Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/204

198 "Presents?" poor Strether echoed, conscious with a pang that he had not yet tried that in any quarter.

"Why, you see," she explained, "he's as fine as ever in the victoria; so that when I leave him, as I often do almost for hours—he likes it so—at the doors of shops, the sight of him there helps me, when I come out, to know my carriage from afar in the rank. But sometimes, for a change, he goes with me into the shops, and then I've all I can do to prevent his buying me things."

"He wants to 'treat' you?" Strether almost gasped at all he himself hadn't thought of. He had a sense of admiration. "Oh, he's much more in the real tradition than I. Yes," he mused, "it's the sacred rage."

"The sacred rage, exactly!"—and Miss Barrace, who had not before heard this term applied, recognised its bearing with a clap of her gemmed hands. "Now I do know why he's not banal. But I do prevent him all the same—and if you saw what he sometimes selects—from buying. I save him hundreds and hundreds. I only take flowers."

"Flowers!" Strether echoed again, with a rueful reflection. How many nosegays had her present interlocutor sent?

"Innocent flowers," she pursued, "as much as he likes. And he sends me splendours; he knows all the best places—he found them for himself; he's wonderful."

"He hasn't told them to me, her friend smiled; "he has a life of his own." But Strether had swung back to the consciousness that, for himself, after all, it never would have done. Waymarsh had not Mrs. Waymarsh in the least to consider, whereas Lambert Strether had constantly, in the inmost honour of his thoughts, to consider Mrs. Newsome. He liked, moreover, to feel how much his friend was in the real tradition. Yet he had his conclusion. "What a rage it is!" He had worked it out. "It's an opposition."

She followed, but at a distance. "That's what I feel. Yet to what?"

"Well, he thinks, you know, that I've a life of my own. And I haven't!"

"You haven't?" She showed doubt, and her laugh confirmed it. "Oh, oh, oh!"