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

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 everyone and of everything?

“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, everyone and everything 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 tortoiseshell 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 tortoiseshell 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 admirable sombre glow. Little did Miss Barrace know that what was behind it was his grave estimate of her own laxity. The general assumption with which our two friends had arrived had been that of finding Mr. Bilham ready to conduct them to one or other of those resorts of the earnest, the aesthetic fraternity which were shown among the sights of Paris. In this character it would have justified them in a proper