Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/109

Rh person unacquainted; but she had none the less, for a long time, no eyes save for the stage, where she occasionally found a pretext for an appreciative moment that she invited Waymarsh to share. The latter's faculty of participation had never had, all round, such an assault to meet; the pressure on him being the sharper for this chosen attitude, on her part, as Strether judged it, of isolating, for their natural intercourse, Chad and himself. Such intercourse was meanwhile restricted to a frank, friendly look from the young man, something markedly like a smile, but falling far short of a grin, and to the vivacity of Strether's private speculation as to whether he carried himself like a fool. He didn't quite see how he could so feel as one without somehow showing as one. The worst of that question moreover was that he knew it as a symptom the sense of which annoyed him. "If I'm going to be odiously conscious of how I may strike the fellow," he reflected, "it was so little what I came out for that I may as well stop before I begin." This sage consideration, too, distinctly seemed to leave untouched the fact that he was going to be conscious. He was conscious of everything but of what would have served him.

He was to know afterwards, in the watches of the night, that nothing would have been more open to him than, after a minute or two, to propose to Chad to pass out with him to the lobby. He had not only not proposed it, but had lacked even the presence of mind to see it as possible. He had stuck there like a schoolboy wishing not to miss a minute of the show; though for that portion of the show then presented he had not had an instant's real attention. He could not when the curtain fell have given the slightest account of what had happened. He had therefore, further, not at that moment acknowledged the amenity added by this acceptance of his awkwardness to Chad's general patience. Hadn't he none the less known at the very time—known it stupidly and without reaction—that the boy was accepting something? He was modestly benevolent, the boy—that was at least what he had been capable of, the superiority of making out his chance to be; and one had one's self literally not had the gumption to get in ahead of him. If we should go into all that