Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/117

Rh, for a month, turned over what he should say on this very occasion, and he seemed at last to have said nothing he had thought of—everything was so totally different.

But in spite of that he had put the flag at the window. That was what he had done, and there was a minute during which he affected himself as having shaken it hard, flapped it with a mighty flutter, straight in front of his companion's nose. It gave him really almost the sense of having already done his part. The momentary relief—as if from the knowledge that nothing of that at least could be undone—sprang from a particular cause, the cause that had flashed into operation, in Miss Gostrey's box, with direct apprehension, with amazed recognition, and that had been concerned, since then, in every throb of his consciousness. What it came to was that, with an absolutely new quantity to deal with, one could simply not know. The new quantity was represented by the fact that Chad had been made over. That was all; whatever it was, it was everything. Strether had never seen the thing so done before; it was perhaps a specialty of Paris. If one had been present at the process one might little by little have mastered the result; but he was face to face, as matters stood, with the finished business. It had freely been noted for him that he might be received as a dog among skittles; but that was on the basis of the old quantity. He had originally thought of lines and tones as things to be taken, but these possibilities had now quite melted away. There was no computing at all what the young man before him would think or feel or say on any subject whatever. This intelligence Strether had afterwards, to account for his nervousness, reconstituted as he might, just as he had also reconstituted the promptness with which Chad had corrected his uncertainty. An extraordinarily short time had been required for the correction, and there had ceased to be anything negative in his companion's aspect as soon as it was made. "Your engagement to my mother has become then what they call here a fait accompli?"—it had consisted, the determinant touch, in nothing more than that.

Well, that was enough, Strether had felt while his