Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/263

Rh him. An ideal rigour would perhaps postpone the trial till after the Pococks had shown their spirit, and it was to an ideal rigour that he had quite promised himself to conform.

Suddenly, however, on this particular day, he felt a particular fear under which everything collapsed. He knew abruptly that he was afraid of himself, and yet not in relation to the effect on his sensibilities of another hour of Mme. de Vionnet. What he dreaded was the effect of a single hour of Sarah Pocock, as to whom he was visited, in troubled nights, with fantastic waking dreams. She loomed at him larger than life; she increased in volume as she came. She so met his eyes that, his imagination taking, after the first step, all, and more than all, the strides, he already felt her come down on him; already burned, under her reprobation, with the blush of guilt; already consented, by way of penance, to the instant forfeiture of everything. He saw himself recommitted under her direction to Woollett as juvenile offenders are committed to reformatories. It was not of course that Woollett was really a place of discipline, but he knew in advance that Sarah's salon at the hotel would be. His danger, at any rate, in these moods of alarm, was some concession on that ground that would involve a sharp rupture with the actual; therefore if he waited to take leave of it he might wholly miss his chance. It was represented with supreme vividness by Mme. de Vionnet, and that is why, in a word, he waited no longer. He had seen in a flash that he must anticipate Mrs. Pocock. He was accordingly much disappointed on now learning from the portress that the lady of his quest was not in Paris. She had gone for some days in the country. There was nothing in this accident but what was natural, yet it produced for poor Strether a drop of all confidence. It was suddenly as if he should never see her again, and as if, moreover, he had brought it on himself by not having been quite kind to her.

It was the advantage of his having let his fancy lose itself for a little in the gloom that the prospect, by reaction, began really to brighten from the moment the deputation from Woollett alighted on the platform of the station. They had come straight from Havre, having