Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/104

98 American is as easily given as taken away! What is it, to begin with, to be one, and what's the extraordinary hurry? Surely nothing that's so pressing was ever so little defined. It's such an order, really, that before we cook you the dish we must at least have your receipt. Besides, the poor chicks have time! What I've seen so often spoiled," she pursued, "is the happy attitude itself, the state of faith and—what shall I call it?—the sense of beauty. You're right about him"—she now took in Strether—"little Bilham has them to a charm; we must keep little Bilham along." Then she was all again for Waymarsh. "The others have all wanted so dreadfully to do something, and they've gone and done it, in too many cases, indeed. It leaves them never the same afterwards; the charm is always somehow broken. Now he, I think, you know, really won't. He won't do the least dreadful little thing. We shall continue to enjoy him just as he is. No—he's quite beautiful. He sees everything. He isn't a bit ashamed. He has every scrap of the courage of it that one could ask. Only think what he might do. One wants really, for fear of some accident, to keep him in view. At this very moment, perhaps, what mayn't he be up to? I've had my disappointments—the poor things are never really safe; or only, at least, when you have them under your eye. One can never completely trust them. One is uneasy, and I think that's why I most miss him now."

She had wound up with a laugh of enjoyment over her embroidery of her idea, an enjoyment that her face communicated to Strether, who would yet have wished, at this moment, that she might let poor Waymarsh alone. He knew, more or less, what she meant, but the fact was not a reason for her not pretending to Waymarsh that he didn't. It was craven of him, perhaps, but he would, for the high amenity of the occasion, have liked Waymarsh not to be so sure of his wit. Her recognition of it gave him away, and, before she had done with him or with that article, would give him worse. What was he, all the same, to do? He looked across the box at his friend; their eyes met; something queer and stiff, something that bore on the situation, but that it was better not to touch, passed