Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/191

Rh He was amazed afterwards to think how simply and quietly he had met it. "Not yet." It was almost as if he were a trifle disappointed—had expected still more of her freedom. But he went straight on. "Is that what Chad has told you will happen to me?"

She was evidently charmed with the way he took it, "If you mean if we've talked of it—most certainly. And the question is not what has had least to do with my wishing to see you."

"To judge if I'm the sort of man a woman can?"

"Precisely," she exclaimed—"you wonderful gentleman! I do judge—I have judged. A woman can't. You're safe—with every right to be. You'd be much happier if you'd only believe it."

Strether was silent a little; then he found himself speaking with a cynicism of confidence of which, even at the moment, the sources were strange to him. "I try to believe it. But it's a marvel," he exclaimed, "how you already get at it!"

"Oh," she was able to say, "remember how much I was, through Mr. Newsome—before I saw you—on the way to it. He thinks everything of your strength."

"Well, I can bear almost anything!" our friend briskly interrupted. Deep and beautiful, on this, her smile came back, and with the effect of making him hear what he had said just as she had heard it. He easily enough felt that it gave him away, but what, in truth, had everything done but that? It had been all very well to think at moments that he was holding her nose down and that he had coerced her; what had he, by this time, done but let her see, practically, that he accepted their relation? What was their relation, moreover—though light and brief enough in form as yet—but whatever she might choose to make it? Nothing could prevent her—certainly he couldn't—from making it pleasant. At the back of his head, behind everything, was the sense that she was—there, before him, close to him, in vivid, imperative form—one of the rare women he had so often heard of, read of, thought of, but never met, whose very presence, look, voice, the mere contemporaneous fact of whom, from the moment it was at all presented, made a relation of mere recognition.