Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/253

Rh which, however, their present momentary silence was full of a conscious reference. Strether's question was a sufficient implication of the weight it had gained with him during the absence of his hostess; and just for that reason a single gesture from her could pass for him as a vivid answer. Yet he was answered still better when she said in a moment, "Will Mr. Newsome introduce his sister?"

"To Mme. de Vionnet?" Strether spoke the name at last. "I shall be greatly surprised if he doesn't."

She seemed to gaze at the possibility. "You mean you've thought of it and you're prepared?"

"I've thought of it and I'm prepared."

It was to her visitor now that she applied her consideration. "Bon! You are magnificent!"

"Well," he answered after a pause and a little wearily, but still standing there before her—"well, that's what, just once in all my dull days, I think I shall like to have been!"

Two days later he had news from Chad of a communication from Woollett in response to their determinant telegram, this missive being addressed to Chad himself and announcing the immediate departure for France of Sarah and Jim and Mamie. Strether had meanwhile, on his own side, cabled; he had but delayed that act till after his visit to Miss Gostrey, an interview by which, as so often before, he felt his sense of things cleared up and settled. His message to Mrs. Newsome, in answer to her own, had consisted of the words: "Judge best to take another month, but with full appreciation of all reinforcements." He had added that he was writing, but he was of course always writing; it was a practice that continued, oddly enough, to relieve him, make him come nearer than anything else to the consciousness of doing something; so that he often wondered if he had not really, under his recent stress, acquired some hollow trick, one of the specious arts of make-believe. Wouldn't the pages he still so frequently despatched by the American post have been worthy of a showy journalist, some master of the great new science of beating the sense out of words? Wasn't he writing against time and mainly to show he was kind?—since it had become quite his habit not to like to