Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/369

Rh as extravagant. "I leave you to flatter yourself," she returned, "that what you speak of is what you've beautifully done. When a thing has been already described in such a lovely way!" But she caught herself up, and her comment on his description rang out sufficiently loud. "Do you consider her even an apology for a decent woman?"

Ah, there it was at last! She put the matter more crudely than, for his own mixed purposes, he had yet had to do; but, essentially, it was all one matter. It was so much—so much; and she treated it, poor lady, as so little. He grew conscious, as he was now apt to, of a strange smile, and the next moment he found himself talking like Miss Barrace. "She has struck me from the first as wonderful. I've been thinking too, moreover, that, after all, she would probably have represented even for yourself something rather new and rather good."

He was to have given Mrs. Pocock with this, however, but her best opportunity for a sound of derision. "Rather new? I hope so with all my heart!"

"I mean," he explained, "that she might have affected you by her exquisite amiability—a real revelation, it has seemed to myself; her high rarity, her distinction of every sort."

He had been, with these words, consciously a little "precious"; but he had had to be—he couldn't give her the truth of the case without them; and it seemed to him, moreover, now, that he didn't care. He had at all events not served his cause, for she sprang at its exposed side. "A 'revelation'—to me: I've to come to such a woman for a revelation? You talk to me about 'distinction'—you, you who've had your privilege—when the most distinguished woman we shall either of us have seen in this world sits there insulted, in her loneliness, by your incredible comparison?"

Strether forebore, with an effort, from straying; but he looked all about him. "Does your mother herself make the point that she sits insulted?"

Sarah's answer came so straight, so "pat," as might have been said, that he felt on the instant its origin. "She has confided to my judgment and my tenderness the expression