Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/331

Rh become aware of the little drama. When she knew where she was, in short, he had made it out; and he made it out at present still better, though with never a direct word passing between them all the while on the subject of his own predicament. There had been at first, as he sat there with her, a moment during which he wondered if she meant to break ground in respect to his prime undertaking. That door stood so strangely ajar that he was half prepared to be conscious, at any juncture, of her having, of someone's having, quite bounced in. But, friendly, familiar, light of touch and happy of tact, she exquisitely stayed out; so that it was, for all the world, as if to show she could deal with him without being reduced to—well, to scarcely anything.

It fully came up for them then, by means of their talking of everything but Chad, that Mamie, unlike Sarah, unlike Jim, knew perfectly what had become of him. It fully came up that she had taken to the last fraction of an inch the measure of the change in him, and that she wanted Strether to know what a secret she proposed to make of it. They talked most conveniently—as if they had had no chance yet—about Woollett, and that had virtually the effect of their keeping the secret more close. The hour took on for Strether, little by little, an odd, sad sweetness of savour; he had such a revulsion in Mamie's favour and on behalf of her social value as might have come from remorse at some early injustice. She made him, as under the breath of some vague western whiff, homesick and freshly restless; he could really, for the time, have fancied himself stranded with her, on a far shore, during an ominous calm, in a quaint community of shipwreck. Their little interview was like a picnic on a coral strand; they passed each other, with melancholy smiles and looks sufficiently allusive, such cupfuls of water as they had saved. Especially sharp in Strether, meanwhile, was the conviction that his companion really knew, as we have hinted, where she had come out. It was at a very particular place—only that she would never tell him; it would be above all what he should have to puzzle for himself. This was what he hoped for, because his interest in the girl wouldn't be complete without it. No more