Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/339

Rh amusement, he left it, no doubt, but scant margin as an opportunity for anything else. He suggested, invented, abounded, yet all the while with the loosest, lightest rein. Strether, during his own weeks, had gained a sense of knowing Paris; but he saw it afresh, and with fresh emotion, in the form of the knowledge, the panem et circenses again, offered to his fellow-emissary.

A thousand unuttered thoughts hummed for him in the air of these observations: not the least frequent of which was that Sarah might well, of a truth, not quite know whither she was drifting. She was in no position not to appear to expect that Chad should treat her handsomely; yet she struck our friend as privately stiffening a little each time she missed the chance of marking the great nuance. The great nuance was, in brief, that of course her brother must treat her handsomely—she should like to see him not; but that treating her handsomely, none the less, wasn't all—in all treating her handsomely buttered no parsnips; and that in fine there were moments when she felt the fixed eyes of their admirable absent mother fairly screw into the flat of her back. Strether, watching, after his habit, and overscoring with thought, positively had moments of his own in which he found himself sorry for her—occasions on which she affected him as a person seated in a runaway vehicle and turning over the question of a possible jump. Would she jump, could she, would that be a safe place?—this question, at such instants, sat for him in her lapse into pallor, her tight lips, her conscious eyes. It came back to the main point at issue: would she be, after all, to be squared? He believed, on the whole, she would jump; yet his alternations on this subject were the more especial stuff of his suspense. One thing remained well before him—a conviction that was in fact to gain sharpness from the impressions of this evening: that if she should gather in her skirts, close her eyes and quit the carnage while in motion, he would promptly enough become aware. She would alight from her headlong course more or less directly upon him; it would be appointed to him, unquestionably, to receive her entire weight. Signs and portents of the experience thus in reserve for him had, as it happened, multiplied even