Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/208

202 after I had seen you, and as I assured her I would do when I met her at Gloriani's. She hadn't then told me she was to be absent, and I felt, at her door, as if understood. She's absent—with all respect to her sick friend, though I know indeed she has plenty—so that I may not see her. She doesn't want to meet me again. Well," she continued with a beautiful conscious mildness, "I liked and admired her beyond everyone in the old time, and she knew it—perhaps that's precisely what has made her go—and I daresay I haven't lost her for ever." Strether still said nothing; he had a horror, as he now thought of himself, of being in question between women—was in fact already quite enough on his way to that; and there was moreover, as it came to him, perceptibly, something behind these allusions and professions that, should he take it in, would square but ill with his present resolve to simplify. It was as if, for him, all the same, her softness and sadness were sincere. He felt that not less when she soon went on: "I'm extremely glad of her happiness." But it also left him mute—sharp and fine though the imputation it conveyed. What it conveyed was that he was Maria Gostrey's happiness, and for the least little instant he had the impulse to challenge the thought. He could have done so, however, only by saying, "What then do you suppose to be between us?" and he was wonderfully glad a moment later not to have spoken. He would rather seem stupid any day than fatuous, and he drew back, as well, with a smothered inward shudder, from the consideration of what women—of highly developed type in particular—might think of each other. Whatever he had come out for, he had not come to go into that; so that he absolutely took up nothing his interlocutress had now let drop. Yet, though he had kept away from her for days, had laid wholly on herself the burden of their meeting again, she had not a gleam of irritation to show him. "Well, about Jeanne now?" she smiled—it had the gaiety with which she had originally come in. He felt it, on the instant, to have been, for her, her real errand. But he had been schooling her, of a truth, to say much in proportion to his little. "Do you make out that she has a sentiment? I mean for Mr. Newsome."