Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/312

306 "Do you know what I wish?" he went on, "I wish Mrs. Newsome herself could have a look."

She stared, missing a little his logic. "It would make a difference?"

Her voice was so earnest that, as he continued to look about, he laughed. "It might!"

"But you've told her, you tell me"

"All about you? Yes, a wonderful story. But there's all the indescribable—what one gets only on the spot."

"Thank you!" she charmingly and sadly smiled.

"It's all about me here," he freely continued. "Mrs. Newsome feels things."

But she seemed doomed, always, to come back to doubt. "No one feels so much as you. No—no one."

"So much the worse, then, for everyone. It's very easy."

They were by this time in the antechamber, still alone together, as she had not rung for a servant. The antechamber was high and square, grave and suggestive too, a little cold and slippery even in summer, and with a few old prints that were precious, Strether divined, on the walls. He stood in the middle, slightly lingering, vaguely directing his glasses, while, leaning against the doorpost of the room, she gently pressed her cheek to the side of the recess.

"You would have been a friend."

"I?" It startled him a little.

"For the reason you say. You're not, like almost everyone, stupid." And then abruptly, as if her bringing it out were somehow founded on that fact, "We're marrying Jeanne."

It affected him on the spot as a move in a game, and he was even then not without the sense that this wasn't the way Jeanne should be married. But he quickly showed his interest—though, as quickly afterwards struck him, with an absurd confusion of mind. "You? You and—a—not Chad?" Of course it was the child's father who made the 'we'; but to the child's father it would have cost him an effort to allude. Yet didn't it seem the next minute that M. de Vionnet was, after all, not in question?—since she had gone on to say that it was indeed to Chad