Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/273

Rh the formation between them of a "split." He had taken this measure in solitude and meditation; but the catastrophe, as Sarah steamed up, looked for its few seconds unprecedentedly dreadful, or proved, more exactly, absolutely unthinkable; so that his finding something free and familiar to respond to brought with it an instant renewal of his loyalty. He had suddenly sounded the whole depth, had gasped at what he might have lost.

Well, he could now, for the quarter of an hour of their detention, hover about the travellers as soothingly as if their direct message to him was that he had lost nothing. He wasn't going to have Sarah write to her mother that night that he was in any way altered or strange. There had been times enough for a month when it had seemed to him that he was strange, that he was altered in every way, but that was a matter for himself. He knew at least whose business it was not; it was not, at all events, such a circumstance as Sarah's own unaided lights would help her to. Even if she had come out to flash those lights more than yet appeared, she wouldn't make much headway against mere pleasantness. He counted on being able to be merely pleasant to the end, and if only from incapacity, moreover, to formulate anything different. He couldn't even formulate to himself his being changed and queer. It had taken place—the process—somewhere deep down. Maria Gostrey had caught glimpses of it. But how was he to fish it up, even if he desired, for Mrs. Pocock? This was the spirit, then, in which he hovered, and with the easier throb in it much indebted, moreover, to the impression of high and established adequacy as a pretty girl promptly produced in him by Mamie. He had wondered vaguely, turning over many things in the fidget of his thoughts, if Mamie were as pretty as Woollett published her; as to which issue seeing her now again was to be so swept away by Woollett's opinion that the consequence really let loose for the imagination an avalanche of others. There were positively five minutes in which the last word seemed of necessity to abide with a Woollett represented by a Mamie. This was the sort of truth the place itself would feel; it would send her forth in confidence; it would point to her with triumph; it would take