Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/173

Rh the one she had now picked up in her hands there need be at least no waste of wonder. "She's coming to see me—that's for you," Strether's interlocutress continued; "but I don't require it to know where I am."

The waste of wonder might be proscribed, but Strether, characteristically, was even by this time quite in the air. "By which you mean that you know where she is?"

She just hesitated. "I mean that if she comes to see me I shall—now that I've pulled myself round a bit after the shock—not be at home."

Strether hung poised. "You call it—your recognition—a shock?"

She gave one of her rare flickers of impatience. "It was a surprise, an emotion. Don't be so literal. I wash my hands of her."

Poor Strether's face lengthened. "She's impossible?"

"She's even more charming than I remembered her."

"Then what's the matter?"

She had to think how to put it. "Well, I'm impossible. It's impossible. Everything's impossible."

He looked at her an instant. "I see where you're coming out. Everything's possible." Their eyes had on it, in fact, an exchange of some duration, after which he pursued: "Isn't it that beautiful child?" Then, as she still said nothing: "Why don't you mean to receive her?"

Her answer in an instant rang clear. "Because I wish to keep out of the business."

It provoked in him a small wail. "You're going to abandon me now?"

"No, I'm only going to abandon her. She'll want me to help her with you. And I won't."

"You'll only help me with her? Well, then!"

Most of the persons previously gathered had, in the interest of tea, passed into the house, and they had the gardens mainly to themselves. The shadows were long, the last call of the birds, who had made a home of their own in the noble, interspaced quarter, sounded from the high trees in the other gardens as well, those of the old convent and of the old hôtels; it was as if our friends had waited for the full charm to come out. Strether's