The Ambassadors by Henry James (read people like a book .TXT) 📕

He paused again, but he brought it out. “Hasn’t she met Chad?”

“Certainly⁠—but not for the first time. He’s an old friend.” At which Strether had a slow amused significant headshake that made her go on: “You mean that for her at least he’s a new person⁠—that she sees him as different?”

“She sees him as different.”

“And how does she see him?”

Strether gave it up. “How can one tell how a deep little girl sees a deep young man?”

“Is everyone so deep? Is she too?”

“So it strikes me deeper than I thought. But wait a little⁠—between us we’ll make it out. You’ll judge for that matter yourself.”

Madame de Vionnet looked for the moment fairly bent on the chance. “Then she will come with her?⁠—I mean Mamie with Mrs. Pocock?”

“Certainly. Her curiosity, if nothing else, will in any case work that. But leave it all to Chad.”

“Ah,” wailed Madame de Vionnet, turning away a little wearily, “the things I leave to Chad!”

The tone of it made him look at her with a kindness that showed his vision of her suspense. But he fell back on his confidence. “Oh well⁠—trust him. Trust him all the way.” He had indeed no sooner so spoken than the queer displacement of his point of view appeared again to come up for him in the very sound, which drew from him a short laugh, immediately checked. He became still more advisory. “When they do come give them plenty of Miss Jeanne. Let Mamie see her well.”

She looked for a moment as if she placed them face to face. “For Mamie to hate her?”

He had another of his corrective headshakes. “Mamie won’t. Trust them.”

She looked at him hard, and then as if it were what she must always come back to: “It’s you I trust. But I was sincere,” she said, “at the hotel. I did, I do, want my child⁠—”

“Well?”⁠—Strether waited with deference while she appeared to hesitate as to how to put it.

“Well, to do what she can for me.”

Strether for a little met her eyes on it; after which something that might have been unexpected to her came from him. “Poor little duck!”

Not more expected for himself indeed might well have been her echo of it. “Poor little duck! But she immensely wants herself,” she said, “to see our friend’s cousin.”

“Is that what she thinks her?”

“It’s what we call the young lady.”

He thought again; then with a laugh: “Well, your daughter will help you.”

And now at last he took leave of her, as he had been intending for five minutes. But she went part of the way with him, accompanying him out of the room and into the next and the next. Her noble old apartment offered a succession of three, the first two of which indeed, on entering, smaller than the last, but each with its faded and formal air, enlarged the office of the antechamber and enriched the sense of approach. Strether fancied them, liked them, and, passing through them with her more slowly now, met a sharp renewal of his original impression. He stopped, he looked back; the whole thing made a vista, which he found high melancholy and sweet⁠—full, once more, of dim historic shades, of the faint faraway cannon-roar of the great Empire. It was doubtless half the projection of his mind, but his mind was a thing that, among old waxed parquets, pale shades of pink and green, pseudo-classic candelabra, he had always needfully to reckon with. They could easily make him irrelevant. The oddity, the originality, the poetry⁠—he didn’t know what to call it⁠—of Chad’s connection reaffirmed for him its romantic side. “They ought to see this, you know. They must.”

“The Pococks?”⁠—she looked about in deprecation; she seemed to see gaps he didn’t.

“Mamie and Sarah⁠—Mamie in particular.”

“My shabby old place? But their things⁠—!”

“Oh their things! You were talking of what will do something for you⁠—”

“So that it strikes you,” she broke in, “that my poor place may? Oh,” she ruefully mused, “that would be desperate!”

“Do you know what I wish?” he went on. “I wish Mrs. Newsome herself could have a look.”

She stared, missing a little his logic. “It would make a difference?”

Her tone was so earnest that as he continued to look about he laughed. “It might!”

“But you’ve told her, you tell me⁠—”

“All about you? Yes, a wonderful story. But there’s all the indescribable⁠—what one gets only on the spot.”

“Thank you!” she charmingly and sadly smiled.

“It’s all about me here,” he freely continued. “Mrs. Newsome feels things.”

But she seemed doomed always to come back to doubt. “No one feels so much as you. No⁠—not anyone.”

“So much the worse then for everyone. It’s very easy.”

They were by this time in the antechamber, still alone together, as she hadn’t rung for a servant. The antechamber was high and square, grave and suggestive too, a little cold and slippery even in summer, and with a few old prints that were precious, Strether divined, on the walls. He stood in the middle, slightly lingering, vaguely directing his glasses, while, leaning against the doorpost of the room, she gently pressed her cheek to the side of the recess. “You would have been a friend.”

“I?”⁠—it startled him a little.

“For the reason you say. You’re not stupid.” And then abruptly, as if bringing it out were somehow founded on that fact: “We’re marrying Jeanne.”

It affected him on the spot as a move in a game, and he was even then not without the sense that that wasn’t the way Jeanne should be married. But he quickly showed his interest, though⁠—as quickly afterwards struck him⁠—with an absurd confusion of mind. “ ‘You’? You and⁠—a⁠—not Chad?” Of course it was the child’s father who made the ‘we,’ but to the child’s father it would have cost him an effort to allude. Yet didn’t it seem the next minute that Monsieur de Vionnet was after all not in question?⁠—since she had gone on to say that it was indeed to Chad she referred and that