Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/368

362 —everything that had lent intention to this particular failure affected him as gathered into a large, loose bundle and thrown, in her words, into his face. The missile made him to that extent catch his breath; which, however, he presently recovered. "Why, when a woman is at once so charming and so beneficent"

"You can sacrifice mothers and sisters to her without a blush, and can make them cross the ocean on purpose to feel the more, and take from you the straighter, how you do it?"

Yes, she had taken him up as short and as sharply as that; but he tried not to flounder in her grasp. "I don't think there's anything I've done in any such calculated way as you describe. Everything has come as a sort of indistinguishable part of everything else. Your coming out belonged closely to my having come before you, and my having come was a result of our general state of mind. Our general state of mind had proceeded, on its side, from our funny ignorance, our funny misconceptions and confusions—from which, since then, an inexorable tide of light seems to have floated us into our perhaps still funnier knowledge. Don't you like your brother as he is," he went on, "and haven't you given your mother an intelligible account of all that that comes to?"

It put to her also, doubtless, his own tone, too many things; this at least would have been the case had not his final challenge directly helped her. Everything, at the stage they had reached, directly helped her, because everything betrayed in him such a basis of intention. He saw—the odd way things came out!—that he would have been held less monstrous had he only been a little wilder. What exposed him was just his poor old trick of quiet inwardness, what exposed him was his thinking such offence. He had not in the least, however, the desire to irritate that Sarah imputed to him, and he could only at last temporise, for the moment, with her indignant view. She was altogether more irritated than he had expected, and he would probably understand this better when he should learn what had occurred for her with Chad. Till then her view of his particular blackness, her clear surprise at his not clutching the pole she held out, must pass