The Ambassadors Henry James (novel24 txt) đ
- Author: Henry James
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Chadâs smile of a truth more than met it. âBut isnât that enough?â
Strether hesitated, but it came out. âNot enough for your mother!â Spoken, however, it sounded a trifle oddâ âthe effect of which was that Chad broke into a laugh. Strether, at this, succumbed as well, though with extreme brevity. âPermit us to have still our theory. But if you are so free and so strong youâre inexcusable. Iâll write in the morning,â he added with decision. âIâll say Iâve got you.â
This appeared to open for Chad a new interest. âHow often do you write?â
âOh perpetually.â
âAnd at great length?â
Strether had become a little impatient. âI hope itâs not found too great.â
âOh Iâm sure not. And you hear as often?â
Again Strether paused. âAs often as I deserve.â
âMother writes,â said Chad, âa lovely letter.â
Strether, before the closed porte-cochĂšre, fixed him a moment. âItâs more, my boy, than you do! But our suppositions donât matter,â he added, âif youâre actually not entangled.â
Chadâs pride seemed none the less a little touched. âI never was thatâ âlet me insist. I always had my own way.â With which he pursued: âAnd I have it at present.â
âThen what are you here for? What has kept you,â Strether asked, âif you have been able to leave?â
It made Chad, after a stare, throw himself back. âDo you think oneâs kept only by women?â His surprise and his verbal emphasis rang out so clear in the still street that Strether winced till he remembered the safety of their English speech. âIs that,â the young man demanded, âwhat they think at Woollett?â At the good faith in the question Strether had changed colour, feeling that, as he would have said, he had put his foot in it. He had appeared stupidly to misrepresent what they thought at Woollett; but before he had time to rectify Chad again was upon him. âI must say then you show a low mind!â
It so fell in, unhappily for Strether, with that reflection of his own prompted in him by the pleasant air of the Boulevard Malesherbes, that its disconcerting force was rather unfairly great. It was a dig that, administered by himselfâ âand administered even to poor Mrs. Newsomeâ âwas no more than salutary; but administered by Chadâ âand quite logicallyâ âit came nearer drawing blood. They hadnât a low mindâ ânor any approach to one; yet incontestably they had worked, and with a certain smugness, on a basis that might be turned against them. Chad had at any rate pulled his visitor up; he had even pulled up his admirable mother; he had absolutely, by a turn of the wrist and a jerk of the far-flung noose, pulled up, in a bunch, Woollett browsing in its pride. There was no doubt Woollett had insisted on his coarseness; and what he at present stood there for in the sleeping street was, by his manner of striking the other note, to make of such insistence a preoccupation compromising to the insisters. It was exactly as if they had imputed to him a vulgarity that he had by a mere gesture caused to fall from him. The devil of the case was that Strether felt it, by the same stroke, as falling straight upon himself. He had been wondering a minute ago if the boy werenât a Pagan, and he found himself wondering now if he werenât by chance a gentleman. It didnât in the least, on the spot, spring up helpfully for him that a person couldnât at the same time be both. There was nothing at this moment in the air to challenge the combination; there was everything to give it on the contrary something of a flourish. It struck Strether into the bargain as doing something to meet the most difficult of the questions; though perhaps indeed only by substituting another. Wouldnât it be precisely by having learned to be a gentleman that he had mastered the consequent trick of looking so well that one could scarce speak to him straight? But what in the world was the clue to such a prime producing cause? There were too many clues then that Strether still lacked, and these clues to clues were among them. What it accordingly amounted to for him was that he had to take full in the face a fresh attribution of ignorance. He had grown used by this time to reminders, especially from his own lips, of what he didnât know; but he had borne them because in the first place they were private and because in the second they practically conveyed a tribute. He didnât know what was bad, andâ âas others didnât know how little he knew itâ âhe could put up with his state. But if he didnât know, in so important a particular, what was good, Chad at least was now aware he didnât; and that, for some reason, affected our friend as curiously public. It was in fact an exposed condition that the young man left him in long enough for him to feel its chillâ âtill he saw fit, in a word, generously again to cover him. This last was in truth what Chad quite gracefully did. But he did it as with a simple thought that met the whole of the case. âOh Iâm all right!â It was what Strether had rather bewilderedly to go to bed on.
IIIt really looked true moreover from the way Chad was to behave after this. He was full of attentions to his motherâs ambassador; in spite of which, all the while, the latterâs other relations rather remarkably contrived to assert themselves. Stretherâs sittings pen in hand with Mrs. Newsome up in his own room were broken, yet they were richer; and they were more than ever interspersed with the hours in which he reported himself, in a different fashion, but with scarce less earnestness and fullness, to Maria Gostrey. Now that,
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