Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/276

270 he could read more than one message. However Sarah was judging her brother, Chad's conclusion about his sister, and about her husband and her husband's sister, was at the least on the way to be sharp. Strether felt the sharpness, and that, as the look between them was an exchange, what he himself gave back was relatively vague. Any comparison of notes, however, could wait; everything struck him as depending on the effect produced by Chad. Neither Sarah nor Mamie had in any way, at the station—where they had had, after all, full time—broken out about it; which, to make up for this, was what our friend had expected of Jim as soon as they should find themselves together. It was queer to him that he had had that noiseless brush with Chad; an ironic intelligence with this youth on the subject of his relatives, an intelligence carried on under their nose, and, as might be said at their expense, such a matter marked again for him strongly the number of stages he had come; albeit that if the number seemed great the time taken for the final one was but the turn of a hand. He had before this had his moments of wondering if he himself were not perhaps changed even as Chad was changed. Only what in Chad was conspicuous improvement—well, he had no name ready for the action, in his own organism, of his own more timid dose. He should have to see first what this action would be. And for his occult passage with the young man, after all, the directness of it had no greater oddity than the fact that the young man's way with the three travellers should have been so happy a manifestation. Strether liked him for it, on the spot, as he had not yet liked him; it affected him, while it lasted, as he might have been affected by some light, pleasant, perfect work of art; to that degree that he wondered if they were really worthy of it, took it in and did it justice; to that degree that it would have been scarce a miracle if, there in the luggage-room, while they waited for their things, Sarah had pulled his sleeve and drawn him aside. "You're right; we haven't quite known what you mean, mother and I, but now we see. Chad's magnificent; what can one want more? If this be the kind of thing!" On which they might, as it were, have embraced and begun to work together.