Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/303

Rh "Oh, yes—about your own case too!" It diminished his magnanimity, but she only looked at him with the greater indulgence.

"Not, however," he went on, "that I want to talk to you about that. It's my own little affair, and I mentioned it simply as part of Mrs. Pocock's advantage." No, no; though there was a queer present temptation in it, and his suspense was so real that to fidget was a relief, he wouldn't talk to her about Mrs. Newsome, wouldn't work off on her the anxiety produced in him by Sarah's calculated omissions of reference. The effect she produced of representing her mother had been produced—and that was just the immense, the uncanny part of it—without her having so much as mentioned that lady. She had brought no message, had alluded to no question, had only answered his inquiries with hopeless, limited propriety. She had invented a way of meeting them—as if he had been a polite, perfunctory, poor relation, of distant degree—that made them almost ridiculous in him. He couldn't, moreover, on his own side, ask much without appearing to publish how he had lately lacked the direct and intimate news to which he would have been so conspicuously entitled; a circumstance of which it was Sarah's profound policy not to betray a suspicion. These things, all the same, he wouldn't breathe to Mme. de Vionnet—much as they might make him walk up and down. And what he didn't say—as well as what she didn't, for she had also her high decencies—didn't diminish the effect of his being there with her at the end of ten minutes more intimately on the basis of saving her than he had yet had occasion to be. It ended, in fact, by being quite beautiful between them, the number of things they had a manifest consciousness of not saying. He would have liked to turn her, critically, to the subject of Mrs. Pocock, but he so stuck to the line he felt to be the point of honour and of delicacy that he scarce even asked her what her personal impression had been. He knew it, for that matter, without putting her to trouble: that she wondered how, with such elements, Sarah could still have no charm was one of the principal things she held her tongue about. Strether would have been interested in her estimate of the elements—