Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/304

298 indubitably there, some of them, and to be appraised according to taste—but he denied himself even the luxury of this diversion. The way Mme. de Vionnet affected him to-day was in itself a kind of demonstration of the happy employment of gifts. How could a woman think Sarah had charm who struck one as having arrived at it herself by such different roads? On the other hand, of course, Sarah wasn't obliged to have it. He felt as if somehow Mme. de Vionnet was. The great question meanwhile was what Chad thought of his sister, which was naturally ushered in by that of Sarah's apprehension of Chad. This they could talk of, and with a freedom purchased by their discretion in other directions. The difficulty, however, was that they were reduced as yet to conjecture. He had given them in the day or two as little of a lead as Sarah, and Mme. de Vionnet mentioned that she had not seen him since his sister's arrival.

"And does that strike you as such an age?"

She met it in all candour. "Oh, I won't pretend I don't miss him. Sometimes I see him every day. Our friendship is like that. Make what you will of it!" she whimsically smiled; a little flicker of the kind, occasional in her, that had more than once moved him to wonder what he might best make of her. "But he's perfectly right," she hastened to add, "and I wouldn't have him fail in any way, at present, for the world. I would sooner not see him for three months. I begged him to be beautiful to them, and he fully feels it for himself."

Strether turned away under his quick perception; she was so odd a mixture of lucidity and mystery. She fell in at moments with the theory about her that he most cherished, and she seemed at others to blow it into air. She spoke now as if her art were all an innocence, and then again as if her innocence were all an art. "Oh, he's giving himself up, and he'll do so to the end. How can he but want, now that it's within reach, his full impression?—which is much more important, you know, than either yours or mine. But he's just soaking," Strether said as he came back; "he's going in, conscientiously, for a saturation. I'm bound to say he is very good."