Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/137

Rh Strether here, with a rising hope, just thought. "We must take one of them at a time." But his coherence lapsed. "Is there some woman—of whom he's really afraid, of course, I mean, or who does with him what she likes?"

"It's awfully charming of you," Bilham presently remarked, "not to have asked me that before?"

"Oh, I'm not fit for my job!"

The exclamation had escaped our friend, but it made little Bilham more deliberate. "Chad's a rare case," he luminously observed. "He's awfully changed," he added.

"Then you see it too?"

"The way he has improved? Oh, yes, I think every one must see it. But I'm not sure," said little Bilham, "that I didn't like him about as well in his other state."

"Then this is really a new state altogether?"

"Well," the young man after a moment returned, "I'm not sure he was really meant by nature to be quite so good. It's like the new edition of an old book that one has been fond of, revised and amended, brought up to date, but not quite the thing that one knew and loved. However that may be, at all events," he pursued, "I don't think, you know, that he's really playing, as you call it, any game. He really wants, I believe, to go back and take up a career. He's capable of one, you know, that will improve and enlarge him still more. He won't then," little Bilham continued to remark, "be my pleasant, well-rubbed, old-fashioned volume at all. But of course I'm beastly immoral. I'm afraid it would be a funny world altogether—a world with things the way I like them. I ought, I dare say, to go home and go into business myself. Only I'd simply rather die—simply. And I've not the least difficulty in making up my mind not to, and in knowing exactly why, and in defending my ground against all comers. All the same," he wound up, "I assure you I don't say a word against it, for himself, I mean—to Chad. I seem to see it as much the best thing for him. You see, he's not happy."

"Do I?" Strether stared. "I've been supposing I see just the opposite—an extraordinary case of the equilibrium arrived at and preserved."