The Ambassadors by Henry James Read Free Book Online Page A

You feel as if this
were wrong."
    He fell back once more, settling himself against the parapet as
if to hear more about it. "Then get me out!"
    Her face fairly brightened for the joy of the appeal, but, as if
it were a question of immediate action, she visibly considered.
"Out of waiting for him?—of seeing him at all?"
    "Oh no—not that," said poor Strether, looking grave. "I've got
to wait for him—and I want very much to see him. But out of the
terror. You did put your finger on it a few minutes ago. It's
general, but it avails itself of particular occasions. That's what
it's doing for me now. I'm always considering something else;
something else, I mean, than the thing of the moment. The obsession
of the other thing is the terror. I'm considering at present for
instance something else than YOU."
    She listened with charming earnestness. "Oh you oughtn't to do
that!"
    "It's what I admit. Make it then impossible."
    She continued to think. "Is it really an 'order' from you?—that
I shall take the job? WILL you give yourself up?"
    Poor Strether heaved his sigh. "If I only could! But that's the
deuce of it—that I never can. No—I can't."
    She wasn't, however, discouraged. "But you want to at
least?"
    "Oh unspeakably!"
    "Ah then, if you'll try!"—and she took over the job, as she had
called it, on the spot. "Trust me!" she exclaimed, and the action
of this, as they retraced their steps, was presently to make him
pass his hand into her arm in the manner of a benign dependent
paternal old person who wishes to be "nice" to a younger one. If he
drew it out again indeed as they approached the inn this may have
been because, after more talk had passed between them, the relation
of age, or at least of experience—which, for that matter, had
already played to and fro with some freedom—affected him as
incurring a readjustment. It was at all events perhaps lucky that
they arrived in sufficiently separate fashion within range of the
hotel-door. The young lady they had left in the glass cage watched
as if she had come to await them on the threshold. At her side
stood a person equally interested, by his attitude, in their
return, and the effect of the sight of whom was instantly to
determine for Strether another of those responsive arrests that we
have had so repeatedly to note. He left it to Miss Gostrey to name,
with the fine full bravado as it almost struck him, of her "Mr.
Waymarsh!" what was to have been, what—he more than ever felt as
his short stare of suspended welcome took things in—would have
been, but for herself, his doom. It was already upon him even at
that distance—Mr. Waymarsh was for HIS part joyless.

II
    He had none the less to confess to this friend that evening that
he knew almost nothing about her, and it was a deficiency that
Waymarsh, even with his memory refreshed by contact, by her own
prompt and lucid allusions and enquiries, by their having publicly
partaken of dinner in her company, and by another stroll, to which
she was not a stranger, out into the town to look at the cathedral
by moonlight—it was a blank that the resident of Milrose, though
admitting acquaintance with the Munsters, professed himself unable
to fill. He had no recollection of Miss Gostrey, and two or three
questions that she put to him about those members of his circle
had, to Strether's observation, the same effect he himself had
already more directly felt—the effect of appearing to place all
knowledge, for the time, on this original woman's side. It
interested him indeed to mark the limits of any such relation for
her with his friend as there could possibly be a question of, and
it particularly struck him that they were to be marked altogether
in Waymarsh's quarter. This added to his own sense of having gone
far with her-gave him an early illustration of a much shorter
course. There was a certitude he immediately grasped—a conviction
that Waymarsh would quite fail, as it were, and on whatever degree
of acquaintances to