Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/307

Rh that I really didn't, quite as much as Chad, come over to have one before it was too late. He wouldn't have expected it of me; but men of my age, at Woollett—and especially the least likely ones—have been noted as liable to strange outbreaks, belated, uncanny clutches at the unusual, the ideal. It's an effect that a lifetime of Woollett has quite been observed as having; and I thus give it to you, in Jim's view, for what it's worth. Now his wife and his mother-in-law," Strether continued to explain, "have, as in honour bound, no patience with such performances, late or early; which puts Jim, as against his relatives, on the other side. Besides," he added, "I don't think he really wants Chad back. If Chad doesn't come"

"He'll have," Mme. de Vionnet quite apprehended, "more of the free hand?"

"Well, Chad's the bigger man."

"So he'll work now, en dessous, to keep him quiet?"

"No, he won't 'work' at all, and he won't do anything en dessous. He's very decent, and he won't be a traitor in the camp. But he'll be amused with his own little view of our duplicity; he'll sniff up what he ecstatically supposes to be Paris from morning till night, and he'll be, as to the rest, for Chad—well, just what he is."

She thought it over. "A solemn warning?"

He met it almost with glee, "You are as wonderful as everybody says!" And then to explain all he meant: "I drove him about for his first hour, and do you know what—all beautifully unconscious—he most put before me? Why, that something like that is at bottom, as an improvement to his present state, as in fact the real redemption of it, what they think it may not be too late to make of our young friend." With which, as, taking it in, she seemed, in her recurrent alarm, bravely to gaze at the possibility, he completed his statement. "But it is too late. Thanks to you!"

It drew from her again one of her indefinite reflections. "Oh, 'me'—after all!"

He stood before her so exhilarated by his demonstration that he could fairly be jocular. "Everything's comparative. You're better than that."