Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/323

Rh His companion brooded. "But won't he wish, for his own satisfaction, to make his ground good to her?"

No—he'll leave it to me, he'll leave everything to me. I 'sort of' feel"—he worked it out—"that the whole thing will come upon me. Yes, I shall have every inch and every ounce of it. I shall be used for it!" And Strether lost himself in the prospect. Then he fancifully expressed the issue. "To the last drop of my blood."

Maria, however, roundly protested. "Ah, you'll please keep a drop for me. I shall have a use for it!"—which she didn't, however, follow up. She had come back, the next moment, to another matter. "Mrs. Pocock, with her brother, is trusting only to her general charm?"

"So it would seem."

"And the charm's not working?"

Well, Strether put it otherwise. "She's sounding the note of home—which is the very best thing she can do."

"The best for Mme. de Vionnet?"

"The best for home itself. The natural one. The right one."

"Right," Maria asked, "when it fails?"

Strether had a pause. "The difficulty is Jim. Jim's the note of home."

She debated. "Ah, not, surely, the note of Mrs. Newsome."

But he had it all. "The note of the home for which Mrs. Newsome wants him—the home of the business. Jim stands, with his little legs apart, at the door of that tent; and Jim is, frankly speaking, extremely fearsome."

Maria stared. "And you in, you poor thing, for your evening with him?"

"Oh, he's all right for me!" Strether laughed. "Anyone's good enough for me. But Sarah shouldn't, all the same, have brought him. She doesn't appreciate him."

His friend was amused with this statement of it. "Doesn't know, you mean, how bad he is?"

Strether shook his head with decision. "Not really."

She hesitated. "Then doesn't Mrs. Newsome?"

It made him frankly do the same. "Well, no—since you ask me."

Maria rubbed it in. "Not really either?"