Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/116

110 that, excellent arguments and reasons. I've not put them into her head—I needn't remind you how little she's a person who needs that. But they exist—you must take it from me as a friend both of hers and yours—for myself as well. I didn't invent them, I didn't originally work them out; but I understand them, I think I can explain them—by which, I mean, make you actively do them justice; and that's why, you see, I'm here. You had better know the worst at once. It's a question of an immediate rupture and an immediate return. I've been conceited enough to dream I can sugar that pill. I take, at any rate, the greatest interest in the question. I took it, already, before I left home; and I don't mind telling you that, altered as you are, I take it still more now that I've seen you. You're older and—I don't know what to call it—more of a handful; but you're by so much the more, I seem to make out, to our purpose."

"Do I strike you as improved?" Strether was to recall that Chad had at this point inquired.

He was likewise to recall—and it had to count for some time as his greatest comfort—that it had been "given" him, as they said at Woollett, to reply with some presence of mind: "I haven't the least idea." He was really, for a while, to like to think he had been positively hard. On the point of conceding that Chad had improved in appearance, but that to the question of appearance the remark must be confined, he checked even that compromise and left his reservation bare. Not only his moral, but also, as it were, his æsthetic sense had a little to pay for this, Chad being unmistakably—and wasn't it a matter of the confounded gray hair again?—handsomer than he had ever promised. That, however, fell in perfectly with what Strether had said. They had no desire to keep down his proper expansion, and he would not be less to their purpose for not looking, as he had too often done of old, only bold and wild. There was indeed a signal particular in which he would distinctly be more so. Strether didn't, as he talked, absolutely follow himself; he only knew he was clutching his thread and that he held it, from moment to moment, a little tighter; his mere uninterruptedness, for five minutes, helped him to do that. He had