Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/178

172 It might be; but Strether distinguished. "I didn't come out to see this sort."

She had a wonderful look at him now. "Are you disappointed she isn't worse?"

He for a moment entertained the question, then found for it the frankest of answers. "Yes. If she were worse she would be better for our purpose. It would be simpler."

"Perhaps," she admitted. "But won't this be pleasanter?"

"Ah, you know," he promptly replied, "I didn't come out—wasn't that just what you originally reproached me with?—for the pleasant."

"Precisely. Therefore I say again what I said at first. You must take things as they come. Besides," Miss Gostrey added, "I'm not afraid for myself."

"For yourself?"

"Of your seeing her. I trust her. There's nothing she'll say about me. In fact there's nothing she can."

Strether wondered—little as he had thought of this. Then he broke out. "Oh, you women!"

There was something in it at which she flushed. "Yes—there we are. We're abysses." At last she smiled. "But I risk her!"

He gave himself a shake. "Well then, so do I!" But he added as they passed into the house that he would see Chad the first thing in the morning.

This was, the next day, the more easily effected that the young man, as it happened, even before he was down, turned up at his hotel. Strether took his coffee, by habit, in the public room; but on his descending for this purpose Chad instantly proposed an adjournment to what he called greater privacy. He had himself, as yet, had nothing—they would sit down somewhere together; and when, after a few steps and a turn into the boulevard, they had, for their greater privacy, sat down among twenty others, our friend saw in his companion's move a fear of the advent of Waymarsh. It was the first time Chad had, to that extent, given this personage "away"; and Strether found himself wondering of what it was symptomatic. He made out in a moment that the youth was in earnest as he had not yet seen him; which, in its turn, threw a ray perhaps a trifle startling on what they had each, up to that time, been