Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/265

Rh with a face half wistful and half rueful. They talked of him, the two others, as they drove, and Strether put Chad in possession of much of his own heavy sense of things. He had already, a few days before, named to him the wire that he was convinced their friend had pulled—a confidence that had made, on the young man's part, quite hugely for curiosity and diversion. The effect of the matter, moreover, Strether could see, was sharp; he saw, that is, how Chad judged a system of influence in which Waymarsh had served as a determinant—an impression just now quickened again; with the whole bearing of such a fact on the youth's view of his relations. As it came up between them that they might now regard their friend as a feature of the control of these latter now sought to be exerted from Woollett, Strether felt indeed that it would be stamped all over him, half an hour later, for Sarah Pocock's eyes, that he was as much on Chad's "side" as Waymarsh had probably described him. He was letting himself, at present, go; there was no denying it; it might be desperation, it might be confidence; he should offer himself to the arriving travellers bristling with all the lucidity he had cultivated.

He repeated to Chad what he had been saying, in the court, to Waymarsh; how there was no doubt whatever that his sister would find the latter a kindred spirit, no doubt of the alliance, based on an exchange of views, that the pair would successfully strike up. They would become as thick as thieves, which, moreover, was but a development of what Strether remembered to have said in one of his first discussions with his mate, struck as he had then already been with the elements of affinity between that personage and Mrs. Newsome herself. "I told him, one day when he had questioned me on your mother, that she was a person who, when he should know her, would rouse in him, I was sure, a special enthusiasm; and that hangs together with the conviction we now feel—this certitude that Mrs. Pocock will take him into her boat. For it's your mother's own boat that she's pulling."

"Ah," said Chad, "mother's worth fifty of Sally!"

"A thousand; but when you presently meet her, all the same, you'll be meeting your mother's representative—just