Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/353

Rh He showed that he knew it. "She's more wonderful than ever?"

"Than ever. With Mr. Pocock."

Strether wondered. "Mme. de Vionnet—with Jim?"

"Mme. de Vionnet—with 'Jim.'" Miss Barrace was historic.

"And what is she doing with him?"

"Ah, you must ask him!"

Strether's face lighted again at the prospect. "It will be amusing to do so." Yet he continued to wonder. "But she must have some idea."

"Of course she has—she has twenty ideas. She has, in the first place," said Miss Barrace, swinging a little her tortoise-shell, "that of doing her part. Her part is to help you."

It came out as nothing had come yet; links were missing and connections unnamed, but it was suddenly as if they were at the heart of their subject. "Yes; how much more she does it," Strether gravely reflected, "than I help her!" It all came over him as with the near presence of the beauty, the grace, the intense, dissimulated spirit with which he had, as he said, been putting off contact. "She has courage."

"Ah, she has courage!" Miss Barrace quite agreed; and it was as if, for a moment, they saw the quantity in each other's face.

But indeed the whole thing was present. "How much she must care!"

"Ah, there it is. She does care. But it isn't, is it," Miss Barrace considerately added, "as if you had ever had any doubt of that?"

Strether seemed suddenly to like to feel that he really never had. "Why, of course it's the whole point."

"Voilà!" Miss Barrace smiled.

"It's why one came out," Strether went on. "And it's why one has stayed so long. And it's also"—he abounded—"why one's going home. It's why, it's why"

"It's why everything!" she concurred. "It's why she might be to-night—for all she looks and shows, and for all your friend 'Jim' does—about twenty years old. That's another of her ideas; to be, for him, and to be quite easily and charmingly, as young as a little girl."