Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/327

Rh reasoning he still hung fire. He had been waiting for Mrs. Pocock and the sound of the oracle; but he had to gird himself afresh—which he did in the embrasure of the window, neither advancing nor retreating—before provoking the revelation. It was apparently for Sarah to come more into view; he was at her service when the sense of it should move her. She did, however, as meanwhile happened, come more into view: only she came, luckily, at the last minute, not in the form he had conceived. The occupant of the balcony was after all quite another person, a person presented, on a second look, by a charming back and a slight shift of her position, as beautiful, brilliant, unconscious Mamie—Mamie alone at home, Mamie passing her time in her own innocent way, Mamie in short, rather shabbily used, but Mamie absorbed, interested and interesting. With her arms on the balustrade and her attention dropped to the street, she allowed Strether to watch her, to consider several things, without turning round.

But the oddity was, that when he had so watched and considered he simply stepped back into the room without following up his advantage. He revolved there again for several minutes, quite as with something new to think of and as if the bearings of the possibility of Sarah had been superseded. For frankly, yes, it had bearings thus to find the girl in solitary possession. There was something in it that touched him to a point not to have been reckoned beforehand, something that softly, but quite pressingly, spoke to him, and that spoke the more each time he paused again at the edge of the balcony and saw her still unaware. Her companions were, plainly, scattered; Sarah would be off somewhere with Waymarsh and Chad off somewhere with Jim. Strether didn't at all mentally impute to Chad that he was with his "good friend"; he gave him the benefit of supposing him involved in appearances that, had he had to describe them—for instance to Maria—he would have conveniently qualified as more subtle. It came to him indeed the next thing that there was perhaps almost an excess of refinement in having left Mamie, in such weather, up there alone, however she might in fact have extemporised, under the charm of the