Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/211

Rh, met another pair which had just come within their range and which struck him as reflecting his sense of what he had done. He recognised them at the same moment as those of little Bilham, who had apparently drawn near on purpose to speak to him, and little Bilham was not, in the conditions, the person to whom his heart would be most closed. They were seated together a minute later at the angle of the room obliquely opposite the corner in which Gloriani was still engaged with Jeanne de Vionnet, to whom, at first, and in silence, their attention had been benevolently given. "I can't see for my life," Strether had then observed, "how a young fellow of any spirit—such a one as you, for instance—can be admitted to the sight of that young lady without being hard hit. Why don't you go in, little Bilham?" He remembered the tone into which he had been betrayed on the garden-bench at the sculptor's reception, and this might make up for that by being much more the right sort of thing to say to a young man worthy of any advice at all. "There would be some reason."

"Some reason for what?"

"Why, for hanging on here."

"To offer my hand and fortune to Mile. de Vionnet?"

"Well," Strether asked, "to what lovelier apparition could you offer them? She's the sweetest little thing I've ever seen."

"She's certainly immense. I mean she's the real thing. I believe the pale pink petals are folded up there for some wondrous efflorescence in time—to open, that is, to some great golden sun. I'm unfortunately but a small farthing candle. What chance, in such a field, for a poor little artist-man?"

"Oh, you're good enough," Strether threw out.

"Certainly, I'm good enough. We're good enough, I consider, nous autres, for anything. But she's too good. There's the difference. They wouldn't look at me."

Strether, lounging on his divan and still charmed by the young girl, whose eyes had consciously strayed to him, he fancied, with a vague smile—Strether, enjoying the whole occasion as with dormant pulses at last awake and in spite of new material thrust upon him, thought over his