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 9 1 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 t THE 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