Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/138

132 "Oh, there's a lot behind it."

"Ah, there you are!" Strether exclaimed. "That's just want I want to get at. You speak of your familiar volume altered out of recognition. Well, who's the editor?"

Little Bilham, for a minute, looked before him in silence. "He ought to get married. That would do it. And he wants to."

"Wants to marry her?"

Again, for a moment, Bilham waited, and, with his sense that he had information, Strether scarce knew what was coming. "He wants to be free. He isn't used, you see," the young man explained in his lucid way, "to being so good."

Strether hesitated. "Then I may take it from you that he is good?"

Bilham had, on his own side, a pause; but there was a quiet fulness in the way he made it up. "Do take it from me."

"Well then, why isn't he free? He swears to me he is, but meanwhile does nothing—except of course that he's so kind to me—to prove it; and couldn't really act much otherwise if he weren't. My question to you just now was exactly on this queer impression of his diplomacy; as if, instead of really giving ground, his line were to keep me on here and set me a bad example."

As the half-hour meanwhile had ebbed, Strether had paid his score, and the waiter was now in the act of counting out change. Our friend pushed back to him a fraction of it, with which, after an emphatic recognition, the personage in question retreated.

"You give too much," little Bilham permitted himself benevolently to observe.

"Oh, I always give too much!" Strether helplessly sighed. "But you don't," he went on, as if to get quickly away from the contemplation of that doom, "answer my question. Why isn't he free?"

Little Bilham had got up as if the transaction with the waiter had been a signal, and had already edged out between the table and the divan. The effect of this was that a minute later they had quitted the place, the gratified waiter alert again at the open door. Strether had found