Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/274

268 its stand on her with assurance; it would be conscious of no requirement she didn't meet, of no question she couldn't answer.

Well, it was right, Strether slipped smoothly enough into the cheerfulness of saying. Granted that a community might be best represented by a young lady of twenty-two, Mamie perfectly played the part, played it as if she were used to it, and looked and spoke and dressed the character. He wondered if she mightn't, in the high light of Paris—a cool, full studio-light, becoming, yet treacherous—show as too conscious of these matters; but the next moment he felt satisfied that her consciousness was, after all, empty for its size, rather too simple than too mixed, and that the kind way with her would be not to take many things out of it, but to put as many as possible in. She was erect and conveniently tall, just a trifle too bloodlessly fair perhaps, but with a pleasant, public, familiar radiance that affirmed her vitality. She might have been "receiving" for Woollett wherever she found herself, and there was something in her manner, her tone, her motion, her pretty blue eyes, her pretty perfect teeth, and her very small—too small—nose that immediately placed her, to the fancy, between the windows of a hot, bright room in which voices were high—up at that end to which people were brought to be "presented." They were there to congratulate—these images—and Strether's renewed vision completed the idea in this key. What Mamie was like was the happy bride—the bride after the church and just before going away. She wasn't the mere maiden; yet, on the other hand, she was only as much married as that. She was in the brilliant, triumphant, festal stage. Well, might it last her long!

Strether rejoiced in these things for Chad, who was all genial attention to the needs of his friends, besides having arranged that his servant should reinforce him. The ladies were certainly pleasant to see, and Mamie would be at any time and anywhere pleasant to exhibit. She would look extraordinarily like his young wife—the wife of a honeymoon—should he go about with her. But that was his own affair, or perhaps it was hers; it was something, at any rate, she couldn't help, Strether remembered how he