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The Ambassadors

by Henry James · English · Gutenberg #432 · 924,544 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Ambassadors

Author: Henry James


        
Release date: February 1, 1996 [eBook #432]
                Most recently updated: September 17, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/432

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cover




The Ambassadors

by Henry James


 New York Edition (1909) 




Contents

 Volume I

 Preface
 Book First
 Book Second
 Book Third
 Book Fourth
 Book Fifth
 Book Sixth

 Volume II

 Book Seventh
 Book Eighth
 Book Ninth
 Book Tenth
 Book Book Eleventh
 Book Twelfth




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 composition 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 unprecedented 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 desire. 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 doesn’t so much matter what you do in
particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’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
illusion 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 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 conditions 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 purpose—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 support, 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 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 Ambassadors,” 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 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 betrayed, 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 wouldn’t have wrecked him. It was
immeasurable, the opportunity to “do” a man of imagination, for if
_there_ mightn’t be a chance to “bite,” where in the world might it be?
This personage of course, so enriched, wouldn’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 convenient. 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 comparative 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 gentleman’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 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
definite, 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 respectable 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 questions that the
“story,” with the omens true, as I say, puts on from this stage the
authenticity of concrete existence. It then is, 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 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 affair—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 snippet, having ended, we assume, with a
capture. The subject 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 hasn’t _his_ 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; wherefore 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 attempt
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
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 outbreak, 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 _galère?_ 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 wouldn’t have indulged 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 hadn’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 probabilities, 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 matter, one had really but to
keep under the lens for an hour to see it give up its secrets. He would
have issued, our rueful 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 “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 promising quantity—by the view that he had
come to Paris in some state of mind which was literally undergoing, as
a result 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 violent, 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
nothing 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,
obviously, 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 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, functional
assurance—an air quite as of readiness to have dispensed 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 itself 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—belated 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 prepared, wherever
presenting himself, only to judge and to feel meanly; but _he_ 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 discrimination, 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 _does_ break down in
Paris; that nothing is more frequently observed; that hundreds of
thousands of more or less hypocritical 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 give me pause no longer, I think, simply because its vulgarity is
so advertised. The revolution performed by Strether under the influence
of the most interesting of great cities was to have nothing to do with
any _bêtise_ 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 represented 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 wonderful dance.

“The Ambassadors” had been, all conveniently, “arranged 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 ingenuity that might reside in one’s actively
adopting—so as to 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 coherency not to fail of, his
or her relation to my leading motive, 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 isn’t, on the other hand, a virtue
eminently subject 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 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 without 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 coming 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 altogether, 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 compositional 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 blossoms 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, becoming the question at
issue and keeping the author’s heart in his mouth. Such an element, for
instance, as his intention 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 exhibition, 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 the comparative dimness of the
particular success. Cherished 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 degree; the
fineness of the measures taken—a real extension, if successful, of the
very terms and possibilities of representation 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 particular form
of interest! One’s work should have composition, 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 particular 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 “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 long
piece, is a form foredoomed to looseness and that 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 mission 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 substitute for
“telling,” I must address myself tooth and nail to another. I couldn’t,
save by implication, make other persons tell _each other_ about
him—blest resource, blest necessity, 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 shouldn’t make a single mouthful of “method,” shouldn’t
throw the reins on his neck and, letting them flap there as free as in
“Gil Blas” 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 questions 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 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 Ambassadors” encages and provides, has to keep in
view proprieties 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 remotely 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 and of the book. She is an
enrolled, a direct, aid to lucidity; she is in fine, to tear off her
mask, the most unmitigated 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 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
everything 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 recogniseably, 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 Strether’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 “action”; to
say nothing of our beginning to descry others, of a remoter intensity,
getting into motion, even if a bit 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, comprehensive, 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 artfully
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, something 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
“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 operative is
positively to find a charm in any produced ambiguity of appearance that
is not by the same stroke, and all helplessly, an ambiguity of sense.
To project imaginatively, 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
attaching proposition; even though it all remains but part and parcel,
I hasten to recognise, of the merely general and related 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 observation as this
last on the whole delightful head, where representation 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 reconsidered production always seems to
bristle with that particular 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 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 decency 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 diminished and compromised—despoiled, that is, of its
_proportional_ 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 consistencies. 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 untried, 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 afternoon, 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 wouldn’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


 I

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 Waymarsh’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 shouldn’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 separation, into his comrade’s face, his business would
be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to
present itself to the nearing steamer as the first “note,” of Europe.
Mixed with everything was the apprehension, 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 previous afternoon, thanks to
this happier device—such a consciousness of personal freedom as he
hadn’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 Liverpool; but he had stolen away from every one alike, had
kept no appointment and renewed no acquaintance, had been indifferently
aware of the number of persons who esteemed themselves fortunate in
being, unlike himself, “met,” and had even independently, 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 look particularly eager; but he was like
a man who, elatedly finding 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 duration 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 pronounced, 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 before, 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 actually 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 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. Waymarsh 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 doesn’t come till later, and I’m relieved not to have kept him. Do
you know him?” Strether wound up.

It wasn’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 pursued; “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 the Munsters; the Munsters being the people he had seen
her with at Liverpool.

But he didn’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
connexion had rather removed than placed a dish, and there seemed
nothing else to serve. Their attitude remained, 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 companion 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 acquaintance 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 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 consciousness 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 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 further, 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 impression of
her as: “Well, she’s more thoroughly civilized—!” 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.

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 couldn’t
have been known to him how much a spectator looking from one to the
other might have discerned that they had in common. It wouldn’t for
such a spectator 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 disproportionate 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, the
mistress of a hundred cases or categories, receptacles 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 didn’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 hadn’t yet told her and perhaps never would. He wasn’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 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.
Hadn’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.
“Isn’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 exchange 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 which he hadn’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 produced 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 hadn’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 hadn’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 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 deviation in one of those directions he couldn’t
yet measure, 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 observed,
“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 hadn’t described
Woollett Massachusetts. “You say that,” she returned, “as if you wanted
one immediately to know the worst.”

“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 yourself 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 happens, to say I’ve not been
straight with you.”

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

Though he wasn’t shy—which was rather anomalous—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
occasion 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 regret 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 between 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 down, queer
twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows
of gables, views of cathedral 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 walks 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 of Woollett. _That’s_
general.”

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

“Precisely. Woollett isn’t sure it ought to enjoy. If it were it would.
But it hasn’t, poor thing,” 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 commanded by their station, the high
red-brown mass, square and subordinately spired and crocketed,
retouched 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
justified 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 shouldn’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 shouldn’t mind
if I didn’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 extraordinary has ever
happened to me.”

She watched him with all her kindness. “That 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-humoured headshake, a
resignation of any such claim, she had a moment of explanation. “If
you’ll only come on further as you _have_ come you’ll 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 believe 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 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 something 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 something else than _you_.”

She listened with charming earnestness. “Oh you oughtn’t to do that!”

“It’s what I admit. Make it then impossible.”

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 wasn’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 matter, 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 sufficiently 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 interested, 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
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. Waymarsh was
for _his_ 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 particularly struck him that they were to be marked
altogether 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
acquaintances to profit by her.

There had been after the first interchange among 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 chamber 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 assumption 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 indeed 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 betake himself to doubtful rest. Dinner and
the subsequent stroll by moonlight—a dream, on Strether’s part, of
romantic effects rather prosaically merged in a mere missing of thicker
coats—had measurably intervened, and this midnight conference was the
result of Waymarsh’s having (when they were free, as he put it, of
their fashionable friend) found the smoking-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
preliminary, in getting prodigiously tired. If the effort directed to
this end involved till a late hour the presence 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
glimpse of him disconcerted in the porch of the hotel, but the
predominant notes. 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 constitute 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 selected 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 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 hadn’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 rectifications in a multiform failure. He had a large
handsome head and a large sallow seamed face—a striking significant
physiognomic total, the upper range of which, the great political brow,
the thick loose hair, the dark fuliginous eyes, recalled even to a
generation 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
“Congressional 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 and he had bidden you enter. Strether, who
hadn’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 prolonged impermanence. It suggested
to his comrade something that always, when kept up, worried him—a
person established in a railway-coach with a forward 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
comparative 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, clustered and expectant,
like a somewhat defiant family-group, on the doorstep 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 wasn’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 difficulty 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 prostration, 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 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 Milrose. 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 justice to a man to
whom it has done such a lot of good to see _you_.”

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 isn’t as bad as I’ve seen
it: it compares favourably with what it was when I last noticed it.” On
this appearance 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.

“_I_ 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 anyway. 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 I’ve gained so little. I haven’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 Waymarsh’s sombre glow.
“_Have_ you come out on purpose?”

“Well—very largely.”

“I thought from the way you wrote there was something 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 mention?”

“No, not too private—for _you_. Only rather complicated.”

“Well,” said Waymarsh, who had waited again, “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 tonight.”

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 didn’t “gain” it was because he didn’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 enlarged 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 companion 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 generally felt, you know,
that she follows you up pretty close.”

Strether’s candour was never very far off. “Oh it has occurred to you
that I’m literally running away from Mrs. Newsome?”

“Well, I haven’t _known_ but what you are. You’re a very attractive
man, Strether. You’ve seen for yourself,” said Waymarsh “what that lady
downstairs 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 referred to?”

Strether took another turn about the room, giving a twitch to his
companion’s blanket and finally gaining 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’ll probably
find yourself 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?”

“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 afternoon, 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 shouldn’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.”

“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, _I_ won’t marry you!”

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


 III

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 understanding 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 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 concluded.

“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 you ‘meet’ them—since it
doesn’t appear to be to stop them?”

“Oh that they shouldn’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 Gostrey, “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 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 wasn’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
appetite 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 Megatherium. She had made him
breakfast like a gentleman, and it was nothing, she forcibly asserted,
to what she would yet make him do. She made him participate 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
ramparts 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 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 wouldn’t appeal
too much, for that provoked stiffness; yet he wouldn’t be too freely
tacit, for that suggested giving up. Waymarsh himself adhered 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
discernible, 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 attitude of retractation. Our friend couldn’t
show him the right things for fear of provoking some total
renouncement, 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 passages 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 influenced 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 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 shouldn’t
know what to do with. It was by the oddest, the least admissible of
laws demoralising 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 recurrently shameless in
the presence of the tailors, though it was just over the heads of the
tailors that his countryman 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 exchanged between this
latter pair about passers, figures, 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 symptom of
vulgar blinking an appointment for the Burlington Arcade. Mere
discriminations about a pair of gloves could thus at any rate
represent—always for such sensitive ears as were in
question—possibilities 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
interests 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 discrimination of types
and tones, exactly the wicked old Rows of Chester, rank with feudalism;
exactly in short Europe.

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 conveniently and conclusively lumping together. There
seemed moreover a direct connexion between some such inference and a
sudden grim dash taken by Waymarsh to the opposite side. This movement
was startlingly sudden, and his companions at first supposed 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 establishment of a
jeweller, behind whose glittering front he was lost to view. The fact
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?”

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 dreadful.”

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 paralysed. 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 isn’t magnificent”—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 _I_ take—and I above all intend to
take—with Mr. Waymarsh.”

Strether thought. “About _me?_ Ah that’s no equivalent. The equivalent
would be Waymarsh’s himself serving me up—his remorseless analysis of
me. And 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’ll 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
remorselessly 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 haven’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 didn’t, for he really didn’t know to what the truth on this
unpleasant point mightn’t have prompted her. She only, however,
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.”

“The superiority you discern in me,” she concurred, “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 doesn’t
alter the fact that you’re expensive. You’ve cost me already—!”

But he had hung fire. “Cost you what?”

“Well, my past—in one great lump. But no matter,” he laughed: “I’ll 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 hasn’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 particular.

“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 unexplained, 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 one of 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 didn’t want to be better than
Strether.




Book Second


 I

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 periodicity; but our friend had meanwhile to find names
for many other matters. On no evening of his life perhaps, 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 conscientious 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 happened to filter through his guide, strained now
to its limits his brief opportunity. Waymarsh hadn’t come with them; he
had seen plays enough, he signified, before 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 hadn’t. He liked the former to be
discriminated; but how could it be done, Strether asked of their
constant counsellor, without discriminating the latter?

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 himself _why_ there hadn’t.
There was much the same difference in his impression of the noticed
state of his companion, whose dress was “cut down,” as he believed 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 complacently 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 ramifications 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
perceptions. What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his
friend’s velvet band somehow added, in her 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 wouldn’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 unexpected—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 manner in which Miss Gostrey’s was. Mrs. Newsome
wore, at operatic hours, a black silk dress—very handsome, he knew it
was “handsome”—and an ornament 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 acceptance of the idea, the form of this special tribute to the
“frill” had grown slightly more marked. The connexion, 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 existed at any rate;
for it seemed now to come over him 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 instance 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 public 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
achievement of privacy might have affected a man of a different
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 hint 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
hadn’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 himself—gave it simply by saying with
off-hand illumination: “Oh yes, they’re types!”—but after he had taken
it he made to the full his own use of it; both 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 interchangeable with
those on the stage.

He felt as if the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow of
his neighbour, a great stripped handsome 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 hadn’t more sense; and he recognised by the same law, beyond the
footlights, what he was pleased to take for the very flush of English
life. He had distracted drops in which he couldn’t have said if it were
actors or auditors who were most true, and the upshot of which, each
time, was the consciousness 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 individual 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
precisely there was a bad woman in a yellow frock who made a pleasant
weak good-looking young man in perpetual evening dress do the most
dreadful things. Strether felt himself on the whole not afraid of the
yellow frock, but he was vaguely anxious over a certain kindness into
which he found himself drifting for its victim. He hadn’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 perpetual 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 probable 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. Wouldn’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, as you see, in possession of them: so it will be awfully
interesting to have them from you. If you’re satisfied, 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 _he_—?”

“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 controlled 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. “And has he only _her?_ I don’t mean
the bad woman in Paris,” she quickly added—“for I assure you I
shouldn’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 married; 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
handsome, 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 wasn’t thinking
of her appearance,” he explained—“striking 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?”

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 particular 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 nothing left for anything
else? Of course she hasn’t. 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, “hasn’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
Gostrey 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
isn’t too much for _me_—!”

“Her condition doesn’t matter? Surely not; we leave her condition out;
we take it, that is, for granted. 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?”

“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 himself the picture
of the stage was now overlaid with another image. His postponements,
however, made her wonder—wonder if the article referred to were
anything bad. And she explained that she meant improper 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.”

“Oh then,” laughed Strether, “I _don’t_ really want to know!”

It made between them a pause, which she, however, 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 persuaded 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 occurred
that by the law, within her, of the incalculable, her desire for the
information dropped and her attitude 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
enormously 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 allowance
his mother has hitherto made him. She has of course the resource of
cutting this allowance off; but even then he has unfortunately, and on
no small scale, his independent supply—money left him by his
grandfather, her own father.”

“Wouldn’t the fact you mention then,” Miss Gostrey asked, “make it just
more easy for him to be particular? Isn’t he conceivable as fastidious
about the source—the apparent and public source—of his income?”

Strether was able quite good-humouredly to entertain 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 swindler?”

“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
doesn’t come home? He’s drowning his shame.”

“His shame? What shame?”

“What shame? Comment donc? _The_ shame.”

“But where and when,” Strether asked, “is ‘_the_ shame’—where is any
shame—to-day? The men I speak of—they did as every one does; and
(besides being ancient history) it was all a matter of appreciation.”

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 understand you, profiting by
them, she at least has remained 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 beneficence—”

“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. She _is_, 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 doesn’t Mrs.
Newsome look after it?”

“So far as possible. She’s wonderfully able, but it’s not her affair,
and her life’s a good deal overcharged. 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.”

“Oh yes, she’s rather a swell!”

“A Woollett swell—_bon!_ 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 needn’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 presentable 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 immediately 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 embroidered, she abounded. “I don’t say it to interfere between
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.

“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’ll 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 be loved?”

“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. “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 moment by the passage between
their knees and the back 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 wasn’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 occasion 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 shouldn’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.”

“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 explained, “is the possible particular effect
on him of his _milieu_.”

“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 doesn’t write.”

“I see. But there are all the same,” she went on, “two quite distinct
things that—given the wonderful 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.”

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, sufficiently to go straight on. “You say that if he does break
he’ll 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
developed 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 making 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 doesn’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.”

“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 voilà!”—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 relation. 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—didn’t I mention
it?—to Jim Pocock.”

“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 duplicity!” 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 _don’t_ 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 several ways of
taking; but he decided after an instant for the humorous. “Haven’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 hadn’t understood her. “_You’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.”

“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, wouldn’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?”

“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 couldn’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; hadn’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 himself what he should do if he hadn’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 wouldn’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 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 Café 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 discussion with his friend,
had made a marked virtue of his having now let himself go; and there
had been elements of impression in their half-hour over their watered
beer-glasses that gave him his occasion for conveying 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 l’Opéra, as to the character of their
nocturnal progress.

This morning there _were_ letters—letters which had reached London,
apparently all together, the day of Strether’s journey, and had taken
their time to follow him; so that, after a controlled impulse to go
into them in the reception-room of the bank, which, reminding 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
overcoat 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 yesterday; 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. Europe
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 recognise 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
remembered the palace; and when he gazed into the irremediable 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-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” together, 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 hadn’t done yet the form of a
question—the question 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 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 distance 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 likeness—poor Lambert
Strether washed up on the sunny strand by the waves of a single day,
poor Lambert Strether thankful for breathing-time and stiffening
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 coming 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
situation 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 fortnight before one of the weariest of men. If ever
a man had come off tired Lambert Strether was that man; and hadn’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 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
didn’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 luxuriously 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
marking 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 real youth, which held against its breast the two
presences 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 remorse 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 occasion to be yet; which came to saying that
this acceptance of fate was all he had to show at fifty-five.

He judged the quantity as small because it _was_ small, and all the
more egregiously since it couldn’t, as he saw the case, so much as
thinkably have been larger. He hadn’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 experiments 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 before was
the recognition—frequent enough to surprise 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 necessities, 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 believed, sailing home again, that
he had gained something great, and his theory—with an elaborate
innocent 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 galleries, 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 hadn’t been only to _be_ kept. Kept for
something, in that event, that he didn’t pretend, didn’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—selected 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 somewhere at home, the dozen—stale and soiled and 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 structure he
had practically never carried further. Strether’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
moments, 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 retrospect,
vague and comprehensive, stretching back like some unmapped Hinterland
from a rough coast-settlement. 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 didn’t
yet call on Chad he wouldn’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 confession 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_ view, pre-eminently pleasant to touch,
they formed the specious shell. Without therefore any needed
instinctive 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 couldn’t otherwise at present be feeling so many
fears confirmed. There were “movements” he was too late for: weren’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 wasn’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
peculiar 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 pattern of propriety. He clearly hadn’t come out in the name
of propriety but to visit unattended equivocal performances; yet still
less had he done so to undermine 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 renouncement 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? Wasn’t
some such pretence on the other hand involved in the assumption of
possible 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 differences 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 already a certain measure
had been reached. It will have been sufficiently seen that he was not a
man to 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 hadn’t promised Mrs. Newsome not to like it at all. He
was ready to recognise at this stage that such an engagement _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 imaginations 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 begun. He was now quite out of it, with his “home,” as
Strether figured the place, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, now; 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 perturbation. 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 envious vision of the boy’s romantic privilege. Melancholy
Mürger, with Francine and Musette and Rodolphe, at home, was, in the
company of the tattered, one—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 already
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 confusedly
learned at Woollett, across the bridges and up the Montagne
Sainte-Geneviève. 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 countrymen 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 Opéra. 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 he didn’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 blessing 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-Geneviève—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 refreshment of these vain
appearances had not accordingly 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 Strether’s belief that he had been
comparatively innocent before this first migration, and even that the
first effects 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 principle in him was that almost any
accident attestedly bad enough was stronger. Such had at any rate
markedly been the case for the precipitation of a special series of
impressions. They had proved, successively, these impressions—all of
Musette and Francine, 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 shrinkingly gathered, as it was scantly
mentioned, with one ferociously “interested” little person after
another. Strether had read somewhere of a Latin motto, a description of
the hours, observed on a clock by a traveller 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 hadn’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 immediate 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 Odéon, he lingered before the
charming open-air array of literature classic 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 cafés that overlapped, under an awning, to the pavement;
but he edged along, grazing the tables, with his hands firmly behind
him. He wasn’t there to dip, to consume—he was there to reconstruct. He
wasn’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 beside 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 vision, 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 enjoyment by the third-floor windows of a continuous balcony, 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
wasn’t to be surprised should he see him some day turn up. Chad had
thereupon, 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 invitation, 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 distinct 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,
æsthetic, had never refused to human commerce that mitigation of
rigour; 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 whatever cost to her more strenuous view, conformed, in the
matter of preparing Chad, wholly to his restrictions, 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 didn’t somehow show as a convenience
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 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? Meanwhile, 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 keeping 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 acknowledgement of his being himself in observation.

This was interesting so far as it went, but the interest 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 presence, 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 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 had given the next
instant an extraordinary quick lift to the issue. The balcony, the
distinguished front, testified 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 fireside; she had told him of it, and it was
something that doubtless awaited him; but Miss Gostrey hadn’t yet
arrived—she mightn’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 somehow as
all indoor chill, glass-roofed court and slippery staircase, and which,
by the same token, expressed 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 Waymarsh, and Waymarsh alone, Waymarsh not
only undiluted but positively strengthened, struck him as the present
alternative to the young man in the balcony. When he did move it was
fairly to escape that alternative. Taking his way over the street at
last and passing through the _porte-cochère_ of the house was like
consciously leaving Waymarsh out. However, he would tell him all about
it.




Book Third


 I

Strether told Waymarsh all about it that very evening, on their dining
together at the hotel; which needn’t have happened, he was all the
while aware, hadn’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 another 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 hadn’t yet got quite used to being so unprepared
for the consequences of the impression he produced. It was
comparatively easy to explain, however, that he hadn’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 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 hadn’t rather chilled the
impulse; so that all he could do was—by way of doing something—to say
“Merci, François!” 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-à-manger was sallow and sociable;
François, dancing over it, all smiles, was a man and a brother; the
high-shouldered patronne, with her high-held, much-rubbed hands, seemed
always 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 innocently 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 Waymarsh would only take it properly—agreed to
breakfast out, at twelve literally, the next day. He didn’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 knew himself tempted by this perversity. If Waymarsh 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 Malesherbes—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 mentioned to him that a friend of the tenant of the
troisième was for the time in possession; and this had been Strether’s
pretext for a further enquiry, an experiment 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, perfectly 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 surprised to find it at this point abreast
with him. “Do you mean a smell? What of?”

“A charming scent. But I don’t know.”

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 Léoville, another wipe of his moustache and
another good word for François, 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 amplitude 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 anything 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 anything?” 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 déjeuner.”

“And are you _going_ to that unholy meal?”

“If you’ll 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 number
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?”

“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 impatiently 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 himself, 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 people—? 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 causing 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 valuable 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.”

“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, “Doesn’t he know what _she_ is?” he went on.

“_I_ don’t know. I didn’t ask him. I couldn’t. It was impossible. You
wouldn’t either. Besides I didn’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—without 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 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. Newsome?”

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.”

“_I_ haven’t laid them down,” Strether promptly returned. “Mr.
Newsome—who knew extraordinarily well what he was about—laid them down
ten years ago.”

Oh well, Waymarsh seemed to indicate with a shake of his mane, _that_
didn’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 demanded “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 nowhere.”

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 awfully,” 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 injustice. You really _must_ know her.
Good-night.”

He breakfasted with Mr. Bilham on the morrow, and, as inconsequently
befell, with Waymarsh massively 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 hadn’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 Waymarsh 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 hadn’t his view 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 person, a person who had
much to do with our friend’s asking himself if the occasion weren’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, mature 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
couldn’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 more subtly than he had been prepared for, and
since in especial Miss Barrace, surrounded clearly by every
consideration, hadn’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 didn’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 the Tuileries or
some other court. I haven’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’ll have a _succès fou_.”
Strether hadn’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 poor Waymarsh’s judgement of it. He was in the trap still more
than his companion and, unlike his companion, not making the best of
it; which was precisely what doubtless gave him his admirab

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