Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/135

Rh then, in connection with it, ever come at all, he might almost have passed as wondering how to provoke it. It would be too absurd if such a vision as that should have to be invoked for relief; it was already marked enough as absurd that he should actually have begun with flutters and dignities on the score of a single accepted meal. What sort of a wretch had he expected Chad to be, anyway?—Strether had occasion to make the inquiry, but he was careful to make it in private. He could himself, comparatively recent as it was—it was truly but the fact of a few days since—focus his primal crudity; but he would, on the approach of an observer, as if handling an illicit possession, have slipped the reminiscence out of sight. There were echoes of it still in Mrs. Newsome's letters, and there were moments when these echoes made him exclaim on her want of tact. He blushed of course, at once, still more for the explanation than for the ground of it: it came to him in time to save his manners that she couldn't at the best become tactful as quickly as he. Her tact had to reckon with the Atlantic Ocean, the General Post Office and the extravagant curve of the globe.

Chad had one day offered tea, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, to a chosen few, a group again including the unobscured Miss Barrace; and Strether had, on coming out, walked away with the acquaintance whom, in his letters to Mrs. Newsome, he always spoke of as the little artist-man. He had had full occasion to mention him as the other party, so oddly, to the only close personal alliance observation had as yet detected in Chad's existence. Little Bilham's way this afternoon was not Strether's, but he had none the less kindly come with him, and it was somehow a part of his kindness that, as, deplorably, it had begun to rain, they suddenly found themselves seated for conversation at a café in which they had taken refuge. He had passed no more crowded hour in Chad's society than the one just ended; he had talked with Miss Barrace, who had reproached him with not having come to see her, and he had above all hit on a happy thought for causing Waymarsh's tension to relax. Something might possibly be done, for the latter, with the idea of his success with that lady, whose quick apprehension of what