The Ambassadors Henry James (novel24 txt) 📖

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 pocketbook, 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 doorpost 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