Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/110

104 occupied our friend in the watches of the night we should have to mend our pen; but an instance or two may mark for us the vividness with which he could remember. He remembered the two absurdities that, if his presence of mind had failed, were the things that had had most to do with it. He had never in his life seen a young man come into a box at ten o'clock at night, and would, if challenged on the question in advance, scarce have been ready to pronounce as to different ways of doing so; but it was, in spite of this, definite to him that Chad had had a way that was wonderful: a fact carrying with it an implication that, as one might imagine it, he knew, he had learned, how.

Here already then were abounding results; he had, on the spot, and without the least trouble of intention, taught Strether that, even in so small a thing as that, there were different ways. He had done, in the same line, still more than this; had, by a mere shake or two of the head, made his old friend observe that the change in him was perhaps more than anything else, for the eye, a matter of the marked streaks of gray, extraordinary at his age, in his thick black hair; as well as that this new feature was curiously becoming to him, did something for him, as characterisation, also even—of all things in the world as refinement, that had been a good deal wanted. Strether felt, however, he would have had to confess, that it would not have been easy just now, on this and other counts, in the presence of what had been supplied, to be quite clear as to what had been missed. A reflection a candid critic might have made of old, for instance, was that it would have been happier for the son to look more like the mother; but this was a reflection that at present would never occur. The ground had quite fallen away from it, yet no resemblance whatever to the mother had supervened. It would have been hard for a young man's face and air to disconnect themselves more completely than Chad's at this juncture from any discerned, from any imaginable aspect of a New England female parent. That of course was no more than had been on the cards; but it produced in Strether, none the less, one of those frequent phenomena of mental reference with which all judgment in him was actually beset.