Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/346

340 as if his friend's penetration, recurrent and insistent, made him really, after all, too nervous. "No—she isn't now. It isn't in the least," he went on, "Chad's fault. He's really all right .I mean he would have been willing. But she came over with ideas. Those she had got at home. They had been her motive and support in joining her brother and his wife. She was to save our friend."

"Ah, like me, poor thing?" Strether also got to his feet.

"Exactly—she had a bad moment. It was very soon distinct to her, to pull her up, to let her down, that, alas, he was, he is, saved. There's nothing left for her to do."

"Not even to love him?"

"She would have loved him better as she originally believed him."

Strether wondered. "Of course one asks one's self what notion a little girl forms, where a young man's in question, of such a history and such a state."

"Well, this little girl saw them, no doubt, as obscure, but she saw them, practically, as wrong. The wrong, for her, was the obscure. Chad turns out, at any rate, right and good and disconcerting, while what she was all prepared for, primed and girded and wound up for, was to deal with him as the general opposite."

"Yet wasn't her whole point"—Strether weighed it—"that he was to be, that he could be, made better, redeemed?"

Little Bilham fixed it all a moment, and then with a small headshake that diffused a tenderness: "She's too late. Too late for the miracle."

"Yes"—his companion saw enough. "Still, if the worst fault of his condition is that it may be all there for her to profit by?"

"Oh, she doesn't want to 'profit,' in that flat way. She doesn't want to profit by another woman's work—she wants the miracle to have been her own miracle. That's what she's too late for."

Strether quite felt how it all fitted; yet there seemed one stray piece. "I'm bound to say, you know, that she strikes one, on these lines, as fastidious—what you call here difficile."