has always
been so ; he has some secret. It 's extraordinary. And
you don't find it out. He 's the same to every one. He
does n't ask questions."

"Ah doesn't he?" Strether laughed.
199

Bilham met it with all his candour. "How then
should / be here ? "

"Oh for what you tell me. You 're part of the per
fect choice."

Well, the young man took in the scene. " It seems
rather good to-day."

Strether followed the direction of his eyes. " Are they
all, this time, femmes du monde ? "

Little Bilham showed his competence. "Pretty
well."

This was a category our friend had a feeling for;
a light, romantic and mysterious, on the feminine
element, in which he enjoyed for a little watching it.
"Are there any Poles?"

His companion considered. " I think I make out a
' Portuguee.' But I Ve seen Turks."

Strether wondered, desiring justice. "They seem —
all the women — very harmonious."

"Oh in closer quarters they come out ! " And then,
while Strether was aware of fearing closer quarters,
though giving himself again to the harmonies, "Well,'*
little Bilham went on, "it is at the worst rather
good, you know. If you like it, you feel it, this
way, that shows you're not in the least out. But
you always know things," he handsomely added,
"immediately."

Strether liked it and felt it only too much; so "I
say, don't lay traps for me ! " he rather helplessly mur
mured.

"Well," his companion returned, "he's wonder
fully kind to us"

"To us Americans you mean ?"

200

BOOK FIFTH

"Oh no — he doesn't know anything about that.
That's half the battle here — that you can never hear
politics. We don't talk them. I mean to poor young
wretches of all sorts. And yet it 's always as charming
as this ; it 's as if, by something in the air, our squalor
did n't show. It puts us all back — into the last cent
ury."

"I'm afraid," Strether said, amused, "that it puts
me rather forward : oh ever so far ! "

"Into the next ? But is n't that only," little Bilham
asked, "because you're really of the century
before?"

"The century before the last? Thank you!"
Strether laughed. "If I ask you about some of the
ladies it can't be then that I may hope, as such a speci
men of the rococo, to please them."

"On the contrary they adore — we all adore here —
the rococo, and where is there a better setting for
it than the whole thing, the pavilion and the garden,
together ? There are lots of people with collections,"
little Bilham smiled as he glanced round. "You'll
be secured!"

It made Strether for a moment give himself again
to contemplation. There were faces he scarce knew
what to make of. Were they charming or were they
only strange ? He might n't talk politics, yet he sus
pected a Pole or two. The upshot was the question at
the back of his head from the moment his friend had
joined him. "Have Madame de Vionnet and her
daughter arrived ? "

"I haven't seen them yet, but Miss Gostrey has
come. She's in the pavilion looking at objects. One

201

THE AMBASSADORS

can see she 's a collector," little Bilham added without
offence.

" Oh yes, she 's a collector, and I knew she was to
come. Is Madame de Vionnet a collector ? " Strether
went on.

"Rather, I believe; almost celebrated." The young
man met, on it, a little, his friend's eyes. "I happen to
know — from Chad, whom I saw last night — that
they've come back; but only yesterday. He was n't
sure — up to the last. This, accordingly," little Bil
ham went on, "will be — if they are here — their first
appearance after their return."

Strether, very quickly, turned these things over.
" Chad told you last night ? To me, on our way here,
he said nothing about it."

" But did you ask him ? "

Strether did him the justice. "I dare say not."

"Well," said little Bilham, "you're not a person to
whom it 's easy to tell things you don't want to know.
Though it is easy, I admit — it 's quite beautiful," he
benevolently added, "when you do want to."

Strether looked at him with an indulgence that
matched his intelligence. " Is that the deep reasoning
on which — about these ladies — you 've been your
self so silent ? "

Little Bilham considered the depth of his reasoning.
" I have n't been silent. I spoke of them to you the
other day, the day we sat together after Chad's tea-
party."

Strether came round to it. "They then are the
virtuous attachment ? "

"I can only tell you that it's what they pass for.

202

BOOK FIFTH

But is n't that enough ? What more than a vain ap
pearance does the wisest of us know ? I commend you,"
the young man declared with a pleasant emphasis,
"the vain appearance."

Strether looked more widely round, and what he
saw, from face to face, deepened the effect of his young
friend's words. "Is it so good ?"

"Magnificent."

Strether had a pause. "The husband 's dead ?"

"Dear no. Alive."

"Oh!" said Strether. After which, as his com
panion laughed: "How then can it be so good?"

"You'll see for yourself. One does see."

"Chad's in love with the daughter?"

"That's what I mean."

Strether wondered . " Then where 's the difficulty ? "

"Why, are n't you and I — with our grander bolder
ideas?"

"Oh mine — !" Strether said rather strangely.
But then as if to attenuate : " You mean they won't
hear of Woollett ? "

Little Bilham smiled. "Isn't that just what you
must see about ? "

It had brought them, as she caught the last words,
into relation with Miss Barrace, whom Strether had
already observed — as he had never before seen a
lady at a party — moving about alone. Coming within
sound of them she had already spoken, and she took
again, through her long-handled glass, all her amused
and amusing possession. "How much, poor Mr.
Strether, you seem to have to see about! But you
can't say," she gaily declared, "that I don't do what

203

THE AMBASSADORS

I can to help you. Mr. Waymarsh is placed. I've
left him in the house with Miss Gostrey."

"The way," little Bilham exclaimed, "Mr. Strether
gets the ladies to work for him! He's just preparing
to draw in another; to pounce — don't you see him ?
— on Madame de Vionnet."

"Madame de Vionnet? Oh, oh, oh!" Miss Bar-
race cried in a wonderful crescendo. There was more
in it, our friend made out, than met the ear. Was it
after all a joke that he should be serious about any
thing ? He envied Miss Barrace at any rate her power
of not being. She seemed, with little cries and protests
and quick recognitions, movements like the darts of
some fine high-feathered free-pecking bird, to stand
before life as before some full shop-window. You
could fairly hear, as she selected and pointed, the tap
of her tortoise-shell against the glass. "It's certain
that we do need seeing about; only I'm glad it's not
I who have to do it. One does, no doubt, begin that
way; then suddenly one finds that one has given it up.
It's too much, it's too difficult. You're wonderful,
you people," she continued to Strether, " for not feel
ing those things — by which I mean impossibilities.
You never feel them. You face them with a fortitude
that makes it a lesson to watch you."

" Ah but " — little Bilham put it with discourage
ment — "what do we achieve after all ? We see about
you and report — when we even go so far as reporting.
But nothing's done."

" Oh you, Mr. Bilham," she replied as with an im
patient rap on the glass, "you're not worth sixpence!
You come over to convert the savages — for I know

204

BOOK FIFTH

you verily did, I remember you — and the savages
simply convert you"

"Not even!" the young man woefully confessed:
"they haven't gone through that form. They've
simply — the cannibals ! — eaten me ; converted me
if you like, but converted me into food. I 'm but the
bleached bones of a Christian."

"Well then there we are! Only" — and Miss Bar-
race appealed again to Strether — " don't let it dis
courage you. You'll break down soon enough, but
you '11 meanwhile have had your moments. // faut en
avoir. I always like to see you while you last. And
I '11 tell you who will last."

"Waymarsh ?" — he had already taken her up.

She laughed out as at the alarm of it. "He'll resist
even Miss Gostrey : so grand is it not to understand.
He's wonderful."

"He is indeed," Strether conceded. "He would n't
tell me of this affair — only said he had an engage
ment ; but with such a gloom, you must let me insist, as
if it had been an engagement to be hanged. Then
silently and secretly he turns up here with you. Do
you call that 'lasting' ?"

"Oh I hope it's lasting!" Miss Barrace said. "But
he only, at the best, bears with me. He does n't under
stand — not one little scrap. He 's delightful. He 's
wonderful," she repeated.

" Michelangelesque ! " — little Bilham completed
her meaning. " He is a success. Moses, on the ceiling,
brought down to the floor; overwhelming, colossal,
but somehow portable."

" Certainly, if you mean by portable," she returned,
205

THE AMBASSADORS

"looking so well in one's carriage. He's too funny
beside me in his corner; he looks like somebody,
somebody foreign and famous, en exil; so that
people wonder — it 's very amusing — whom I 'm
taking about. I show him Paris, show him every
thing, and he never turns a hair. He's like the In
dian chief one reads about, who, when he comes
up to Washington to see the Great Father, stands
wrapt in his blanket and gives no sign. / might
be the Great Father — from the way he takes every
thing." She was delighted at this hit of her identity
with that personage — it fitted so her character ; she
declared it was the title she meant henceforth to
adopt. "And the way he sits, too, in the corner of
my room, only looking at my visitors very hard and
as if he wanted to start something! They wonder
what he does want to start. But he's wonderful,"
Miss Barrace once more insisted. "He has never
started anything yet."

It presented him none the less, in truth, to her actual
friends, who looked at each other in intelligence, with
frank amusement on Bilham's part and a shade of
sadness on Strether's. Strether's sadness sprang —
for the image had its grandeur — from his thinking
how little he himself was wrapt in his blanket, how
little, in marble halls, all too oblivious of the Great
Father, he resembled a really majestic aboriginal.
But he had also another reflexion. "You've all of
you here so much visual sense that you 've somehow
all 'run ' to it. There are moments when it strikes one
that you have n't any other."

"Any moral," little Bilham explained, watching
206

BOOK FIFTH

serenely, across the garden, the several femmes du
monde. " But Miss Barrace has a moral distinction,"
he kindly continued; speaking as if for Strether's
benefit not less than for her own.

"Have you?" Strether, scarce knowing what he
was about, asked of her almost eagerly.

"Oh not a distinction" — she was mightily amused
at his tone — "Mr. Bilham's too good. But I think
I may say a sufficiency. Yes, a sufficiency. Have you
supposed strange things of me ? " — and she fixed
him again, through all her tortoise-shell, with the droll
interest of it. "You are all indeed wonderful. I should
awfully disappoint you. I do take my stand on my
sufficiency. But I know, I confess," she went on,
"strange people. I don't know how it happens; I
don't do it on purpose; it seems to be my doom — as
if I were always one of their habits: it's wonderful!
I dare say moreover," she pursued with an interested
gravity, " that I do, that we all do here, run too much
to mere eye. But how can it be helped ? We 're all
looking at each other — and in the light of Paris one
sees what things resemble. That's what the light of
Paris seems always to show. It 's the fault of the light
of Paris — dear old light ! "

"Dear old Paris!" little Bilham echoed.

" Everything, every one shows," Miss Barrace went

on.
tt

But for what they really are ?" Strether asked.
"Oh I like your Boston 'reallys'! But sometimes
— yes."

" Dear old Paris then ! " Strether resignedly sighed
while for a moment they looked at each other. Then

207

THE AMBASSADORS

he broke out: "Does Madame de Vionnet do that?
I mean really show for what she is ? "

Her answer was prompt. "She's charming. She's
perfect."

"Then why did you a minute ago say ' Oh, oh, oh ! '
at her name ? "

She easily remembered. "Why just because — !
She's wonderful."

"Ah she too?" — Strether had almost a groan.

But Miss Barrace had meanwhile perceived relief.
"Why not put your question straight to the person
who can answer it best ? "

" No," said little Bilham ; " don't put any question ;
wait, rather — it will be much more fun — to judge
for yourself. He has come to take you to her."

II

ON which Strether saw that Chad was again at hand,
and he afterwards scarce knew, absurd as it may
seem, what had then quickly occurred. The moment
concerned him, he felt, more deeply than he could
have explained, and he had a subsequent passage of
speculation as to whether, on walking off with Chad,
he had n't looked either pale or red. The only thing
he was clear about was that, luckily, nothing indiscreet
had in fact been said, and that Chad himself was more
than ever, in Miss Barrace's great sense, wonderful.
It was one of the connexions — though really why it
should be, after all, was none so apparent — in which
the whole change in him came out as most striking.
Strether recalled as they approached the house that
he had impressed him that first night as knowing how
to enter a box. Well, he impressed him scarce less
now as knowing how to make a presentation. It did
something for Strether's own quality — marked it as
estimated; so that our poor friend, conscious and
passive, really seemed to feel himself quite handed
over and delivered ; absolutely, as he would have said,
made a present of, given away. As they reached the
house a young woman, about to come forth, appeared,
unaccompanied, on the steps; at the exchange with
whom of a word on Chad's part Strether immediately
perceived that, obligingly, kindly, she was there to
meet them. Chad had left her in the house, but she

209

THE AMBASSADORS

had afterwards come halfway and then the next
moment had joined them in the garden. Her air of
youth, for Strether, was at first almost disconcerting,
while his second impression was, not less sharply, a
degree of relief at there not having just been, with the
others, any freedom used about her. It was upon him
at a touch that she was no subject for that, and mean
while, on Chad's introducing him, she had spoken to
him, very simply and gently, in an English clearly of
the easiest to her, yet unlike any other he had ever
heard. It was n't as if she tried ; nothing, he could
see after they had been a few minutes together, was as
if she tried ; but her speech, charming correct and odd,
was like a precaution against her passing for a Pole.
There were precautions, he seemed indeed to see,
only when there were really dangers.

Later on he was to feel many more of them, but by
that time he was to feel other things besides. She was
dressed in black, but in black that struck him as light
and transparent; she was exceedingly fair, and, though
she was as markedly slim, her face had a round
ness, with eyes far apart and a little strange. Her
smile was natural and dim; her hat not extravagant;
he had only perhaps a sense of the clink, beneath her
fine black sleeves, of more gold bracelets and bangles
than he had ever seen a lady wear. Chad was excel
lently free and light about their encounter; it was one
of the occasions on which Strether most wished he
himself might have arrived at such ease and such
humour: "Here you are then, face to face at last;
you 're made for each other — vous allez voir; and I
bless your union." It was indeed, after he had gone

210

BOOK FIFTH

off, as if he had been partly serious too. This latter
motion had been determined by an enquiry from him
about "Jeanne"; to which her mother had replied
that she was probably still in the house with Miss
Gostrey, to whom she had lately committed her. "Ah
but you know," the young man had rejoined, " he must
see her"; with which, while Strether pricked up his
ears, he had started as if to bring her, leaving the
other objects of his interest together. Strether won
dered to find Miss Gostrey already involved, feeling
that he missed a link; but feeling also, with small de
lay, how much he should like to talk with her of
Madame de Vionnet on this basis of evidence.

The evidence as yet in truth was meagre; which,
for that matter, was perhaps a little why his expecta
tion had had a drop. There was somehow not quite a
wealth in her; and a wealth was all that, in his sim
plicity, he had definitely prefigured. Still, it was too
much to be sure already that there was but a poverty.
They moved away from the house, and, with eyes on
a bench at some distance, he proposed that they
should sit down. " I Ve heard a great deal about you,"
she said as they went ; but he had an answer to it that
made her stop short. "Well, about you, Madame de
Vionnet, I've heard, I'm bound to say, almost no
thing " — those struck him as the only words he him
self could utter with any lucidity ; conscious as he was,
and as with more reason, of the determination to be in
respect to the rest of his business perfectly plain and
go perfectly straight. It had n't at any rate been in
the least his idea to spy on Chad's proper freedom.
It was possibly, however, at this very instant and

211

THE AMBASSADORS

under the impression of Madame de Vionnet's pause,
that going straight began to announce itself as a mat
ter for care. She had only after all to smile at him
ever so gently in order to make him ask himself if he
were n't already going crooked. It might be going
crooked to find it of a sudden just only clear that she
intended very definitely to be what he would have
called nice to him. This was what passed between
them while, for another instant, they stood still; he
could n't at least remember afterwards what else it
might have been. The thing indeed really unmistake-
able was its rolling over him as a wave that he had
been, in conditions incalculable and unimaginable, a
subject of discussion. He had been, on some ground
that concerned her, answered for; which gave her an
advantage he should never be able to match.

" Has n't Miss Gostrey," she asked, " said a good
word for me ? "

What had struck him first was the way he was
bracketed with that lady; and he wondered what ac
count Chad would have given of their acquaintance.
Something not as yet traceable, at all events, had ob
viously happened. " I did n't even know of her know
ing you.'*

"Well, now she'll tell you all. I'm so glad you're
in relation with her."

This was one of the things — the " all " Miss Gos
trey would now tell him — that, with every deference
to present preoccupation, was uppermost for Strether
after they had taken their seat. One of the others was,
at the end of five minutes, that she — oh incontest-
ably, yes — differed less; differed, that is, scarcely at

212

BOOK FIFTH

all — well, superficially speaking, from Mrs. New-
some or even from Mrs. Pocock. She was ever so
much younger than the one and not so young as the
other; but what was there in her, if anything, that
would have made it impossible he should meet her at
Woollett ? And wherein was her talk during their
moments on the bench together not the same as would
have been found adequate for a Woollett garden-
party ? — unless perhaps truly in not being quite so
bright. She observed to him that Mr. Newsome had,
to her knowledge, taken extraordinary pleasure in his
visit; but there was no good lady at Woollett who
would n't have been at least up to that. Was there in
Chad, by chance, after all, deep down, a principle of
aboriginal loyalty that had made him, for sentimental
ends, attach himself to elements, happily encountered,
that would remind him most of the old air and the old
soil ? Why accordingly be in a flutter — Strether
could even put it that way — about this unfamiliar
phenomenon of the femme du monde? On these terms
Mrs. Newsome herself was as much of one. Little
Bilham verily had testified that they came out, the
ladies of the type, in close quarters ; but it was just in
these quarters — now comparatively close — that he
felt Madame de Vionnet's common humanity. She
did come out, and certainly to his relief, but she came
out as the usual thing. There might be motives be
hind, but so could there often be even at Woollett.
The only thing was that if she showed him she wished
to like him — as the motives behind might conceiv
ably prompt — it would possibly have been more
thrilling for him that she should have shown as more

213

THE AMBASSADORS

vividly alien. Ah she was neither Turk nor Pole ! —
which would be indeed flat once more for Mrs. New-
some and Mrs. Pocock. A lady and two gentlemen
had meanwhile, however, approached their bench,
and this accident stayed for the time further develop
ments.

They presently addressed his companion, the bril
liant strangers ; she rose to speak to them, and Strether
noted how the escorted lady, though mature and by
no means beautiful, had more of the bold high look,
the range of expensive reference, that he had, as
might have been said, made his plans for. Madame
de Vionnet greeted her as "Duchesse" and was
greeted in turn, while talk started in French, as "Ma
toute-belle " ; little facts that had their due, their vivid
interest for Strether. Madame de Vionnet did n't,
none the less, introduce him — a note he was con
scious of as false to the Woollett scale and the Wool-
lett humanity; though it did n't prevent the Duchess,
who struck him as confident and free, very much
what he had obscurely supposed duchesses, from look
ing at him as straight and as hard — for it was hard
— as if she would have liked, all the same, to know
him. "Oh yes, my dear, it's all right, it's me; and
who are you, with your interesting wrinkles and your
most effective (is it the handsomest, is it the ugliest ?)
of noses ? " — some such loose handful of bright
flowers she seemed, fragrantly enough, to fling at him.
Strether almost wondered — at such a pace was he
going — if some divination of the influence of either
party were what determined Madame de Vionnet's
abstention. One of the gentlemen, in any case, suc-

214

BOOK FIFTH

[

ceeded in placing himself in close relation with our
friend's companion; a gentleman rather stout and
importantly short, in a hat with a wonderful wide
curl to its brim and a frock coat buttoned with an
effect of superlative decision. His French had quickly
turned to equal English, and it occurred to Strether
that he might well be one of the ambassadors. His
design was evidently to assert a claim to Madame de
Vionnet's undivided countenance, and he made it
good in the course of a minute — led her away with a
trick of three words ; a trick played with a social art of
which Strether, looking after them as the four, whose
backs were now all turned, moved off*, felt himself no
master.

He sank again upon his bench and, while his eyes
followed the party, reflected, as he had done before, on
Chad's strange communities. He sat there alone for
five minutes, with plenty to think of; above all with
his sense of having suddenly been dropped by a
charming woman overlaid now by other impressions
and in fact quite cleared and indifferent. He had n't
yet had so quiet a surrender; he did n't in the least
care if nobody spoke to him more. He might have
been, by his attitude, in for something of a march so
broad that the want of ceremony with which he had
just been used could fall into its place as but a minor
incident of the procession. Besides, there would be
incidents enough, as he felt when this term of contem
plation was closed by the reappearance of little Bil-
ham, who stood before him a moment with a suggest
ive " Well ? " in which he saw himself reflected as
disorganised, as possibly floored. He replied with a

215

THE AMBASSADORS

" Well ! " intended to show that he was n't floored in
the least. No indeed; he gave it out, as the young
man sat down beside him, that if, at the worst, he had
been overturned at all, he had been overturned into
the upper air, the sublimer element with which he had
an affinity and in which he might be trusted a while
to float. It was n't a descent to earth to say after an
instant and in sustained response to the reference:
"You're quite sure her husband's living?"

"Oh dear, yes."

"Ah then—!"

"Ah then what?"

Strether had after all to think. "Well, I'm sorry
for them." But it did n't for the moment matter more
than that. He assured his young friend he was quite
content. They would n't stir; were all right as they
were. He did n't want to be introduced ; had been in
troduced already about as far as he could go. He had
seen moreover an immensity; liked Gloriani, who, as
Miss Barrace kept saying, was wonderful; had made
out, he was sure, the half-dozen other men who were
distinguished, the artists, the critics and oh the great
dramatist — him it was easy to spot; but wanted —
no, thanks, really — to talk with none of them ; having
nothing at all to say and finding it would do beauti
fully as it was; do beautifully because what it was —
well, was just simply too late. And when after this
little Bilham, submissive and responsive, but with an
eye to the consolation nearest, easily threw off some
"Better late than never!" all he got in return for it
was a sharp " Better early than late ! " This note in
deed the next thing overflowed for Strether into a quiet

216

BOOK FIFTH

stream of demonstration that as soon as he had let
himself go he felt as the real relief. It had consciously
gathered to a head, but the reservoir had filled sooner
than he knew, and his companion's touch was to make
the waters spread. There were some things that had
to come in time if they were to come at all. If they
did n't come in time they were lost for ever. It was
the general sense of them that had overwhelmed him
with its long slow rush.

" It's not too late for you, on any side, and you don't
strike me as in danger of missing the train; besides
which people can be in general pretty well trusted, of
course — with the clock of their freedom ticking as
loud as it seems to do here — to keep an eye on the
fleeting hour. All the same don't forget that you're
young — blessedly young; be glad of it on the con
trary and live up to it. Live all you can ; it 's a mistake
not to. It does n't so much matter what you do in par
ticular, so long as you have your life. If you have n't
had that what have you had ? This place and these
impressions — mild as you may find them to wind a
man up so ; all my impressions of Chad and of people
I've seen at his place — well, have had their abund
ant message for me, have just dropped that into my
mind. I see it now. I have n't done so enough before
— and now I'm old; too old at any rate for what I
see. Oh I do see, at least; and more than you'd be
lieve or I can express. It 's too late. And it 's as if the
train had fairly waited at the station for me without
my having had the gumption to know it was there.
Now I hear its faint receding whistle miles and miles
down the line. What one loses one loses; make no

217 '

THE AMBASSADORS

mistake about that. The affair — I mean the affair of
life — could n't, no doubt, have been different for me;
for it's at the best a tin mould, either fluted and em
bossed, with ornamental excrescences, or else smooth
and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly,
one's consciousness is poured — so that one 'takes'
the form, as the great cook says, and is more or less
compactly held by it: one lives in fine as one can.
Still, one has the illusion of freedom ; therefore don't
be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I
was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelli
gent to have it; I don't quite know which. Of course
at present I'm a case of reaction against the mistake;
and the voice of reaction should, no doubt, always be
taken with an allowance. But that does n't affect the
point that the right time is now yours. The right time
is any time that one is still so lucky as to have. You 've
plenty; that's the great thing; you're, as I say, damn
you, so happily and hatefully young. Don't at any
rate miss things out of stupidity. Of course I don't
take you for a fool, or I should n't be addressing
you thus awfully. Do what you like so long as you
don't make my mistake. For it was a mistake.
Live!" . . . Slowly and sociably, with full pauses
and straight dashes, Strether had so delivered him
self; holding little Bilham from step to step deeply
and gravely attentive. The end of all was that the
young man had turned quite solemn, and that this
was a contradiction of the innocent gaiety the
speaker had wished to promote. He watched for a
moment the consequence of his words, and then,
laying a hand on his listener's knee and as if to end

218

BOOK FIFTH

with the proper joke: "And now for the eye I shall
keep on you ! "

"Oh but I don't know that I want to be, at your
age, too different from you!"

"Ah prepare while you're about it," said Strether,
"to be more amusing."

Little Bilham continued to think, but at last had a
smile. "Well, you are amusing — to me"

" Impayable, as you say, no doubt. But what am I
to myself?" Strether had risen with this, giving his
attention now to an encounter that, in the middle of
the garden, was in the act of taking place between
their host and the lady at whose side Madame de
Vionnet had quitted him. This lady, who appeared
within a few minutes to have left her friends, awaited
Gloriani's eager approach with words on her lips
that Strether could n't catch, but of which her inter
esting witty face seemed to give him the echo. He was
sure she was prompt and fine, but also that she had
met her match, and he liked — in the light of what he
was quite sure was the Duchess's latent insolence —
the good humour with which the great artist asserted
equal resources. Were they, this pair, of the "great
world" ? — and was he himself, for the moment and
thus related to them by his observation, in it ? Then
there was something in the great world covertly tiger
ish, which came to him across the lawn and in the
charming air as a waft from the jungle. Yet it made
him admire most of the two, made him envy, the
glossy male tiger, magnificently marked. These ab
surdities of the stirred sense, fruits of suggestion ripen
ing on the instant, were all reflected in his next words

219

THE AMBASSADORS

to little Bilham. "I know — if we talk of that —
whom / should enjoy being like!"

Little Bilham followed his eyes ; but then as with a
shade of knowing surprise : " Gloriani ? "

Our friend had in fact already hesitated, though
not on the hint of his companion's doubt, in which
there were depths of critical reserve. He had just
made out, in the now full picture, something and
somebody else; another impression had been super
imposed. A young girl in a white dress and a softly
plumed white hat had suddenly come into view, and
what was presently clear was that her course was to
ward them. What was clearer still was that the hand
some young man at her side was Chad Newsome, and
what was clearest of all was that she was therefore
Mademoiselle de Vionnet, that she was unmistakeably
pretty — bright gentle shy happy wonderful — and
that Chad now, with a consummate calculation of
effect, was about to present her to his old friend's
vision. What was clearest of all indeed was something
much more than this, something at the single stroke
of which — and was n't it simply juxtaposition ? — all
vagueness vanished. It was the click of a spring —
he saw the truth. He had by this time also met Chad's
look; there was more of it in that; and the truth, ac
cordingly, so far as Bilham's enquiry was concerned,
had thrust in the answer. " Oh Chad ! " — it was that
rare youth he should have enjoyed being " like." The
virtuous attachment would be all there before him;
the virtuous attachment would be in the very act
of appeal for his blessing; Jeanne de Vionnet, this
charming creature, would be — exquisitely, intensely

220

BOOK FIFTH

now — the object of it. Chad brought her straight up
to him, and Chad was, oh yes, at this moment — for
the glory of Woollett or whatever — better still even
than Gloriani. He had plucked this blossom; he had
kept it over-night in water; and at last as he held it up
to wonder he did enjoy his effect. That was why
Strether had felt at first the breath of calculation —
and why moreover, as he now knew, his look at the
girl would be, for the young man, a sign of the latter' s
success. What young man had ever paraded about that
way, without a reason, a maiden in her flower ? And
there was nothing in his reason at present obscure.
Her type sufficiently told of it — they would n't, they
could n't, want her to go to Woollett. Poor Woollett,
and what it might miss ! — though brave Chad indeed
too, and what it might gain! Brave Chad however
had just excellently spoken. "This is a good little
friend of mine who knows all about you and has more
over a message for you. And this, my dear " — he had
turned to the child herself — "is the best man in the
world, who has it in his power to do a great deal for us
and whom I want you to like and revere as nearly as
possible as much as I do."

She stood there quite pink, a little frightened, pret
tier and prettier and not a bit like her mother. There
was in this last particular no resemblance but that
of youth to youth; and here was in fact suddenly
Strether's sharpest impression. It went wondering,
dazed, embarrassed, back to the woman he had just
been talking with ; it was a revelation in the light of
which he already saw she would become more inter
esting. So slim and fresh and fair, she had yet put

221

THE AMBASSADORS

forth this perfection ; so that for really believing it of
her, for seeing her to any such developed degree as a
mother, comparison would be urgent. Well, what
was it now but fairly thrust upon him ? "Mamma
wishes me to tell you before we go," the girl said,
"that she hopes very much you '11 come to see us very
soon. She has something important to say to you."

"She quite reproaches herself," Chad helpfully
explained: "you were interesting her so much when
she accidentally suffered you to be interrupted."

"Ah don't mention it!" Strether murmured, look
ing kindly from one to the other and wondering at
many things.

"And I'm to ask you for myself," Jeanne con
tinued with her hands clasped together as if in some
small learnt prayer — " I 'm to ask you for myself if
you won't positively come."

" Leave it to me, dear — I '11 take care of it ! " Chad
genially declared in answer to this, while Strether
himself almost held his breath. What was in the girl
was indeed too soft, too unknown for direct dealing;
so that one could only gaze at it as at a picture, quite
staying one's own hand. But with Chad he was now
on ground — Chad he could meet ; so pleasant a con
fidence in that and in everything did the young man
freely exhale. There was the whole of a story in his
tone to his companion, and he spoke indeed as if al
ready of the family. It made Strether guess the more
quickly what it might be about which Madame de
Vionnet was so urgent. Having seen him then she
had found him easy; she wished to have it out with
him that some way for the young people must be dis-

222

BOOK FIFTH

covered, some way that would not impose as a condi
tion the transplantation of her daughter. He already
saw himself discussing with this lady the attractions of
Woollett as a residence for Chad's companion. Was
that youth going now to trust her with the affair — so
that it would be after all with one of his " lady-friends "
that his mother's missionary should be condemned to
deal ? It was quite as if for an instant the two men
looked at each other on this question. But there was
no mistaking at last Chad's pride in the display of such
a connexion. This was what had made him so carry
himself while, three minutes before, he was bringing
it into view; what had caused his friend, first catching
sight of him, to be so struck with his air. It was, in a
word, just when he thus finally felt Chad putting
things straight off on him that he envied him, as he
had mentioned to little Bilham, most. The whole ex
hibition however was but a matter of three or four
minutes, and the author of it had soon explained that,
as Madame de Vionnet was immediately going "on,"
this could be for Jeanne but a snatch. They would all
meet again soon, and Strether was meanwhile to stay
and amuse himself — "I'll pick you up again in
plenty of time." He took the girl off as he had brought
her, and Strether, with the faint sweet foreignness
of her "Au revoir, monsieur!" in his ears as a note
almost unprecedented, watched them recede side by
side and felt how, once more, her companion's rela
tion to her got an accent from it. They disappeared
among the others and apparently into the house;
whereupon our friend turned round to give out to
little Bilham the conviction of which he was full. But

223

THE AMBASSADORS

there was no little Bilham any more; little Bilham had
within the few moments, for reasons of his own, pro
ceeded further : a circumstance by which, in its order,
Strether was also sensibly affected

Ill

CHAD was not in fact on this occasion to keep his
promise of coming back; but Miss Gostrey had soon
presented herself with an explanation of his failure.
There had been reasons at the last for his going off
with ces dames; and he had asked her with much
instance to come out and take charge of their friend.
She did so, Strether felt as she took her place beside
him, in a manner that left nothing to desire. He had
dropped back on his bench, alone again for a time,
and the more conscious for little Bilham's defection
of his unexpressed thought ; in respect to which how
ever this next converser was a still more capacious
vessel. "It's the child!" he had exclaimed to her
almost as soon as she appeared ; and though her direct
response was for some time delayed he could feel in
her meanwhile the working of this truth. It might
have been simply, as she waited, that they were now
in presence altogether of truth spreading like a flood
and not for the moment to be offered her in the mere
cupful; inasmuch as who should ces dames prove to be
but persons about whom — once thus face to face with
them — she found she might from the first have told
him almost everything ? This would have freely come
had he taken the simple precaution of giving her their
name. There could be no better example — and she
appeared to note it with high amusement — than the
way, making things out already so much for himself,

225

THE AMBASSADORS

he was at last throwing precautions to the winds.
They were neither more nor less, she and the child's
mother, than old school-friends — friends who had
scarcely met for years but whom this unlooked-for
chance had brought together with a rush. It was a
relief, Miss Gostrey hinted, to feel herself no longer
groping; she was unaccustomed to grope and as a
general thing, he might well have seen, made straight
enough for her clue. With the one she had now picked
up in her hands there need be at least no waste of
wonder. "She's coming to see me — that's for you"
Strether's counsellor continued; "but I don't require
it to know where I am."

The waste of wonder might be proscribed; but
Strether, characteristically, was even by this time in
the immensity of space. " By which you mean that
you know where she is ? "

She just hesitated. "I mean that if she comes to see
me I shall — now that I Ve pulled myself round a bit
after the shock — not be at home."

Strether hung poised. " You call it — your recogni
tion — a shock ? "

She gave one of her rare flickers of impatience. " It
was a surprise, an emotion. Don't be so literal. I
wash my hands of her."

Poor Strether's face lengthened. "She's impos
sible—?"

"She's even more charmng than I remembered
her."

"Then what's the matter?"

She had to think how to put it. "Well, I'm impos
sible. It's impossible. Everything's impossible."

226

BOOK FIFTH

He looked at her an instant. "I see where you're
coming out. Everything's possible." Their eyes had
on it in fact an exchange of some duration; after
which he pursued : " Is n't it that beautiful child ? "
Then as she still said nothing : "Why don't you mean
to receive her ? "

Her answer in an instant rang clear. "Because I
wish to keep out of the business."

It provoked in him a weak wail. "You're going
to abandon me now?"

"No, I'm only going to abandon her. She'll want
me to help her with you. And I won't."

"You'll only help me with her? Well then—!"
Most of the persons previously gathered had, in the
interest of tea, passed into the house, and they had the
gardens mainly to themselves. The shadows were
long, the last call of the birds, who had made a home
of their own in the noble interspaced quarter, sounded
from the high trees in the other gardens as well, those
of the old convent and of the old hotels; it was as if our
friends had waited for the full charm to come out.
Strether's impressions were still present ; it was as if
something had happened that "nailed" them, made
them more intense ; but he was to ask himself soon
afterwards, that evening, what really had happened —
conscious as he could after all remain that for a gen
tleman taken, and taken the first time, into the
"great world,'* the world of ambassadors and duch
esses, the items made a meagre total. It was nothing
new to him, however, as we know, that a man might
have — at all events such a man as he — an amount
of experience out of any proportion to his adventures;

227

THE AMBASSADORS

so that, though it was doubtless no great adventure
to sit on there with Miss Gostrey and hear about
Madame de Vionnet, the hour, the picture, the imme
diate, the recent, the possible — as well as the com
munication itself, not a note of which failed to reverb
erate — only gave the moments more of the taste of
history.

It was history, to begin with, that Jeanne's mother
had been three-and-twenty years before, at Geneva,
schoolmate and good girl-friend to Maria Gostrey,
who had moreover enjoyed since then, though inter
ruptedly and above all with a long recent drop, other
glimpses of her. Twenty-three years put them both
on, no doubt; and Madame de Vionnet — though she
had married straight after school — could n't be to
day an hour less than thirty-eight. This made her ten
years older than Chad — though ten years, also, if
Strether liked, older than she looked ; the least, at any
rate, that a prospective mother-in-law could be ex
pected to do with. She would be of all mothers-in-
law the most charming; unless indeed, through some
perversity as yet insupposeable, she should utterly
belie herself in that relation. There was none surely
in which, as Maria remembered her, she must n't be
charming; and this frankly in spite of the stigma of
failure in the tie where failure always most showed.
It was no test there — when indeed was it a test
there ? — for Monsieur de Vionnet had been a brute.
She had lived for years apart from him — which was
of course always a horrid position ; but Miss Gostrey's
impression of the matter had been that she could
scarce have made a better thing of it had she done it

228

BOOK FIFTH

on purpose to show she was amiable. She was so
amiable that nobody had had a word to say; which
was luckily not the case for her husband. He was so
impossible that she had the advantage of all her
merits.

It was still history for Strether that the Comte de
Vionnet — it being also history that the lady in ques
tion was a Countess — should now, under Miss Gos-
trey's sharp touch, rise before him as a high distin
guished polished impertinent reprobate, the product
of a mysterious order; it was history, further, that the
charming girl so freely sketched by his companion
should have been married out of hand by a mother,
another figure of striking outline, full of dark personal
motive; it was perhaps history most of all that this
company was, as a matter of course, governed by such
considerations as put divorce out of the question.
" 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 attach
ing creature, then both sensitive and violent, auda
cious 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 appar
ently 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

229

THE AMBASSADORS

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 her
self 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 unluck
ily to make her more or less of a prey later on. She had
been in particular, at school, dazzlingly, though quite
booklessly, clever ; as polgylot as a little Jewess (which
she was n't, oh no !) and chattering French, English,
German, Italian, anything one would, in a way that
made a clean sweep, if not of prizes and parchments,
at least of every "part," whether memorised or im
provised, in the curtained costumed school repertory,
and in especial of all mysteries of race and vagueness
of reference, all swagger about " home," among their
variegated mates.

It would doubtless be difficult to-day, as between
French and English, to name her and place her; she
would certainly show, on knowledge, Miss Gostrey
felt, as one of those convenient types who don't keep
you explaining — minds with doors as numerous as
the many-tongued cluster of confessionals at Saint
Peter's. You might confess to her with confidence in
Roumelian, and even Roumelian sins. Therefore — !
But Strether's narrator covered her implication with
a laugh ; a laugh by which his betrayal of a sense of
the lurid in the picture was also perhaps sufficiently
protected. He had a moment of wondering, while his

230

BOOK FIFTH

friend went on, what sins might be especially Rou-
melian. She went on at all events to the mention of
her having met the young thing — again by some
Swiss lake — in her first married state, which had ap
peared for the few intermediate years not at least
violently disturbed. She had been lovely at that mo
ment, delightful to her, full of responsive emotion, of
amused recognitions and amusing reminders; and
then, once more, much later, after a long interval,
equally but differently charming — touching and
rather mystifying for the five minutes of an encounter
at a railway-station en province, during which it had
come out that her life was all changed. Miss Gostrey
had understood enough to see, essentially, what had
happened, and yet had beautifully dreamed that she
was herself faultless. There were doubtless depths in
her, but she was all right ; Strether would see if she
was n't. She was another person however — that had
been promptly marked — from the small child of na
ture at the Geneva school; a little person quite made
over (as foreign women were, compared with Ameri
can) by marriage. Her situation too had evidently
cleared itself up ; there would have been — all that
was possible — a judicial separation. She had settled
in Paris, brought up her daughter, steered her boat.
It was no very pleasant boat — especially there — to
be in; but Marie de Vionnet would have headed
straight. She would have friends, certainly — and
very good ones. There she was at all events — and it
was very interesting. Her knowing Mr. Chad did n't
in the least prove she had n't friends; what it proved
was what good ones he had. " I saw that," said Miss

231

THE AMBASSADORS

Gostrey, "that night at the Francais; it came out for
me in three minutes. I saw her — or somebody like
her. And so," she immediately added, " did you."

" Oh no — not anybody like her ! " Strether laughed.
"But you mean," he as promptly went on, "that she
has had such an influence on him ?"

Miss Gostrey was on her feet; it was time for
them to go. "She has brought him up for her daugh
ter."

Their eyes, as so often, in candid conference,
through their settled glasses, met over it long; after
which Strether's again took in the whole place. They
were quite alone there now. " Must n't she rather —
in the time then — have rushed it ? "

"Ah she won't of course have lost an hour. But
that's just the good mother — the good French one.
You must remember that of her — that as a mother
she's French, and that for them there's a special
providence. It precisely however — that she may n't
have been able to begin as far back as she'd have
liked — makes her grateful for aid."

Strether took this in as they slowly moved to the
house on their way out. "She counts on me then to
put the thing through ? "

"Yes — she counts on you. Oh and first of all of
course," Miss Gostrey added, "on her — well, con
vincing you."

"Ah," her friend returned, "she caught Chad
young ! "

"Yes, but there are women who are for all your
'times of life/ They're the most wonderful sort."

She had laughed the words out, but they brought
232

BOOK FIFTH

her companion, the next thing, to a stand. "Is what
you mean that she'll try to make a fool of me ?"

"Well, I'm wondering what she will — with an
opportunity — make."

"What do you call," Strether asked, "an oppor
tunity ? My going to see her ? "

"Ah you must go to see her" — Miss Gostrey was
a trifle evasive. " You can't not do that. You 'd have
gone to see the other woman. I mean if there had been
one — a different sort. It's what you came out for."

It might be; but Strether distinguished. "I did n't
come out to see this sort."

She had a wonderful look at him now. "Are you
disappointed she is n't worse ?"

He for a moment entertained the question, then
found for it the frankest of answers. "Yes. If she
were worse she'd be better for our purpose. It would
be simpler."

"Perhaps," she admitted. "But won't this be
pleasanter ? "

"Ah you know," he promptly replied, "I didn't
come out — was n't that just what you originally
reproached me with ? — for the pleasant."

"Precisely. Therefore I say again what I said at
first. You must take things as they come. Besides,"
Miss Gostrey added, "I'm not afraid for myself."

" For yourself— ?"

"Of your seeing her. I trust her. There's nothing
she'll say about me. In fact there's nothing she can."

Strether wondered — little as he had thought of
this. Then he broke out. " Oh you women ! "

There was something in it at which she flushed.

233

THE AMBASSADORS

"Yes — there we are. We're abysses." At last she
smiled. "But I risk her!"

He gave himself a shake. " Well then so do I ! "
But he added as they passed into the house that he
would see Chad the first thing in the morning.

This was the next day the more easily effected that
the young man, as it happened, even before he was
down, turned up at his hotel. Strether took his coffee,
by habit, in the public room; but on his descending
for this purpose Chad instantly proposed an adjourn
ment to what he called greater privacy. He had him
self as yet had nothing — they would sit down some
where together ; and when after a few steps and a turn
into the Boulevard they had, for their greater privacy,
sat down among twenty others, our friend saw in his
companion's move a fear of the advent of Waymarsh.
It was the first time Chad had to that extent given this
personage "away"; and Strether found himself won
dering of what it was symptomatic. He made out in a
moment that the youth was in earnest as he had n't
yet seen him ; which in its turn threw a ray perhaps a
trifle startling on what they had each up to that time
been treating as earnestness. It was sufficiently flat
tering however that the real thing — if this was at last
the real thing — should have been determined, as ap
peared, precisely by an accretion of Strether's import
ance. For this was what it quickly enough came to —
that Chad, rising with the lark, had rushed down to
let him know while his morning consciousness was
yet young that he had literally made the afternoon
before a tremendous impression. Madame de Vionnet
would n't, could n't rest till she should have some

234

BOOK FIFTH

assurance from him that he would consent again to
see her. The announcement was made, across their
marble-topped table, while the foam of the hot milk
was in their cups and its plash still in the air, with the
smile of Chad's easiest urbanity; and this expression
of his face caused our friend's doubts to gather on the
spot into a challenge of the lips. " See here " — that
was all ; he only for the moment said again " See here."
Chad met it with all his air of straight intelligence,
while Strether remembered again that fancy of the
first impression of him, the happy young Pagan, hand
some and hard but oddly indulgent, whose mysterious
measure he had under the street-lamp tried mentally
to take. The young Pagan, while a long look passed
between them, sufficiently understood. Strether scarce
needed at last to say the rest — "I want to know
where I am." But he said it, adding before any an
swer something more. "Are you engaged to be mar
ried — is that your secret ? — to the young lady ? "

Chad shook his head with the slow amenity that
was one of his ways of conveying that there was time
for everything. " I have no secret — though I may
have secrets ! I have n't at any rate that one. We 're
not engaged. No."

"Then where 's the hitch ?"

" Do you mean why I have n't already started with
you ? " Chad, beginning his coffee and buttering his
roll, was quite ready to explain. " Nothing would have
induced me — nothing will still induce me — not to
try to keep you here as long as you can be made to
stay. It 's too visibly good for you." Strether had him
self plenty to say about this, but it was amusing also

235

THE AMBASSADORS

to measure the march of Chad's tone. He had never
been more a man of the world, and it was always in
his company present to our friend that one was seeing
how in successive connexions a man of the world
acquitted himself. Chad kept it up beautifully. " My
idea — voyons! — is simply that you should let
Madame de Vionnet know you, simply that you
should consent to know her. I don't in the least mind
telling you that, clever and charming as she is, she 's
ever so much in my confidence. All I ask of you is to
let her talk to you. You Ve asked me about what you
call my hitch, and so far as it goes she '11 explain it to
you. She 's herself my hitch, hang it — if you must
really have it all out. But in a sense," he hastened in
the most wonderful manner to add, "that you '11 quite
make out for yourself. She 's too good a friend, con
found her. Too good, I mean, for me to leave without
— without — " It was his first hesitation.

"Without what?"

"Well, without my arranging somehow or other the
damnable terms of my sacrifice."

" It will be a sacrifice then ? "

"It will be the greatest loss I ever suffered. I owe
her so much."

It was beautiful, the way Chad said these things,
and his plea was now confessedly — oh quite fla
grantly and publicly — interesting. The moment
really took on for Strether an intensity. Chad owed
Madame de Vionnet so much ? What did that do then
but clear up the whole mystery ? He was indebted for
alterations, and she was thereby in a position to have
sent in her bill for expenses incurred in reconstruction.

236

BOOK FIFTH

What was this at bottom but what had been to be
arrived at ? Strether sat there arriving at it while he
munched toast and stirred his second cup. To do this
with the aid of Chad's pleasant earnest face was also
to do more besides. No, never before had he been
so ready to take him as he was. What was it that
had suddenly so cleared up ? It was just everybody's
character; that is everybody's but — in a measure —
his own. Strether felt his character receive for the
instant a smutch from all the wrong things he had
suspected or believed. The person to whom Chad
owed it that he could positively turn out such a com
fort to other persons — such a person was sufficiently
raised above any "breath " by the nature of her work
and the young man's steady light. All of which was
vivid enough to come and go quickly; though indeed
in the midst of it Strether could utter a question.
"Have I your word of honour that if I surrender
myself to Madame de Vionnet you '11 surrender your
self to me?"

Chad laid his hand firmly on his friend's. " My dear
man, you have it."

There was finally something in his felicity almost
embarrassing and oppressive — Strether had begun
to fidget under it for the open air and the erect posture.
He had signed to the waiter that he wished to pay, and
this transaction took some moments, during which he
thoroughly felt, while he put down money and pre
tended — it was quite hollow — to estimate change,
that Chad's higher spirit, his youth, his practice, his
paganism, his felicity, his assurance, his impudence,
whatever it might be, had consciously scored a sue*

237

THE AMBASSADORS

cess. Well, that was all right so far as it went; his
sense of the thing in question covered our friend for a
minute like a veil through which — as if he had been
muffled — he heard his interlocutor ask him if he
mightn't take him over about five. "Over" was over
the river, and over the river was where Madame de
Vionnet lived, and five was that very afternoon. They
got at last out of the place — got out before he an
swered. He lighted, in the street, a cigarette, which
again gave him more time. But it was already sharp
for him that there was no use in time. "What does
she propose to do to me ?" he had presently demanded.
Chad had no delays. "Are you afraid of her ?"
" Oh immensely. Don't you see it ? "
"Well," said Chad, "she won't do anything worse
to you than make you like her."
"It's just of that I'm afraid."
"Then it's not fair to me."
Strether cast about. "It's fair to your mother."
"Oh," said Chad, "are you afraid of her?"
"Scarcely less. Or perhaps even more. But is this
lady against your interests at home ?" Strether went on.
"Not directly, no doubt; but she's greatly in favour
of them here."

"And what — 'here* — does she consider them to
be?"

"Well, good relations!"
"With herself?"
"With herself."

"And what is it that makes them so good ?"
"What ? Well, that 's exactly what you '11 make out
if you '11 only go, as I 'm supplicating you, to see her."

238

BOOK FIFTH

Strether stared at him with a little of the wanness,
no doubt, that the vision of more to "make out " could
scarce help producing. " I mean bow good are they ? "

"Oh awfully good."

Again Strether had faltered, but it was brief. It was
all very well, but there was nothing now he would n't
risk. " Excuse me, but I must really — as I began by
telling you — know where I am. Is she bad ? "

" ' Bad ' ? " — Chad echoed it, but without a shock.
"Is that what's implied — ?"

"When relations are good?" Strether felt a little
silly, and was even conscious of a foolish laugh, at
having it imposed on him to have appeared to speak
so. What indeed was he talking about ? His stare
had relaxed ; he looked now all round him. But some
thing in him brought him back, though he still did n't
know quite how to turn it. The two or three ways he
thought of, and one of them in particular, were, even
with scruples dismissed, too ugly. He none the less at
last found something. "Is her life without reproach ?"

It struck him, directly he had found it, as pompous
and priggish ; so much so that he was thankful to Chad
for taking it only in the right spirit. The young man
spoke so immensely to the point that the effect was
practically of positive blandness. "Absolutely with
out reproach. A beautiful life. Allez done voir /"

These last words were, in the liberality of their con
fidence, so imperative that Strether went through no
form of assent; but before they separated it had been
confirmed that he should be picked up at a quarter to
five.

BOOK SIXTH

IT was quite by half-past five — after the two men
had been together in Madame de Vionnet's drawing-
room not more than a dozen minutes — that Chad,
with a look at his watch and then another at their
hostess, said genially, gaily: "I've an engagement,
and I know you won't complain if I leave him with
you. He'll interest you immensely; and as for her,"
he declared to Strether, "I assure you, if you're at
all nervous, she's perfectly safe."

He had left them to be embarrassed or not by this
guarantee, as they could best manage, and embarrass
ment was a thing that Strether was n't at first sure
Madame de Vionnet escaped. He escaped it himself,
to his surprise; but he had grown used by this time
to thinking of himself as brazen. She occupied, his
hostess, in the Rue de Bellechasse, the first floor of an
old house to which our visitors had had access from
an old clean court. The court was large and open, full
of revelations, for our friend, of the habit of privacy,
the peace of intervals, the dignity of distances and ap
proaches; the house, to his restless sense, was in the
high homely style of an elder day, and the ancient
Paris that he was always looking for — sometimes
intensely felt, sometimes more acutely missed — was
in the immemorial polish of the wide waxed staircase
and in the fine boiseries, the medallions, mouldings,
mirrors, great clear spaces, of the greyish-white salon

243

THE AMBASSADORS

into which he had been shown. He seemed at the very
outset to see her in the midst of possessions not vul
garly numerous, but hereditary cherished charming.
While his eyes turned after a little from those of his
hostess and Chad freely talked — not in the least
about him, but about other people, people he did n't
know, and quite as if he did know them — he found
himself making out, as a background of the occupant,
some glory, some prosperity of the First Empire, some
Napoleonic glamour, some dim lustre of the great
legend; elements clinging still to all the consular
chairs and mythological brasses and sphinxes' heads
and faded surfaces of satin striped with alternate silk.
The place itself went further back — that he
guessed, and how old Paris continued in a manner
to echo there; but the post-revolutionary period, the
world he vaguely thought of as the world of Chateau
briand, of Madame de Stael, even of the young La-
martine, had left its stamp of harps and urns and
torches, a stamp impressed on sundry small objects,
ornaments and relics. He had never before, to his
knowledge, had present to him relics, of any special
dignity, of a private order — little old miniatures, me
dallions, pictures, books; books in leather bindings,
pinkish and greenish, with gilt garlands on the back,
ranged, together with other promiscuous properties,
under the glass of brass-mounted cabinets. His atten
tion took them all tenderly into account. They were
among the matters that marked Madame de Vionnet's
apartment as something quite different from Miss
Gostrey's little museum of bargains and from Chad's
lovely home; he recognised it as founded much more

244

BOOK SIXTH

on old accumulations that had possibly from time to
time shrunken than on any contemporary method of
acquisition or form of curiosity. Chad and Miss Gos-
trey had rummaged and purchased and picked up
and exchanged, sifting, selecting, comparing; whereas
the mistress of the scene before him, beautifully pass
ive under the spell of transmission — transmission
from her father's line, he quite made up his mind —
had only received, accepted and been quiet. When she
had n't been quiet she had been moved at the most
to some occult charity for some fallen fortune. There
had been objects she or her predecessors might even
conceivably have parted with under need, but Strether
could n't suspect them of having sold old pieces to get
" better " ones. They would have felt no difference as
to better or worse. He could but imagine their having
felt — perhaps in emigration, in proscription, for his
sketch was slight and confused — the pressure of want
or the obligation of sacrifice.

The pressure of want — whatever might be the
case with the other force — was, however, presum
ably not active now, for the tokens of a chastened
ease still abounded after all, many marks of a taste
whose discriminations might perhaps have been called
eccentric. He guessed at intense little preferences and
sharp little exclusions, a deep suspicion of the vulgar
and a personal view of the right. The general result
of this was something for which he had no name on
the spot quite ready, but something he would have
come nearest to naming in speaking of it as the air of
supreme respectability, the consciousness, small, still,
reserved, but none the less distinct and diffused, of

245

THE AMBASSADORS

private honour. The air of supreme respectability —
that was a strange blank wall for his adventure to
have brought him to break his nose against. It had in
fact, as he was now aware, filled all the approaches,
hovered in the court as he passed, hung on the stair
case as he mounted, sounded in the grave rumble of
the old bell, as little electric as possible, of which
Chad, at the door, had pulled the ancient but neatly-
kept tassel ; it formed in short the clearest medium of
its particular kind that he had ever breathed. He
would have answered for it at the end of a quarter of
an hour that some of the glass cases contained swords
and epaulettes of ancient colonels and generals;
medals and orders once pinned over hearts that had
long since ceased to beat; snuff-boxes bestowed on
ministers and envoys; copies of works presented, with
inscriptions, by authors now classic. At bottom of it
all for him was the sense of her rare unlikeness to the
women he had known. This sense had grown, since
the day before, the more he recalled her, and had been
above all singularly fed by his talk with Chad in the
morning. Everything in fine made her immeasurably
new, and nothing so new as the old house and the old
objects. There were books, two or three, on a small
table near his chair, but they had n't the lemon-
coloured covers with which his eye had begun to dally
from the hour of his arrival and to the opportunity of
a further acquaintance with which he had for a fort
night now altogether succumbed. On another table,
across the room, he made out the great Revue; but
even that familiar face, conspicuous in Mrs. New-
some's parlours, scarce counted here as a modern

246

BOOK SIXTH

note. He was sure on the spot — and he afterwards
knew he was right — that this was a touch of Chad's
own hand. What would Mrs. Newsome say to the
circumstance that Chad's interested "influence"
kept her paper-knife in the Revue? The interested in
fluence at any rate had, as we say, gone straight to
the point — had in fact soon left it quite behind.

She was seated, near the fire, on a small stuffed and
fringed chair, one of the few modern articles in the
room; and she leaned back in it with her hands
clasped in her lap and no movement, in all her person,
but the fine prompt play of her deep young face. The
fire, under the low white marble, undraped and aca
demic, had burnt down to the silver ashes of light
wood ; one of the windows, at a distance, stood open
to the mildness and stillness, out of which, in the short
pauses, came the faint sound, pleasant and homely,
almost rustic, of a plash and a clatter of sabots from
some coach-house on the other side of the court.
Madame de Vionnet, while Strether sat there, was n't
to shift her posture by an inch. "I don't think you
seriously believe in what you're doing," she said;
" but all the same, you know, I 'm going to treat you
quite as if I did."

"By which you mean," Strether directly replied,
" quite as if you did n't ! I assure you it won't make
the least difference with me how you treat me."

"Well," she said, taking that menace bravely and
philosophically enough, "the only thing that really
matters is that you shall get on with me."

"Ah but I don't!" he immediately returned.

It gave her another pause; which, however, she
247

THE AMBASSADORS

happily enough shook off. "Will you consent to go
on with me a little — provisionally — as if you did ?"

Then it was that he saw how she had decidedly
come all the way; and there accompanied it an extra
ordinary sense of her raising from somewhere below
him her beautiful suppliant eyes. He might have been
perched at his door-step or at his window and she
standing in the road. For a moment he let her stand
and could n't moreover have spoken. It had been sad,
of a sudden, with a sadness that was like a cold breath
in his face. " What can I do," he finally asked, " but
listen to you as I promised Chadwick?"

"Ah but what I'm asking you," she quickly said,
"is n't what Mr. Newsome had in mind." She spoke
at present, he saw, as if to take courageously all her
risk. "This is my own idea and a different thing."

It gave poor Strether in truth — uneasy as it made
him too — something of the thrill of a bold percep
tion justified. "Well," he answered kindly enough,
" I was sure a moment since that some idea of your
own had come to you."

She seemed still to look up at him, but now more
serenely. " I made out you were sure — and that
helped it to come. So you see," she continued, "we
do get on."

" Oh but it appears to me I don't at all meet your
request. How can I when I don't understand it?"

" It is n't at all necessary you should understand ;
it will do quite well enough if you simply remember
it. Only feel I trust you — and for nothing so tre
mendous after all. Just," she said with a wonderful
smile, "for common civility."

248

BOOK SIXTH

Strether had a long pause while they sat again face
to face, as they had sat, scarce less conscious, before
the poor lady had crossed the stream. She was the
poor lady for Strether now because clearly she had
some trouble, and her appeal to him could only mean
that her trouble was deep. He could n't help it; it
was n't his fault; he had done nothing; but by a turn
of the hand she had somehow made their encounter
a relation. And the relation profited by a mass of
things that were not strictly in it or of it; by the
very air in which they sat, by the high cold delicate
room, by the world outside and the little plash in
the court, by the First Empire and the relics in the
stiff cabinets, by matters as far off as those and by
others as near as the unbroken clasp of her hands
in her lap and the look her expression had of being
most natural when her eyes were most fixed. "You
count upon me of course for something really much
greater than it sounds."

"Oh it sounds great enough too!" she laughed at
this.

He found himself in time on the point of telling her
that she was, as Miss Barrace called it, wonderful;
but, catching himself up, he said something else in
stead. "What was it Chad's idea then that you should
say to me ? "

"Ah his idea was simply what a man's idea always
is — to put every effort off on the woman."

"The 'woman' — ?" Strether slowly echoed.

"The woman he likes — and just in proportion as
he likes her. In proportion too — for shifting the
trouble — as she likes him"

249

THE AMBASSADORS

Strether followed it ; then with an abruptness of his
own: "How much do you like Chad ?"

"Just as much as that — to take all, with you, on
myself." But she got at once again away from this.
" I Ve been trembling as if we were to stand or fall by
what you may think of me; and I'm even now," she
went on wonderfully, " drawing a long breath — and,
yes, truly taking a great courage — from the hope
that I don't in fact strike you as impossible."

"That's at all events, clearly," he observed after an
instant, "the way I don't strike you."

"Well," she so far assented, "as you haven't yet
said you worit have the little patience with me I ask
for—"

"You draw splendid conclusions ? Perfectly. But
I don't understand them," Strether pursued. "You
seem to me to ask for much more than you need.
What, at the worst for you, what at the best for my
self, can I after all do ? I can use no pressure that I
have n't used. You come really late with your re
quest. I Ve already done all that for myself the case
admits of. I Ve said my say, and here I am."

"Yes, here you are, fortunately!" Madame de
Vionnet laughed. "Mrs. Newsome," she added in
another tone, "did n't think you can do so little."

He had an hesitation, but he brought the words
out. "Well, she thinks so now."

"Do you mean by that — ?" But she also hung
fire.

" Do I mean what ? "

She still rather faltered. " Pardon me if I touch on
it, but if I 'm saying extraordinary things, why, per-

250

BOOK SIXTH

haps, may n't I ? Besides, does n't it properly concern
us to know ? "

"To know what ?" he insisted as after thus beating
about the bush she had again dropped.

She made the effort. " Has she given you up ? "

He was amazed afterwards to think how simply and
quietly he had met it. "Not yet." It was almost as
if he were a trifle disappointed — had expected still
more of her freedom. But he went straight on. " Is
that what Chad has told you will happen to me ? "

She was evidently charmed with the way he took it.
" If you mean if we 've talked of it — most certainly.
And the question 's not what has had least to do with
my wishing to see you."

"To judge if I'm the sort of man a woman
can— ?"

"Precisely," she exclaimed — "you wonderful gen
tleman ! I do judge — I have judged. A woman
can't. You 're safe — with every right to be. You 'd
be much happier if you 'd only believe it."

Strether was silent a little; then he found himself
speaking with a cynicism of confidence of which even
at the moment the sources were strange to him. "I
try to believe it. But it's a marvel," he exclaimed,
"how you already get at it!"

Oh she was able to say. " Remember how much
I was on the way to it through Mr. Newsome
— before I saw you. He thinks everything of your
strength."

"Well, I can bear almost anything!" our friend
briskly interrupted. Deep and beautiful on this her
smile came back, and with the effect of making him

251

THE AMBASSADORS

hear what he had said just as she had heard it. He
easily enough felt that it gave him away, but what in
truth had everything done but that ? It had been all
very well to think at moments that he was holding her
nose down and that he had coerced her : what had he
by this time done but let her practically see that he
accepted their relation ? What was their relation
moreover — though light and brief enough in form as
yet — but whatever she might choose to make it ?
Nothing could prevent her — certainly he could n't
— from making it pleasant. At the back of his head,
behind everything, was the sense that she was —
there, before him, close to him, in vivid imperative
form — one of the rare women he had so often heard
of, read of, thought of, but never met, whose very
presence, look, voice, the mere contemporaneous fact
of whom, from the moment it was at all presented,
made a relation of mere recognition. That was not
the kind of woman he had ever found Mrs. Newsome,
a contemporaneous fact who had been distinctly slow
to establish herself; and at present, confronted with
Madame de Vionnet, he felt the simplicity of his orig
inal impression of Miss Gostrey. She certainly had
been a fact of rapid growth ; but the world was wide,
each day was more and more a new lesson. There
were at any rate even among the stranger ones rela
tions and relations. "Of course I suit Chad's grand
way," he quickly added. "He has n't had much dif
ficulty in working me in."

She seemed to deny a little, on the young man's be
half, by the rise of her eyebrows, an intention of any
process at all inconsiderate. "You must know how

252

BOOK SIXTH

grieved he 'd be if you were to lose anything. He be
lieves you can keep his mother patient."

Strether wondered with his eyes on her. "I see.
That 's then what you really want of me. And how am
I to do it ? Perhaps you '11 tell me that."

"Simply tell her the truth."

"And what do you call the truth ?"

"Well, any truth — about us all — that you see
yourself. I leave it to you."

"Thank you very much. I like," Strether laughed
with a slight harshness, " the way you leave things ! "

But she insisted kindly, gently, as if it was n't so
bad. "Be perfectly honest. Tell her all."

"All?" he oddly echoed.

"Tell her the simple truth," Madame de Vionnet
again pleaded.

" But what is the simple truth ? The simple truth is
exactly what I 'm trying to discover."

She looked about a while, but presently she came
back to him. "Tell her, fully and clearly, about us"

Strether meanwhile had been staring. "You and
your daughter ? "

"Yes — little Jeanne and me. Tell her," she just
slightly quavered, "you like us."

"And what good will that do me ? Or rather" —
he caught himself up — "what good will it do you?"

She looked graver. "None, you believe, really?"

Strether debated. "She did n't send me out to
Mike 'you."

"Oh," she charmingly contended, "she sent you
out to face the facts."

He admitted after an instant that there was some-

253

THE AMBASSADORS

thing in that. " But how can I face them till I know
what they are ? Do you want him," he then braced
himself to ask, " to marry your daughter ? "

She gave a headshake as noble as it was prompt.
"No — not that."

"And he really does n't want to himself?"

She repeated the movement, but now with a strange
light in her face. "He likes her too much."

Strether wondered. "To be willing to consider, you
mean, the question of taking her to America ? "

"To be willing to do anything with her but be
immensely kind and nice — really tender of her. We
watch over her, and you must help us. You must see
her again."

Strether felt awkward. "Ah with pleasure — she's
so remarkably attractive."

The mother's eagerness with which Madame de
Vionnet jumped at this was to come back to him later
as beautiful in its grace. "The dear thing did please
you ? " Then as he met it with the largest " Oh ! " of
enthusiasm: "She's perfect. She's my joy."

"Well, I'm sure that — if one were near her and
saw more of her — she'd be mine."

"Then," said Madame de Vionnet, "tell Mrs.
Newsome that!"

He wondered the more. "What good will that
do you ? " As she appeared unable at once to say,
however, he brought out something else. "Is your
daughter in love with our friend ? "

"Ah," she rather startlingly answered, "I wish
you'd find out!"

He showed his surprise. " I ? A stranger ? "
254

BOOK SIXTH

"Oh you won't be a stranger — presently. You
shall see her quite, I assure you, as if you were n't."

It remained for him none the less an extraordinary
notion. "It seems to me surely that if her mother
can't—"

"Ah little girls and their mothers to-day!" she
rather inconsequently broke in. But she checked
herself with something she seemed to give out as
after all more to the point. "Tell her I 've been good
for him. Don't you think I have ?"

It had its effect on him — more than at the mo
ment he quite measured. Yet he was consciously
enough touched. "Oh if it's all you — !"

"Well, it may not be 'all,'" she interrupted, "but
it 's to a great extent. Really and truly," she added in
a tone that was to take its place with him among
things remembered.

"Then it's very wonderful." He smiled at her
from a face that he felt as strained, and her own face
for a moment kept him so. At last she also got up.
"Well, don't you think that for that — "

"I ought to save you ?" So it was that the way to
meet her — and the way, as well, in a manner, to get
off — came over him. He heard himself use the
exorbitant word, the very sound of which helped to
determine his flight. " I '11 save you if I can."

II

IN Chad's lovely home, however, one evening ten
days later, he felt himself present at the collapse of the
question of Jeanne de Vionnet's shy secret. He had
been dining there in the company of that young lady
and her mother, as well as of other persons, and he
had gone into the petit salon, at Chad's request, on
purpose to talk with her. The young man had put
this to him as a favour — "I should like so awfully to
know what you think of her. It will really be a chance
for you," he had said, "to see the jeune fille — I mean
the type — as she actually is, and I don't think that,
as an observer of manners, it 's a thing you ought to
miss. It will be an impression that — whatever else
you take — you can carry home with you, where you '11
find again so much to compare it with."

Strether knew well enough with what Chad wished
him to compare it, and though he entirely assented
he had n't yet somehow been so deeply reminded that
he was being, as he constantly though mutely ex
pressed it, used. He was as far as ever from making
out exactly to what end ; but he was none the less con
stantly accompanied by a sense of the service he ren
dered. He conceived only that this service was highly
agreeable to those who profited by it ; and he was in
deed still waiting for the moment at which he should
catch it in the act of proving disagreeable, proving in
some degree intolerable, to himself. He failed quite to

256

BOOK SIXTH

see how his situation could clear up at all logically
except by some turn of events that would give him the
pretext of disgust. He was building from day to day
on the possibility of disgust, but each day brought
forth meanwhile a new and more engaging bend of
the road. That possibility was now ever so much
further from sight than on the eve of his arrival, and
he perfectly felt that, should it come at all, it would
have to be at best inconsequent and violent. He
struck himself as a little nearer to it only when he
asked himself what service, in such a life of utility,
he was after all rendering Mrs. Newsome. When he
wished to help himself to believe that he was still all
right he reflected — and in fact with wonder — on
the unimpaired frequency of their correspondence;
in relation to which what was after all more natural
than that it should become more frequent just in pro
portion as their problem became more complicated ?
Certain it is at any rate that he now often brought
himself balm by the question, with the rich conscious
ness of yesterday's letter, " Well, what can I do more
than that — what can I do more than tell her every
thing ?" To persuade himself that he did tell her, had
told her, everything, he used to try to think of par
ticular things he had n't told her. When at rare mo
ments and in the watches of the night he pounced on
one it generally showed itself to be — to a deeper
scrutiny — not quite truly of the essence. When any
thing new struck him as coming up, or anything
already noted as reappearing, he always immediately
wrote, as if for fear that if he did n't he would miss
something; and also that he might be able to say to

257

THE AMBASSADORS

himself from time to time " She knows it now — even
while I worry." It was a great comfort to him in gen
eral not to have left past things to be dragged to light
and explained; not to have to produce at so late a
stage anything not produced, or anything even veiled
and attenuated, at the moment. She knew it now:
that was what he said to himself to-night in relation to
the fresh fact of Chad's acquaintance with the two
ladies — not to speak of the fresher one of his own.
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 had n'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 would n'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 could n't really
strike one as quite the straight thing. He had n'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 had n'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

258

BOOK SIXTH

did n'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. Then he had remarked — making
the most of the advantage of his years — that it fright
ened him quite enough to find himself dedicated to
the entertainment of a little foreign girl. There were
girls he wasn't afraid of — he was quite bold with
little Americans. Thus it was that she had defended
herself to the end — "Oh but I'm almost American
too. That's what mamma has wanted me to be — I
mean like that; for she has wanted me to have lots of
freedom. She has known such good results from it."

She was fairly beautiful to him — a faint pastel in
an oval frame : he thought of her already as of some
lurking image in a long gallery, the portrait of a small
old-time princess of whom nothing was known but
that she had died young. Little Jeanne was n't,

259

THE AMBASSADORS

doubtless, to die young, but one could n't, all the
same, bear on her lightly enough. It was bearing
hard, it was bearing as be, in any case, would n't bear,
to concern himself, in relation to her, with the ques
tion of a young man. Odious really the question of a
young man; one did n't treat such a person as a maid
servant suspected of a "follower." And then young
men, young men — well, the thing was their business
simply, or was at all events hers. She was fluttered,
fairly fevered — to the point of a little glitter that
came and went in her eyes and a pair of pink spots
that stayed in her cheeks — with the great adventure
of dining out and with the greater one still, possibly,
of finding a gentleman whom she must think of as
very, very old, a gentleman with eye-glasses, wrinkles,
a long grizzled moustache. She spoke the prettiest
English, our friend thought, that he had ever heard
spoken, just as he had believed her a few minutes
before to be speaking the prettiest French. He won
dered almost wistfully if such a sweep of the lyre did n't
react on the spirit itself; and his fancy had in fact,
before he knew it, begun so to stray and embroider
that he finally found himself, absent and extravagant,
sitting with the child in a friendly silence. Only by
this time he felt her flutter to have fortunately dropped
and that she was more at her ease. She trusted him,
liked him, and it was to come back to him afterwards
that she had told him things. She had dipped into the
waiting medium at last and found neither surge nor
chill — nothing but the small splash she could herself
make in the pleasant warmth, nothing but the safety
of dipping and dipping again. At the end of the ten

260

BOOK SIXTH

minutes he was to spend with her his impression
— with all it had thrown off and all it had taken
in — was complete. She had been free, as she knew
freedom, partly to show him that, unlike other little
persons she knew, she had imbibed that ideal. She
was delightfully quaint about herself, but the vision
of what she had imbibed was what most held him. It
really consisted, he was soon enough to feel, in just
one great little matter, the fact that, whatever her
nature, she was thoroughly — he had to cast about for
the word, but it came — bred. He could n't of course
on so short an acquaintance speak for her nature, but
the idea of breeding was what she had meanwhile
dropped into his mind. He had never yet known it so
sharply presented. Her mother gave it, no doubt; but
her mother, to make that less sensible, gave so much
else besides-, and on neither of the two previous occa
sions, extraordinary woman, Strether felt, anything
like what she was giving to-night. Little Jeanne was
a case, an exquisite case of education; whereas the
Countess, whom it so amused him to think of by that
denomination, was a case, also exquisite, of — well,
he did n't know what.

" He has wonderful taste, notre jeune homme " : this
was what Gloriani said to him on turning away from
the inspection of a small picture suspended near the
door of the room. The high celebrity in question had
just come in, apparently in search of Mademoiselle
de Vionnet, but while Strether had got up from beside
her their fellow guest, with his eye sharply caught, had
paused for a long look. The thing was a landscape, of
no size, but of the French school, as our friend was

261

THE AMBASSADORS

glad to feel he knew, and also of a quality — which he
liked to think he should also have guessed ; its frame
was large out of proportion to the canvas, and he had
never seen a person look at anything, he thought, just
as Gloriani, with his nose very near and quick move
ments of the head from side to side and bottom to top,
examined this feature of Chad's collection. The artist
used that word the next moment, smiling courteously,
wiping his nippers and looking round him further —
paying the place in short by the very manner of his
presence and by something Strether fancied he could
make out in this particular glance, such a tribute as,
to the latter's sense, settled many things once for all.
Strether was conscious at this instant, for that matter,
as he had n't yet been, of how, round about him, quite
without him, they we re consistently settled. Gloriani's
smile, deeply Italian, he considered, and finely in
scrutable, had had for him, during dinner, at which
they were not neighbours, an indefinite greeting; but
the quality in it was gone that had appeared on the
other occasion to turn him inside out; it was as if even
the momentary link supplied by the doubt between
them had snapped. He was conscious now of the final
reality, which was that there was n'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 would n'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

262

BOOK SIXTH

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 would n't be more explicit, only assuring him,
with the pleasure of observation so visible in her, that
she would n'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 him
self 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 every
thing."

"Of course not — wonderful as she is. Besides, he
263

THE AMBASSADORS

makes nothing of her. She won't take him from me —
though she would n't, no doubt, having other affairs
in hand, even if she could. I 've never," said Miss Bar-
race, " 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 par
ticularly magnificent ? "

"Surely. Almost as I've never seen her. Does n'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 differ
ent in that."

"No," said Strether, "one was sure of her shoul
ders. It is n't her shoulders."

His companion, with renewed mirth and the finest
sense, between the puffs of her cigarette, of the droll
ery of things, appeared to find their conversation
highly delightful. "Yes, it is n't her shoulders."

"What then is it ?" Strether earnestly enquired.

"Why, it's she — simply. It's her mood. It's her
charm."

"Of course it's her charm, but we're speaking of
the difference."

"Well," Miss Barrace explained, "she's just bril-

264

BOOK SIXTH

liant, as we used to say. That's all. She's various.
She's fifty women."

"Ah but only one" — Strether kept it clear — "at
a time."

" Perhaps. But in fifty times — ! "

"Oh we shan't come to that," our friend declared;
and the next moment he had moved in another direc
tion. "Will you answer me a plain question ? Will she
ever divorce ? "

Miss Barrace looked at him through all her tortoise-
shell. "Why should she?"

It was n't what he had asked for, he signified ; but
he met it well enough. "To marry Chad."

"Why should she marry Chad ?"

" Because I 'm convinced she 's very fond of him.
She has done wonders for him."

" Well then, how could she do more ? Marrying a
man, or a woman either," Miss Barrace sagely went
on, "is never the wonder, for any Jack and Jill can
bring that off. The wonder is their doing such things
without marrying."

Strether considered a moment this proposition.
"You mean it's so beautiful for our friends simply to
go on so ? "

But whatever he said made her laugh. " Beautiful."

He nevertheless insisted. "And that because it's
disinterested ? "

She was now, however, suddenly tired of the ques
tion. "Yes, then — call it that. Besides, she'll never
divorce. Don't, moreover," she added, "believe
everything you hear about her husband."

"He's not then," Strether asked, "a wretch?"
265

THE AMBASSADORS

"Oh yes. But charming."

"Do you know him ?"

"I've met him. He's lien aimable."

"To every one but his wife ?"

" Oh for all I know, to her too — to any, to every
woman. I hope you at any rate," she pursued with
a quick change, " appreciate the care I take of Mr.
Waymarsh."

"Oh immensely." But Strether was not yet in
line. "At all events," he roundly brought out, "the
attachment's an innocent one."

"Mine and his? Ah," she laughed, "don't rob it
of all interest ! "

" I mean our friend's here — to the lady we Ve
been speaking of." That was what he had settled to
as an indirect but none the less closely involved conse
quence of his impression of Jeanne. That was where
he meant to stay. " It 's innocent," he repeated —
"I see the whole thing."

Mystified by his abrupt declaration, she had
glanced over at Gloriani as at the unnamed subject
of his allusion, but the next moment she had under
stood ; though indeed not before Strether had noticed
her momentary mistake and wondered what might
possibly be behind that too. He already knew that
the sculptor admired Madame de Vionnet; but did
this admiration also represent an attachment of which
the innocence was discussable ? He was moving verily
in a strange air and on ground not of the firmest. He
looked hard for an instant at Miss Barrace, but she
had already gone on. "All right with Mr. Newsome ?
Why of course she is ! " — and she got gaily back to

266

BOOK SIXTH

the question of her own good friend. "I dare say
you're surprised that I'm not worn out with all I
see — it being so much ! — of Sitting Bull. But I 'm
not, you know — I don't mind him; I bear up, and
we get on beautifully. I 'm very strange ; I 'm like that ;
and often I can't explain. There are people who are
supposed interesting or remarkable or whatever, and
who bore me to death ; and then there are others as to
whom nobody can understand what anybody sees in
them — in whom I see no end of things." Then after
she had smoked a moment, "He's touching, you
know," she said.

"'Know'?" Strether echoed — " don't I, indeed?
We must move you almost to tears."

"Oh but I don't mean you!" she laughed.

"You ought to then, for the worst sign of all — as
I must have it for you — is that you can't help me.
That's when a woman pities."

"Ah but I do help you!" she cheerfully insisted.

Again he looked at her hard, and then after a pause :
"No you don't!"

Her tortoise-shell, on its long chain, rattled down.
"I help you with Sitting Bull. That's a good deal."

" Oh that, yes." But Strether hesitated. "Do you
mean he talks of me ? "

"So that I have to defend you ? No, never."

"I see," Strether mused. "It's too deep."

"That's his only fault," she returned — "that
everything, with him, is too deep. He has depths of
silence — which he breaks only at the longest inter
vals by a remark. And when the remark comes it's
always something he has seen or felt for himself —

267

THE AMBASSADORS

never a bit banal. That would be what one might
have feared and what would kill me. But never."
She smoked again as she thus, with amused com
placency, appreciated her acquisition. "And never
about you. We keep clear of you. We're wonderful.
But I'll tell you what he does do," she continued:
"he tries to make me presents."

" Presents ? " poor Strether echoed, conscious with
a pang that he had n't yet tried that in any quarter.

"Why you see," she explained, "he's as fine as ever
in the victoria; so that when I leave him, as I often
do almost for hours — he likes it so — at the doors of
shops, the sight of him there helps me, when I come
out, to know my carriage away off in the rank. But
sometimes, for a change, he goes with me into the
shops, and then I 've all I can do to prevent his buy
ing me things."

"He wants to 'treat* you ?" Strether almost gasped
at all he himself had n't thougnt of. He had a sense
of admiration. "Oh he's much more in the real tra
dition than I. Yes," he mused ; " it 's the sacred rage."

"The sacred rage, exactly!" — and Miss Barrace,
who had n't before heard this term applied, recog
nised its bearing with a clap of her gemmed hands.
"Now I do know why he's not banal. But I do pre
vent him all the same — and if you saw what he some
times selects — from buying. I save him hundreds
and hundreds. I only take flowers."

" Flowers ? " Strether echoed again with a rueful
reflexion. How many nosegays had her present con-
verser sent ?

"Innocent flowers," she pursued, "as much as he
268

BOOK SIXTH

likes. And he sends me splendours; he knows all the
best places — he has found them for himself; he 's
wonderful."

" He has n't told them to me" her friend smiled ;
"he has a life of his own." But Strether had swung
back to the consciousness that for himself after all it
never would have done. Waymarsh had n't Mrs.
Waymarsh in the least to consider, whereas Lambert
Strether had constantly, in the inmost honour of his
thoughts, to consider Mrs. Newsome. He liked more
over to feel how much his friend was in the real tradi
tion. Yet he had his conclusion. " What a rage it is ! "
He had worked it out. "It's an opposition."

She followed, but at a distance. "That's what I
feel. Yet to what ? "

"Well, he thinks, you know, that I've a life of my
own. And I haven't!"

"You haven't?" She showed doubt, and her
laugh confirmed it. "Oh, oh, oh!"

"No — not for myself. I seem to have a life only
for other people."

"Ah for them and ivith them! Just now for in
stance with — "

"Well, with whom ?" he asked before she had had
time to say.

His tone had the effect of making her hesitate and
even, as he guessed, speak with a difference. "Say
with Miss Gostrey. What do you do for her?"

It really made him wonder. "Nothing at all!"

Ill

MADAME DE VIONNET, having meanwhile come in,
was at present close to them, and Miss Barrace here
upon, instead of risking a rejoinder, became again
with a look that measured her from top to toe all mere
long-handled appreciative tortoise-shell. She had
struck our friend, from the first of her appearing, as
dressed for a great occasion, and she met still more
than on either of the others the conception reawak
ened in him at their garden-party, the idea of the
femme du monde in her habit as she lived. Her bare
shoulders and arms were white and beautiful; the
materials of her dress, a mixture, as he supposed, of
silk and crape, were of a silvery grey so artfully com
posed as to give an impression of warm splendour;
and round her neck she wore a collar of large old
emeralds, the green note of which was more dimly
repeated, at other points of her apparel, in embroid
ery, in enamel, in satin, in substances and textures
vaguely rich. Her head, extremely fair and exquisitely
festal, was like a happy fancy, a notion of the antique,
on an old precious medal, some silver coin of the
Renaissance; while her slim lightness and brightness,
her gaiety, her expression, her decision, contributed
to an effect that might have been felt by a poet as half
mythological and half conventional. He could have
compared her to a goddess still partly engaged in a
morning cloud, or to a sea-nymph waist-high in the
summer surge. Above all she suggested to him the

270

BOOK SIXTH

reflexion that the femme du monde — in these finest
developments of the type — was, like Cleopatra in the
play, indeed various and multifold. She had aspects,
characters, days, nights — or had them at least,
showed them by a mysterious law of her own, when
in addition to everything she happened also to be
a woman of genius. She was an obscure person, a
muffled person one day, and a showy person, an un
covered person the next. He thought of Madame de
Vionnet to-night as showy and uncovered, though he
felt the formula rough, because, thanks to one of
the short-cuts of genius, she had taken all his cate
gories by surprise. Twice during dinner he had met
Chad's eyes in a longish look; but these communica
tions had in truth only stirred up again old ambiguities
— so little was it clear from them whether they were
an appeal or an admonition. "You see how I'm
fixed," was what they appeared to convey; yet how
he was fixed was exactly what Strether did n't see.
However, perhaps he should see now.

"Are you capable of the very great kindness of
going to relieve Newsome, for a few minutes, of the
rather crushing responsibility of Madame Gloriani,
while I say a word, if he '11 allow me, to Mr. Strether,
of whom I 've a question to ask ? Our host ought to
talk a bit to those other ladies, and I '11 come back in
a minute to your rescue." She made this proposal to
Miss Barrace as if her consciousness of a special duty
had just flickered up, but that lady's recognition of
Strether's little start at it — as at a betrayal on the
speaker's part of a domesticated state — was as mute
as his own comment; and after an instant, when their

271

THE AMBASSADORS

fellow guest had good-naturedly left them, he had
been given something else to think of. "Why has
Maria so suddenly gone ? Do you know ? " That was
the question Madame de Vionnet had brought with
her.

"I'm afraid I've no reason to give you but the
simple reason I 've had from her in a note — the sud
den obligation to join in the south a sick friend who
has got worse."

"Ah then she has been writing you ?"

"Not since she went — I had only a brief explana
tory word before she started. I went to see her,"
Strether explained — "it was the day after I called on
you — but she was already on her way, and her con
cierge told me that in case of my coming I was to be
informed she had written to me. I found her note
when I got home."

Madame de Vionnet listened with interest and with
her eyes on Strether's face; then her delicately decor
ated head had a small melancholy motion. "She
did n't write to me. I went to see her," she added,
"almost immediately after I had seen you, and as I
assured her I would do when I met her at Gloriani's.
She had n't then told me she was to be absent, and
I felt at her door as if I understood. She's absent
— with all respect to her sick friend, though I know
indeed she has plenty — so that I may not see her.
She does n't want to meet me again. Well," she con
tinued with a beautiful conscious mildness, "I liked
and admired her beyond every one in the old time,
and she knew it — perhaps that's precisely what
has made her go — and I dare say I have n't lost her

272

BOOK SIXTH

for ever." Strether still said nothing; he had a horror,
as he now thought of himself, of being in question
between women — was in fact already quite enough
on his way to that; and there was moreover, as it
came to him, perceptibly, something behind these
allusions and professions that, should he take it in,
would square but ill with his present resolve to sim
plify. It was as if, for him, all the same, her softness
and sadness were sincere. He felt that not less when
she soon went on : " I 'm extremely glad of her happi
ness." But it also left him mute — sharp and fine
though the imputation it conveyed. What it conveyed
was that he was Maria Gostrey's happiness, and for
the least little instant he had the impulse to challenge
the thought. He could have done so however only
by saying " What then do you suppose to be between
us ?" and he was wonderfully glad a moment later not
to have spoken. He would rather seem stupid any
day than fatuous, and he drew back as well, with a
smothered inward shudder, from the consideration of
what women — of highly-developed type in particular
— might think of each other. Whatever he had come
out for he had n't come to go into that ; so that he
absolutely took up nothing his interlocutress had now
let drop. Yet, though he had kept away from her for
days, had laid wholly on herself the burden of their
meeting again, she had n't a gleam of irritation to
show him. " Well, about Jeanne now ? " she smiled
— it had the gaiety with which she had originally come
in. He felt it on the instant to represent her motive
and real errand. But he had been schooling her of a
truth to say much in proportion to his little. "Do you

273

THE AMBASSADORS

make out that she has a sentiment ? I mean for Mr.
Newsome."

Almost resentful, Strether could at last be prompt.
" How can I make out such things ? "

She remained perfectly good-natured. "Ah but
they 're beautiful little things, and you make out —
don't pretend ! — everything in the world. Have n't
you," she asked, "been talking with her?"

"Yes, but not about Chad. At least not much."

" Oh you don't require * much' ! " she reassuringly de
clared. But she immediately changed her ground. "I
hope you remember your promise of the other day."

"To 'save' you, as you called it?"

"I call it so still. You will?" she insisted. "You
have n't repented ? "

He wondered. " No — but I 've been thinking what
I meant."

She kept it up. "And not, a little, what 7 did ?"

"No — that's not necessary. It will be enough if
I know what I meant myself."

"And don't you know," she asked, "l>y this time ?"

Again he had a pause. "I think you ought to leave
it to me. But how long," he added, " do you give me ? "

" It seems to me much more a question of how long
you give me. Does n't our friend here himself, at any
rate," she went on, "perpetually make me present to
you?"

" Not," Strether replied, " by ever speaking of you
to me."

" He never does that ? "

"Never."

She considered, and, if the fact was disconcerting
274

BOOK SIXTH

to her, effectually concealed it. The next minute in
deed she had recovered. "No, he would n't. But do
you need that ? "

Her emphasis was wonderful, and though his eyes
had been wandering he looked at her longer now.
"I see what you mean."

"Of course you see what I mean."

Her triumph was gentle, and she really had tones
to make justice weep. "I 've before me what he owes
you."

"Admit then that that's something," she said, yet
still with the same discretion in her pride.

He took in this note but went straight on. " You 've
made of him what I see, but what I don't see is how
in the world you 've done it."

"Ah that's another question!" she smiled. "The
point is of what use is your declining to know me when
to know Mr. Newsome — as you do me the honour
to find him — is just to know me."

"I see," he mused, still with his eyes on her. "I
should n't have met you to-night."

She raised and dropped her linked hands. "It
does n't matter. If I trust you why can't you a little
trust me too ? And why can't you also," she asked in
another tone, "trust yourself?" But she gave him
no time to reply. "Oh I shall be so easy for you!
And I 'm glad at any rate you 've seen my child."

"I'm glad too," he said; "but she does you no
good."

"No good?" — Madame de Vionnet had a clear
stare. " Why she 's an angel of light."

"That's precisely the reason. Leave her alone.
275

THE AMBASSADORS

Don't try to find out. I mean," he explained, " about
what you spoke to me of — the way she feels."

His companion wondered. "Because one really
won't?"

"Well, because I ask you, as a favour to myself, not
to. She 's the most charming creature I 've ever seen.
Therefore don't touch her. Don't know — don't want
to know. And moreover — yes — you wont."

It was an appeal, of a sudden, and she took it in.
"As a favour to you ?"

" Well — since you ask me."

"Anything, everything you ask," she smiled. "I
shaa't know then — never. Thank you," she added
with peculiar gentleness as she turned away.

The sound of it lingered with him, making him
fairly feel as if he had been tripped up and had a fall.
In the very act of arranging with her for his inde
pendence he had, under pressure from a particular
perception, inconsistently, quite stupidly, committed
himself, and, with her subtlety sensitive on the spot
to an advantage, she had driven in by a single word
a little golden nail, the sharp intention of which he
signally felt. He had n't detached, he had more
closely connected himself, and his eyes, as he con
sidered with some intensity this circumstance, met
another pair which had just come within their range
and which struck him as reflecting his sense of what
he had done. He recognised them at the same mo
ment as those of little Bilham, who had apparently
drawn near on purpose to speak to him, and little Bil
ham was n't, in the conditions, the person to whom
his heart would be most closed. They were seated

276

BOOK SIXTH

together a minute later at the angle of the room ob
liquely opposite the corner in which Gloriani was still
engaged with Jeanne de Vionnet, to whom at first
and in silence their attention had been benevolently
given. "I can't see for my life," Strether had then
observed, "how a young fellow of any spirit — such
a one as you for instance — can be admitted to the
sight of that young lady without being hard hit. Why
don't you go in, little Bilham ? " He remembered the
tone into which he had been betrayed on the garden-
bench at the sculptor's reception, and this might
make up for that by being much more the right sort of
thing to say to a young man worthy of any advice at
all. "There would be some reason."

"Some reason for what ?"

"Why for hanging on here."

"To offer my hand and fortune to Mademoiselle
de Vionnet ? "

"Well," Strether asked, "to what lovelier appari
tion could you offer them ? She 's the sweetest little
thing I've ever seen."

"She's certainly immense. I mean she's the real
thing. I believe the pale pink petals are folded up
there for some wondrous efflorescence in time; to
open, that is, to some great golden sun. I'm unfor
tunately but a small farthing candle. What chance
in such a field for a poor little painter-man ? "

"Oh you're good enough," Strether threw out.

" Certainly I 'm good enough. We 're good enough,
I consider, nous autres, for anything. But she's too
good. There 's the difference. They would n't look
at me."

277

THE AMBASSADORS

Strether, lounging on his divan and still charmed
by the young girl, whose eyes had consciously strayed
to him, he fancied, with a vague smile — Strether,
enjoying the whole occasion as with dormant pulses
at last awake and in spite of new material thrust upon
him, thought over his companion's words. "Whom
do you mean by 'they' ? She and her mother?"

"She and her mother. And she has a father too,
who, whatever else he may be, certainly can't be in
different to the possibilities she represents. Besides,
there's Chad."

Strether was silent a little. "Ah but he does n't
care for her — not, I mean, it appears, after all, in
the sense I'm speaking of. He's not in love with
her."

"No — but he's her best friend; after her mother.
He 's very fond of her. He has his ideas about what
can be done for her."

"Well, it's very strange!" Strether presently re
marked with a sighing sense of fulness.

"Very strange indeed. That 's just the beauty of it.
Is n't it very much the kind of beauty you had in
mind," little Bilham went on, "when you were so
wonderful and so inspiring to me the other day ?
Did n't you adjure me, in accents I shall never forget,
to see, while I 've a chance, everything I can ? — and
really to see, for it must have been that only you
meant. Well, you did me no end of good, and I 'm
doing my best. I do make it out a situation."

" So do I ! " Strether went on after a moment. But
he had the next minute an inconsequent question.
" How comes Chad so mixed up, anyway ? "

278

BOOK SIXTH

"Ah, ah, ah!" — and little Bilham fell back on
his cushions.

It reminded our friend of Miss Barrace, and he
felt again the brush of his sense of moving in a maze
of mystic closed allusions. Yet he kept hold of his
thread. "Of course I understand really; only the
general transformation makes me occasionally gasp.
Chad with such a voice in the settlement of the future
of a little countess — no," he declared, "it takes more
time! You say moreover,'* he resumed, "that we're
inevitably, people like you and me, out of the running.
The curious fact remains that Chad himself is n't.
The situation does n't make for it, but in a different
one he could have her if he would."

"Yes, but that 's only because he 's rich and because
there's a possibility of his being richer. They won't
think of anything but a great name or a great fortune."

"Well," said Strether, "he'll have no great fortune
on these lines. He must stir his stumps."

"Is that," little Bilham enquired, "what you were
saying fo Madame de Vionnet ? "

"No — I don't say much to her. Of course, how
ever," Strether continued, "he can make sacrifices if
he likes."

Little Bilham had a pause. "Oh he's not keen for
sacrifices; or thinks, that is, possibly, that he has
made enough."

"Well, it is virtuous," his companion observed with
some decision.

"That's exactly," the young man dropped after a
moment, "what I mean."

It kept Strether himself silent a little. "I've made
279

THE AMBASSADORS

it out for myself," he then went on; "I've really,
within the last half-hour, got hold of it. I understand
it in short at last; which at first — when you orig
inally spoke to me — I did n't. Nor when Chad
originally spoke to me either."

"Oh," said little Bilham, "I don't think that at
that time you believed me."

" Yes — I did ; and I believed Chad too. It would
have been odious and unmannerly — as well as quite
perverse — if I had n't. What interest have you in
deceiving me ? "

The young man cast about. "What interest
have ir

"Yes. Chad might have. But you?"

"Ah, ah, ah!" little Bilham exclaimed.

It might, on repetition, as a mystification, have
irritated our friend a little; but he knew, once more,
as we have seen, where he was, and his being proof
against everything was only another attestation that
he meant to stay there. "I could n't, without my own
impression, realise. She's a tremendously clever bril
liant capable woman, and with an extraordinary
charm on top of it all — the charm we surely all of us
this evening know what to think of. It is n't every
clever brilliant capable woman that has it. In fact it 's
rare with any woman. So there you are," Strether
proceeded as if not for little Bilham's benefit alone.
"I understand what a relation with such a woman —
what such a high fine friendship — may be. It can't
be vulgar or coarse, anyway — and that 's the point."

"Yes, that's the point," said little Bilham. "It
can't be vulgar or coarse. And, bless us and save us,

280

BOOK SIXTH

it is rit ! It 's, upon my word, the very finest thing
I ever saw in my life, and the most distinguished."

Strether, from beside him and leaning back with
him as he leaned, dropped on him a momentary look
which filled a short interval and of which he took no
notice. He only gazed before him with intent parti
cipation. "Of course what it has done for him,"
Strether at all events presently pursued, "of course
what it has done for him — that is as to how it has
so wonderfully worked — is n't a thing I pretend
to understand. I've to take it as I find it. There
he is."

"There he is!" little Bilham echoed. "And it's
really and truly she. I don't understand either, even
with my longer and closer opportunity. But I 'm like
you," he added; "I can admire and rejoice even when
I 'm a little in the dark. You see I Ve watched it for
some three years, and especially for this last. He
was n't so bad before it as I seem to have made out
that you think — "

"Oh I don't think anything now!" Strether impa
tiently broke in : " that is but what I do think ! I mean
that originally, for her to have cared for him — "

" There must have been stuff in him ? Oh yes, there
was stuff indeed, and much more of it than ever
showed, I dare say, at home. Still, you know," the
young man in all fairness developed, " there was room
for her, and that's where she came in. She saw her
chance and took it. That 's what strikes me as having
been so fine. But of course," he wound up, " he liked
her first."

"Naturally," said Strether.
281

THE AMBASSADORS

"I mean that they first met somehow and some
where — I believe in some American house — and
she, without in the least then intending it, made her
impression. Then with time and opportunity he made
his; and after that she was as bad as he."

Strether vaguely took it up. "As 'bad'?"

"She began, that is, to care — to care very much.
Alone, and in her horrid position, she found it, when
once she had started, an interest. It was, it is, an in
terest ; and it did — it continues to do — a lot for her
self as well. So she still cares. She cares in fact," said
little Bilham thoughtfully, "more."

Strether's theory that it was none of his business
was somehow not damaged by the way he took this.
" More, you mean, than he ? " On which his com
panion looked round at him, and now for an instant
their eyes met. "More than he?" he repeated.

Little Bilham, for as long, hung fire. "Will you
never tell any one ? "

Strether thought. "Whom should I tell ?"

"Why I supposed you reported regularly — "

"To people at home?" — Strether took him up.
"Well, I won't tell them this."

The young man at last looked away. "Then she
does now care more than he."

" Oh ! " Strether oddly exclaimed.

But his companion immediately met it. "Have n't
you after all had your impression of it ? That 's how
you Ve got hold of him."

"Ah but I have n't got hold of him!"

"Oh I say!" But it was all little Bilham said.

"It's at any rate none of my business. I mean,"
282

BOOK SIXTH

Strether explained, "nothing else than getting hold of
him is." It appeared, however, to strike him as his
business to add : "The fact remains nevertheless that
she has saved him."

Little Bilham just waited. "I thought that was
what you were to do."

But Strether had his answer ready. "I'm speaking
— in connexion with her — of his manners and mor
als, his character and life. I'm speaking of him as
a person to deal with and talk with and live with —
speaking of him as a social animal."

"And is n't it as a social animal that you also want
him?"

" Certainly ; so that it 's as if she had saved him for
us."

"It strikes you accordingly then," the young man
threw out, "as for you all to save her?"

"Oh for us 'all' — !" Strether could but laugh at
that. It brought him back, however, to the point he
had really wished to make. "They've accepted their
situation — hard as it is. They 're not free — at least
she's not; but they take what's left to them. It's a
friendship, of a beautiful sort; and that's what makes
them so strong. They 're straight, they feel ; and they
keep each other up. It's doubtless she, however,
who, as you yourself have hinted, feels it most."

Little Bilham appeared to wonder what he had
hinted. "Feels most that they're straight?"

"Well, feels that she is, and the strength that comes
from it. She keeps him up — she keeps the whole
thing up. When people are able to it's fine. She's
wonderful, wonderful, as Miss Barrace says; and he

283

THE AMBASSADORS

is, in his way, too ; however, as a mere man, he may
sometimes rebel and not feel that he finds his account
in it. She has simply given him an immense moral
lift, and what that can explain is prodigious. That 's
why I speak of it as a situation. It is one, if there
ever was." And Strether, with his head back and
his eyes on the ceiling, seemed to lose himself .n the
vision of it.

His companion attended deeply. "You state it
much better than I could."

"Oh you see it does n't concern you."

Little Bilham considered. " I thought you said just
now that it does n't concern you either."

"Well, it does n't a bit as Madame de Vionnet's af
fair. But as we were again saying just now, what did
I come out for but to save him ? "

"Yes — to remove him."

"To save him by removal; to win him over to him
self thinking it best he shall take up business — think
ing he must immediately do therefore what's neces
sary to that end."

"Well," said little Bilham after a moment, "you
have won him over. He does think it best. He has
within a day or two again said to me as much."

"And that," Strether asked, "is why you consider
that he cares less than she ? "

" Cares less for her than she for him ? Yes, that 's
one of the reasons. But other things too have given
me the impression. A man, don't you think ? " little
Bilham presently pursued, "cant,, in such conditions,
care so much as a woman. It takes different condi
tions to make him, and then perhaps he cares more.

284

BOOK SIXTH

Chad," Rewound up, "has his possible future before
him."

"Are you speaking of his business future?"

"No — on the contrary; of the other, the future of
what you so justly call their situation. M. de Vionnet
may live for ever."

"Ss3 that they can't marry?"

The young man waited a moment. "Not being able
to marry is all they've with any confidence to look
forward to. A woman — a particular woman — may
stand that strain. But can a man ?" he propounded.

Strether's answer was as prompt as if he had al
ready, for himself, worked it out. "Not without a
very high ideal of conduct. But that 's j ust what we 're
attributing to Chad. And how, for that matter," he
mused, " does his going to America diminish the par
ticular strain ? Would n't it seem rather to add to it ? "

"Out of sight out of mind!" his companion
laughed. Then more bravely: "Wouldn't distance
lessen the torment ? " But before Strether could reply,
"The thing is, you see, Chad ought to marry!" he
wound up.

Strether, for a little, appeared to think of it. " If
you talk of torments you don't diminish mine ! " he
then broke out. The next moment he was on his feet
with a question. "He ought to marry whom ?"

Little Bilham rose more slowly. "Well, some one
he can — some thoroughly nice girl."

Strether's eyes, as they stood together, turned again
to Jeanne. "Do you mean her? "

His friend made a sudden strange face. "After
being in love with her mother ? No."

285

THE AMBASSADORS

" But is n't it exactly your idea that he is rit in love
with her mother ? "

His friend once more had a pause. "Well, he is n't
at any rate in love with Jeanne."

"I dare say not."

" How can he be with any other woman ? "

"Oh that I admit. But being in love isn't, you
know, here " — little Bilham spoke in friendly reminder
— " thought necessary, in strictness, for marriage."

"And what torment — to call a torment — can
there ever possibly be with a woman like that ? " As
if from the interest of his own question Strether had
gone on without hearing. " Is it for her to have turned
a man out so wonderfully, too, only for somebody
else ? " He appeared to make a point of this, and little
Bilham looked at him now. " When it 's for each other
that people give things up they don't miss them."
Then he threw off as with an extravagance of which
he was conscious : " Let them face the future to
gether ! "

Little Bilham looked at him indeed. "You mean
that after all he should n't go back ? "

"I mean that if he gives her up — !"

"Yes?"

"Well, he ought to be ashamed of himself." But
Strether spoke with a sound that might have passed
for a laugh.

END OF VOLUME I

>^J Ir-vA-'^'.A-r-^

^ u^.,u toU A

-*•* A- I iSs-*^ T» ***• ' •

VM*~~~. <w^^tV

L , . -» .H?.)

•'T i

r,

.'_ c^-*-A_

•>JxC
^ n ^ r

WW Us..

*- v 73T

i^,.>(AxLA.^^.> .«• fc-0- "7-

UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY

AA 001 124942 2

.

~T

-
I c^Xi

•