Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/189

Rh "Ah, but what I'm asking you," she quickly said, "is not what Mr. Newsome had in mind." She spoke now, he saw, as if to take courageously all her risk. "This is my own idea and a different thing."

It gave poor Strether, in truth—uneasy as it made him too—something of the thrill of a bold perception justified. "Well," he answered kindly enough, "I was sure just now that some idea of your own had come to you."

She seemed still to look up at him, but now more serenely. "I made out you were sure—and that helped it to come. So, you see," she continued, "we do get on."

"Oh, but it appears to me I don't at all meet your request. How can I when I don't understand it?"

"It isn't at all necessary you should understand it; it will do quite well enough if you simply remember him. Only feel I trust you—and for nothing so tremendous after all. Just," she said with a wonderful smile, "for common civility."

Strether had a long pause, while they sat again face to face, as they had sat, scarce less conscious, before the poor lady had crossed the stream. She was the poor lady for Strether now because, clearly, she had some trouble, and her appeal to him could only mean that her trouble was deep. He couldn't help it; it was not his fault; he had done nothing; but by a turn of the hand she had somehow made their encounter a relation. And the relation profited by a mass of things that were not, strictly, in it or of it; by the very air in which they sat, by the high, cold, delicate room, by the world outside and the little plash in the court, by the first Empire and the relics in the stiff cabinets, by matters as far off as those, and by others as near as the unbroken clasp of her hands in her lap and the look her expression had of being most natural when her eyes were most fixed. "You count upon me, of course, for something really much greater than it sounds."

"Oh, it sounds great enough too!" she laughed at this.

He found himself, in time, on the point of telling her that she was, as Miss Barrace called it, wonderful; but, catching himself up, he said something else instead. "What was it, Chad's idea, then, that you should say to me?"