Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/275

Rh had seen him come up with Jeanne de Vionnet in Gloriani's garden, and the fancy he had had about that—the fancy obscured now, thickly overlaid with others—this recollection was during these minutes his only note of trouble. He had often, in spite of himself, wondered if Chad were not, with Jeanne, the object of a still and shaded flame. It was on the cards that the child might be tremulously in love, and this conviction now flickered up not a bit the less for his disliking to think of it, for its being, in a complicated situation, a complication the more, and for something indescribable in Mamie, something, at all events, that his own mind straightway lent her, something that gave her value, gave her intensity and purpose as the symbol of an opposition. Little Jeanne wasn't really at all in question—how could she be?—yet from the moment Miss Pocock had shaken her skirts on the platform, touched up the immense bows of her hat, and settled properly over her shoulder the strap of her morocco-and-gilt travelling satchel, from that moment little Jeanne was opposed.

It was in the cab with Jim that impressions really crowded on Strether, giving him the strangest sense of length of absence from people among whom he had lived for years. Having them thus come out to him was as if he had returned to find them, and the droll promptitude of Jim's mental reaction threw his own initiation far back into the past. Whoever might or mightn't be suited by what was going on among them, Jim, for one, would certainly be; his instant recognition—frank and whimsical—of what the affair was for him gave Strether a glow of pleasure. "I say, you know, this is about my shape, and if it hadn't been for you!" so he broke out as the charming streets met his healthy appetite; and he wound up, after an expressive nudge, with a clap of his companion's knee and an "Oh, you, you—you are doing it!" that was charged with rich meaning. Strether felt in it the intention of homage, but, with a curiosity otherwise occupied, postponed taking it up. What he was asking himself for the time was how Sarah Pocock, in the opportunity already given her, had judged her brother—from whom he himself, as they finally, at the station, separated for their different conveyances, had had a look into which