The Ambassadors Henry James (novel24 txt) 📖

Miss Gostrey’s eyes, and she looked as if she heard the bright dollars shovelled in. “I hope then you make a good thing⁠—”

“I never made a good thing!” he at once returned.

She just waited. “Don’t you call it a good thing to be loved?”

“Oh we’re not loved. We’re not even hated. We’re only just sweetly ignored.”

She had another pause. “You don’t trust me!” she once more repeated.

“Don’t I when I lift the last veil?⁠—tell you the very secret of the prison-house?”

Again she met his eyes, but to the result that after an instant her own turned away with impatience. “You don’t sell? Oh I’m glad of that!” After which however, and before he could protest, she was off again. “She’s just a moral swell.”

He accepted gaily enough the definition. “Yes⁠—I really think that describes her.”

But it had for his friend the oddest connection. “How does she do her hair?”

He laughed out. “Beautifully!”

“Ah that doesn’t tell me. However, it doesn’t matter⁠—I know. It’s tremendously neat⁠—a real reproach; quite remarkably thick and without, as yet, a single strand of white. There!”

He blushed for her realism, but gaped at her truth. “You’re the very deuce.”

“What else should I be? It was as the very deuce I pounced on you. But don’t let it trouble you, for everything but the very deuce⁠—at our age⁠—is a bore and a delusion, and even he himself, after all, but half a joy.” With which, on a single sweep of her wing, she resumed. “You assist her to expiate⁠—which is rather hard when you’ve yourself not sinned.”

“It’s she who hasn’t sinned,” Strether replied. “I’ve sinned the most.”

“Ah,” Miss Gostrey cynically laughed, “what a picture of her! Have you robbed the widow and the orphan?”

“I’ve sinned enough,” said Strether.

“Enough for whom? Enough for what?”

“Well, to be where I am.”

“Thank you!” They were disturbed at this moment by the passage between their knees and the back of the seats before them of a gentleman who had been absent during a part of the performance and who now returned for the close; but the interruption left Miss Gostrey time, before the subsequent hush, to express as a sharp finality her sense of the moral of all their talk. “I knew you had something up your sleeve!” This finality, however, left them in its turn, at the end of the play, as disposed to hang back as if they had still much to say; so that they easily agreed to let everyone go before them⁠—they found an interest in waiting. They made out from the lobby that the night had turned to rain; yet Miss Gostrey let her friend know that he wasn’t to see her home. He was simply to put her, by herself, into a four-wheeler; she liked so in London, of wet nights after wild pleasures, thinking things over, on the return, in lonely four-wheelers. This was her great time, she intimated, for pulling herself together. The delays caused by the weather, the struggle for vehicles at the door, gave them occasion to subside on a divan at the back of the vestibule and just beyond the reach of the fresh damp gusts from the street. Here Strether’s comrade resumed that free handling of the subject to which his own imagination of it already owed so much. “Does your young friend in Paris like you?”

It had almost, after the interval, startled him. “Oh I hope not! Why should he?”

“Why shouldn’t he?” Miss Gostrey asked. “That you’re coming down on him need have nothing to do with it.”

“You see more in it,” he presently returned, “than I.”

“Of course I see you in it.”

“Well then you see more in ‘me’!”

“Than you see in yourself? Very likely. That’s always one’s right. What I was thinking of,” she explained, “is the possible particular effect on him of his milieu.”

“Oh his milieu⁠—!” Strether really felt he could imagine it better now than three hours before.

“Do you mean it can only have been so lowering?”

“Why that’s my very starting-point.”

“Yes, but you start so far back. What do his letters say?”

“Nothing. He practically ignores us⁠—or spares us. He doesn’t write.”

“I see. But there are all the same,” she went on, “two quite distinct things that⁠—given the wonderful place he’s in⁠—may have happened to him. One is that he may have got brutalised. The other is that he may have got refined.”

Strether stared⁠—this was a novelty. “Refined?”

“Oh,” she said quietly, “there are refinements.”

The way of it made him, after looking at her, break into a laugh. “You have them!”

“As one of the signs,” she continued in the same tone, “they constitute perhaps the worst.”

He thought it over and his gravity returned. “Is it a refinement not to answer his mother’s letters?”

She appeared to have a scruple, but she brought it out. “Oh I should say the greatest of all.”

“Well,” said Strether, “I’m quite content to let it, as one of the signs, pass for the worst that I know he believes he can do what he likes with me.”

This appeared to strike her. “How do you know it?”

“Oh I’m sure of it. I feel it in my bones.”

“Feel he can do it?”

“Feel that he believes he can. It may come to the same thing!” Strether laughed.

She wouldn’t, however, have this. “Nothing for you will ever come to the same thing as anything else.” And she understood what she meant, it seemed, sufficiently to go straight on. “You say that if he does break he’ll come in for things at home?”

“Quite positively. He’ll come in for a particular chance⁠—a chance that any properly constituted young man would jump at. The business has so developed that an opening scarcely apparent three years ago, but which his father’s will took account of as in certain conditions possible and which, under that will, attaches to Chad’s availing himself of it a large contingent advantage⁠—this opening, the conditions having come about, now simply awaits him. His mother has kept it for him, holding out against strong pressure, till the last possible moment.