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

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

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

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

But in spite of all he had put the flag at the window. This was what he had done, and there was a minute during which he affected himself as having shaken it hard, flapped it with a mighty flutter, straight in front of his companion’s nose. It gave him really almost the sense of having already acted his part. The momentary relief⁠—as if from the knowledge that nothing of that at least could be undone⁠—sprang from a particular cause, the cause that had flashed into operation, in Miss Gostrey’s box, with direct apprehension, with amazed recognition, and that had been concerned since then in every throb of his consciousness. What it came to was that with an absolutely new quantity to deal with one simply couldn’t know. The new quantity was represented by the fact that Chad had been made over. That was all; whatever it was it was everything. Strether had never seen the thing so done before⁠—it was perhaps a speciality of Paris. If one had been present at the process one might little by little have mastered the result; but he was face to face, as matters stood, with the finished business. It had freely been noted for him that he might be received as a dog among skittles, but that was on the basis of the old quantity. He had originally thought of lines and tones as things to be taken, but these possibilities had now quite melted away. There was no computing at all what the young man before him would think or feel or say on any subject whatever. This intelligence Strether had afterwards, to account for his nervousness, reconstituted as he might, just as he had also reconstituted the promptness with which Chad had corrected his uncertainty. An extraordinarily short time had been required for the correction, and there had ceased to be anything negative in his companion’s face and air as soon as it was made. “Your engagement to my mother has become then what they call here a fait accompli?”⁠—it had consisted, the determinant touch, in nothing more than that.

Well, that was enough, Strether had felt while his answer hung fire. He had felt at the same time, however, that nothing could less become him than that it should hang fire too long. “Yes,” he said brightly, “it was on the happy settlement of the question that I started. You see therefore to what tune I’m in your family. Moreover,” he added, “I’ve been supposing you’d suppose it.”

“Oh I’ve been supposing it for a long time, and what you tell me helps me to understand that you should want to do something. To do something, I mean,” said Chad, “to commemorate an event so⁠—what do they call it?⁠—so auspicious. I see you make out, and not unnaturally,” he continued, “that bringing me home in triumph