Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/348

342 doorway of the room between little Bilham and brilliant Miss Barrace, who was entering as Bilham withdrew. She had apparently put him a question, to which he had replied by turning to indicate his late interlocutor; toward whom, after an interrogation further aided by a resort to the optical machinery that seemed, like her other ornaments, curious and archaic, the genial lady, suggesting more than ever, for her fellow-guest, the old French print, the historic portrait, directed herself with an intention that Strether instantly met. He knew in advance the first note she would sound, and took in, as she approached, all her need of sounding it. Nothing yet had been so "wonderful" between them as the present occasion; and it was her special sense of this quality in occasions that she was there, as she was in most places, to feed. That sense had already been so well fed by the situation about them that she had quitted the other room, forsaken the music, dropped out of the play, abandoned, in a word, the stage itself, that she might stand a minute behind the scenes with Strether and so perhaps figure as one of the famous augurs replying, behind the oracle, to the wink of the other. Seated near him presently where little Bilham had sat, she replied in truth to many things; beginning as soon as he had said to her—what he hoped he said without fatuity—"All you ladies are extraordinarily kind to me."

She played her long handle, which shifted her observation; she saw in an instant all the absences, all the diverted attentions, that left them free. "How can we be anything else? But isn't that exactly your plight? 'We ladies'—oh, we're nice, and you must be having enough of us! As one of us, you know, I don't know that I'm crazy about us! But Miss Gostrey, at least, to-night, has left you alone, hasn't she?" With which she again looked about as if Maria might still lurk.

"Oh, yes," said Strether; "she's only sitting up for me at home." And then as this elicited from his companion her gay "Oh, oh, oh!" he explained that he meant sitting up in suspense and prayer. "We thought it on the whole better she shouldn't be present; and either way, of course, it's a terrible worry for her." He abounded in the sense of his appeal to the ladies, and they might take their