Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/250

244 "Simply have written a letter. One will have been quite enough. He has told them I want looking after."

"And do you?" She was all interest.

"Immensely. And I shall get it."

"By which you mean you don't budge?"

"I don't budge."

"You've cabled?"

"No. I've made Chad do it."

"That you decline to come? "

"That he declines. We had it out this morning, and I brought him round. He had come in before I was down to tell me he was ready—ready, I mean, to return. And he went off, after ten minutes with me, to say he wouldn't."

Miss Gostrey followed with intensity. "Then you've stopped him?"

Strether settled himself afresh in his chair. "I've stopped him. That is for the time. That"—he gave it to her more vividly—"is where I am."

"I see, I see. But where is Mr. Newsome? He was ready," she asked, "to go?"

"All ready."

"And sincerely—believing you would be?"

"Perfectly, I think; so that he was amazed to find the hand I had laid on him to pull him over suddenly converted into an engine for keeping him still."

It was an account of the matter Miss Gostrey could be absorbed by. "Does he think the conversion sudden?"

"Well," said Strether, "I'm not altogether sure what he thinks. I'm not sure of anything that concerns him, except that the more I've seen of him the less I've found him what I originally expected. He's obscure, and that's why I'm waiting."

She wondered. "But for what in particular?"

"For the answer to his cable."

"And what was his cable?"

"I don't know," Strether replied; "it was to be, when he left me, according to his own taste. I simply said to him, 'I want to stay, and the only way for me to do so is for you to.' That I wanted to stay seemed to impress him, and he acted on that."