Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/308

302 "You"—she could but answer him—"are better than anything." But she had another thought. "Will Mrs. Pocock come to me?"

"Oh yes—she'll do that. As soon, that is, as my friend Waymarsh—her friend now—leaves her leisure."

She showed an interest. "Is he so much her friend as that?"

"Why, didn't you see it all at the hotel?"

"Oh"—she was amused—"'all' is a good deal to say. I don't know—I forget. I lost myself in her."

"You were splendid," Strether returned—"but 'all' isn't a good deal to say; it's only a little. Yet it's charming so far as it goes. She wants a man to herself."

"And hasn't she got you?"

"Do you think she looked at me—or even at you—as if she had?" Strether easily dismissed that pleasantry. "Everyone, you see, must strike her as having somebody. You've got Chad—and Chad has got you."

"I see"—she made of it what she could. "And you've got Maria."

Well, he on his side accepted that. "I've got Maria. And Maria has got me. So it goes."

"But Mr. Jim—whom has he got?"

"Oh, he has got—or it's as if he had—the whole place."

"But for Mr. Waymarsh"—she recalled—"isn't Miss Barrace before anyone else?"

He shook his head. "Miss Barrace is a raffinée, and her amusement won't lose by Mrs. Pocock. It will gain rather—especially if Sarah triumphs and she comes in for a view of it."

"How well you know us!" Mme. de Vionnet, at this, frankly sighed.

"No it seems to me it's we that I know. I know Sarah—it's perhaps on that ground only that my feet are firm. Waymarsh will take her round, while Chad takes Jim—and I shall be, I assure you, delighted for both of them. Sarah will have had what she requires—she will have paid her own tribute to the ideal; and he will have done about the same. In Paris it's in the air—so what can one do less? If there's a point that, beyond any other, Sarah