Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/350

344 "Wonderfully—but just so that it does build her out. She's bricked up, she's buried alive!"

Strether seemed for a moment to look at it; but it brought him to a sigh. "Oh, but she's not dead! It will take more than this to kill her."

His companion had a pause that might have been for pity. "No, I can't pretend I think she's finished—or that it's for more than to-night." She remained pensive as if with the same compunction. "It's only up to her chin." Then again for the fun of it: "She can still breathe."

"She can still breathe!"—he echoed it in the same spirit. "And do you know," he went on, "what's really, all this time, happening to me?—through the beauty of music, the gaiety of voices, the uproar, in short, of our revel and the felicity of your wit? The sound of Mrs. Pocock's respiration drowns for me, I assure you, every other. It's literally all I hear."

She focussed him with her clink of chains. "Well!" she breathed ever so kindly.

"Well, what?"

"She is free from her chin up," she mused; "and that will be enough for her."

"It will be enough for me!" Strether ruefully laughed. "Waymarsh has really," he then asked, "brought her to see you?"

"Yes—but that's the worst of it. I could do you no good. And yet I tried hard."

Strether wondered. "And how did you try?"

"Why, I didn't speak of you."

"I see. That was better."

"Then what would have been worse? For speaking or silent," she lightly wailed, "I somehow 'compromise.' And it has never been anyone but you."

"That shows"—he was magnanimous—"that it's something not in you, but in one's self. It's my fault."

She was silent a little. "No, it's Mr. Waymarsh's. It's the fault of his having brought her."

"Ah then," said Strether good-naturedly, "why did he bring her?"

"He couldn't afford not to."