Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/18

12 the point he had made. "But what do you think of as happening?"

Though he was not shy—which was rather anomalous—Strether gazed about without meeting her eyes; a motion that, in talk, was frequent with him, yet of which his words often seemed not at all the effect. "Why, that you should find me too hopeless." With which they walked on again together, while she answered, as they went, that the most "hopeless" of her countryfolk were precisely those, in general, she liked best. All sorts of other pleasant small things—small things that were yet large for him—flowered in the air of the occasion; but the bearing of the occasion itself on matters still remote concerns us too closely to permit us to multiply our illustrations. Two or three, however, in truth, we should perhaps regret to lose. The tortuous wall—girdle, long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by careful civic hands—wanders, in narrow file, between parapets smoothed by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows of gables, views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled English town and ordered English country. Too deep almost for words was the delight of these things for Strether; yet as deeply mixed with it were certain images of his inward picture. He had trod this walk in the far-off time, at twenty-five; but that, instead of spoiling it, only enriched it for present feeling and marked his renewal as a thing substantial enough to share. It was with Waymarsh he should have shared it, and he was now, accordingly, taking from him something that was his due. He looked repeatedly at his watch, and when he had done so for the fifth time Miss Gostrey took him up.

"You're doing something that you think not right"

It so touched the place that he quite changed colour, and his laugh was almost awkward. "Am I enjoying it as much as that?"

"You're not enjoying it, I think, so much as you ought."

"I see"—he appeared thoughtfully to agree. "Great is my privilege."