Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/280

274 of his catastrophe. He was quick enough to see that Jim Pocock declined judgment, had hovered quite round the outer edge of discussion and anxiety, leaving all analysis of their question to the ladies alone and now only feeling his way toward some small, droll cynicism. It broke out afresh, the cynicism—it had already shown a flicker—in a but slightly deferred "Well, hanged if I would if I were he!"

"You mean you wouldn't in Chad's place?"

"Give up this to go back and run the advertising." Poor Jim, with his arms folded and his little legs out in the open fiacre, drank in the sparkling Paris noon and carried his eyes from one side of their vista to the other. "Why, I want to come out here and live myself. And I want to live while I am here too. I feel with you—oh, you've been grand, old man, and I've twigged—that it ain't right to worry Chad. I don't mean to persecute him; I couldn't in conscience. It's thanks to you, at any rate, that I'm here; and I'm sure I'm much obliged. You're a lovely pair."

There were things in this speech that Strether, for the time, let pass. "Don't you then think it important the advertising should be thoroughly taken in hand? Chad will be, so far as capacity is concerned," he went on, "the man to do it."

"Where did he pick up his capacity," Jim asked, "over here?"

"He didn't pick it up over here, and the wonderful thing is that over here he hasn't inevitably lost it. He has a natural turn for business, an extraordinary head. He comes by that," Strether explained, "honestly enough. He's in that respect his father's son, and also—for she's wonderful, in her way, too—his mother's. He has other tastes and other tendencies; but Mrs. Newsome and your wife are quite right about his having that. He's very remarkable."

"Well, I guess he is! " Jim Pocock comfortably sighed. "But if you've believed so in his making us hum, why have you so prolonged the discussion? Don't you know we've been quite anxious about you?"

These questions were not informed with earnestness, but Strether saw he must none the less make a choice and take