Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/328

322 Rue de Rivoli, a little makeshift Paris of wonder and fancy. Our friend, at any rate, now recognised—and it was as if, at the recognition, Mrs. Newsome's fixed intensity had suddenly, with a deep, audible gasp, grown thin and vague—that, day after day, he had been conscious, in respect to his young lady, of something odd and ambiguous, but a matter into which he could at last read a meaning. It had been, at the most, this mystery, an obsession—oh, an obsession agreeable; and it had just now fallen into its place as at the touch of a spring. It had represented the possibility between them of some communication baffled by accident and delay—the possibility even of some relation as yet unacknowledged.

There was always their old relation, the fruit of the Woollett years; but that—and it was what was strangest—had nothing whatever in common with what was now in the air. As a child, as a "bud," and then again as a flower of expansion, Mamie had bloomed for him, freely, in the almost incessantly open doorways of home; where he remembered her as first very forward, as then very backward—for he had carried on at one period, in Mrs. Newsome's parlours (oh, Mrs. Newsome's phases, and his own!) a course of English literature reinforced by exams and teas—and once more, finally, as very much in advance. But he had kept no great sense of points of contact; it not being in the nature of things at Woollett that the freshest of the buds should find herself in the same basket with the most withered of the winter apples. The child had given sharpness, above all, to his sense of the flight of time: it was but the day before yesterday that he had tripped up on her hoop, yet his experience of remarkable women—destined, it would seem, remarkably to grow—felt itself ready, this afternoon, quite braced itself, to include her. She had, in fine, more to say to him than he had ever dreamed the pretty girl of the moment could have; and the proof of the circumstance was that, visibly, unmistakably, she had been able to say it to no one else. It was something she could mention neither to her brother, to her sister-in-law, nor to Chad; though he could just imagine that, had she still been at home, she might have brought it out, as a supreme tribute to age, authority and