Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/126

 IX

really looked true, moreover, from the way Chad, after this, behaved. He was full of attentions to his mother's ambassador; in spite of which, remarkably however, the latter's other relations still contrived to assert themselves. Strether's sittings, pen in hand, with Mrs. Newsome up in his own room were broken, but they were richer; and they were more than ever interspersed with the hours in which he reported himself, in a different fashion, but with scarce less earnestness and fulness, to Maria Gostrey. Now that, as he would have expressed it, he had really something to talk about, he found himself, in respect to any oddity that might reside for him in the double connection, at once more aware and more indifferent. He had been fine to Mrs. Newsome about his useful friend, but it had begun to haunt his imagination that Chad, taking up again for her benefit a pen too long disused, might possibly be finer. It wouldn't at all do, he saw, that anything should come up for him at Chad's hands but what specifically was to have come; the greatest divergence from which would be precisely the element of any lubrication of their intercourse by levity. It was accordingly to forestall such an accident that he frankly put before the young man the several facts, just as they had occurred, of his funny alliance. He spoke of these facts, pleasantly and obligingly, as "the whole story," and felt that he might qualify the alliance as funny if he remained sufficiently grave about it. He flattered himself that he even exaggerated the wild freedom of his original encounter with the wonderful lady; he was scrupulously definite about the absurd conditions in which they had made acquaintance—their having picked each other up almost in the street; and he had—finest inspiration of all!—a conception of carrying the 120