The Ambassadors Henry James (novel24 txt) đ
- Author: Henry James
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His companion brooded. âBut wonât he wish for his own satisfaction to make his ground good to her?â
âNoâ âheâll leave it to me, heâll leave everything to me. I âsort ofâ feelââ âhe worked it outâ ââthat the whole thing will come upon me. Yes, I shall have every inch and every ounce of it. I shall be used for itâ â!â And Strether lost himself in the prospect. Then he fancifully expressed the issue. âTo the last drop of my blood.â
Maria, however, roundly protested. âAh youâll please keep a drop for me. I shall have a use for it!ââ âwhich she didnât however follow up. She had come back the next moment to another matter. âMrs. Pocock, with her brother, is trusting only to her general charm?â
âSo it would seem.â
âAnd the charmâs not working?â
Well, Strether put it otherwise, âSheâs sounding the note of homeâ âwhich is the very best thing she can do.â
âThe best for Madame de Vionnet?â
âThe best for home itself. The natural one; the right one.â
âRight,â Maria asked, âwhen it fails?â
Strether had a pause. âThe difficultyâs Jim. Jimâs the note of home.â
She debated. âAh surely not the note of Mrs. Newsome.â
But he had it all. âThe note of the home for which Mrs. Newsome wants himâ âthe home of the business. Jim stands, with his little legs apart, at the door of that tent; and Jim is, frankly speaking, extremely awful.â
Maria stared. âAnd you in, you poor thing, for your evening with him?â
âOh heâs all right for me!â Strether laughed. âAnyoneâs good enough for me. But Sarah shouldnât, all the same, have brought him. She doesnât appreciate him.â
His friend was amused with this statement of it. âDoesnât know, you mean, how bad he is?â
Strether shook his head with decision. âNot really.â
She wondered. âThen doesnât Mrs. Newsome?â
It made him frankly do the same. âWell, noâ âsince you ask me.â
Maria rubbed it in. âNot really either?â
âNot at all. She rates him rather high.â With which indeed, immediately, he took himself up. âWell, he is good too, in his way. It depends on what you want him for.â
Miss Gostrey, however, wouldnât let it depend on anythingâ âwouldnât have it, and wouldnât want him, at any price. âIt suits my book,â she said, âthat he should be impossible; and it suits it still better,â she more imaginatively added, âthat Mrs. Newsome doesnât know he is.â
Strether, in consequence, had to take it from her, but he fell back on something else. âIâll tell you who does really know.â
âMr. Waymarsh? Never!â
âNever indeed. Iâm not always thinking of Mr. Waymarsh; in fact I find now I never am.â Then he mentioned the person as if there were a good deal in it. âMamie.â
âHis own sister?â Oddly enough it but let her down. âWhat good will that do?â
âNone perhaps. But thereâ âas usualâ âwe are!â
IIIThere they were yet again, accordingly, for two days more; when Strether, on being, at Mrs. Pocockâs hotel, ushered into that ladyâs salon, found himself at first assuming a mistake on the part of the servant who had introduced him and retired. The occupants hadnât come in, for the room looked empty as only a room can look in Paris, of a fine afternoon when the faint murmur of the huge collective life, carried on out of doors, strays among scattered objects even as a summer air idles in a lonely garden. Our friend looked about and hesitated; observed, on the evidence of a table charged with purchases and other matters, that Sarah had become possessedâ âby no aid from himâ âof the last number of the salmon-coloured Revue; noted further that Mamie appeared to have received a present of Fromentinâs MaĂźtres dâAutrefois from Chad, who had written her name on the cover; and pulled up at the sight of a heavy letter addressed in a hand he knew. This letter, forwarded by a banker and arriving in Mrs. Pocockâs absence, had been placed in evidence, and it drew from the fact of its being unopened a sudden queer power to intensify the reach of its author. It brought home to him the scale on which Mrs. Newsomeâ âfor she had been copious indeed this timeâ âwas writing to her daughter while she kept him in durance; and it had altogether such an effect upon him as made him for a few minutes stand still and breathe low. In his own room, at his own hotel, he had dozens of well-filled envelopes superscribed in that character; and there was actually something in the renewal of his interrupted vision of the character that played straight into the so frequent question of whether he werenât already disinherited beyond appeal. It was such an assurance as the sharp downstrokes of her pen hadnât yet had occasion to give him; but they somehow at the present crisis stood for a probable absoluteness in any decree of the writer. He looked at Sarahâs name and address, in short, as if he had been looking hard into her motherâs face, and then turned from it as if the face had declined to relax. But since it was in a manner as if Mrs. Newsome were thereby all the more, instead of the less, in the room, and were conscious, sharply and sorely conscious, of himself, so he felt both held and hushed, summoned to stay at least and take his punishment. By staying, accordingly, he took itâ âcreeping softly and vaguely about and waiting for Sarah to come in. She would come in if he stayed long enough, and he had now more than ever the sense of her success in leaving him a prey to anxiety. It
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