Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/143

Rh "Ah, but don't they?—after all that, as I've understood you, you've told them about me?"

He had paused before her again, but he continued his course, "They will—before, as you say, I've done." Then he came out with the point he had wished, after all, most to make. "It seems to give away, now, his game. This is what he has been doing—keeping me along for. He has been waiting for them."

Miss Gostrey drew in her lips. "You see a good deal in it!"

"I doubt if I see as much as you. Do you pretend," he went on, "that you don't see?"

"Well, what?"—she pressed him as he paused.

"Why, that there must be a lot between them—and that it has been going on from the first, even from before I came."

She took a minute to answer. "Who are they then if it's so grave?"

"It may not be grave—it may be gay. But at any rate it's marked. Only I don't know," Strether had to confess, "anything about them. Their name, for instance, was a thing that, after little Bilham's information, I found it a kind of refreshment not to feel obliged to follow up."

"Oh," she returned, "if you think you've got off!"

Her laugh produced in him a momentary gloom. "I don't think I've got off. I only think I'm breathing for about five minutes. I daresay I shall have, at the best, still to get on." A look, over it all, passed between them, and the next minute he had come back to good-humour. "I don't, meanwhile, take the smallest interest in their name."

"Nor in their nationality?—American, French, English, Polish?"

"I don't care the least little 'hang,'" he smiled, "for their nationality. It would be nice if they're Polish!" he almost immediately added.

"Very nice indeed." The transition kept up her spirits. "So you see you do care."

He did this contention a modified justice. "I think I should if they were Polish. Yes," he thought, "there might be joy in that."