Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/370

364 of her personal sense of everything, and the assertion of her personal dignity."

They were the very words of the lady of Woollett—he would have known them in a thousand; her parting charge to her child. Mrs. Pocock, accordingly, spoke to this extent by book, and the fact immensely moved him. "If she does really feel as you say, it's, of course, very, very dreadful. I've given sufficient proof, one would have thought," he added, "of my deep admiration for Mrs. Newsome."

"And pray what proof would one have thought you'd call sufficient? That of thinking this person here so far superior to her?"

He wondered again; he waited. "Ah, dear Sarah, you must leave me this person here!"

In his desire to avoid all vulgar retorts, to show how, even perversely, he clung to his rag of reason, he had softly almost wailed this plea. Yet he knew it to be perhaps the most positive declaration he had ever made in his life, and his visitor's reception of it virtually gave it that importance. "That's exactly what I'm delighted to do. God knows we don't want her! You take good care not to meet," she observed in a still higher key, "my question about their life. If you do consider it a thing one can even speak of, I congratulate you on your taste!"

The life she alluded to was, of course, Chad's and Mme. de Vionnet's, which she thus bracketed together in a way that made him wince a little, there being nothing for him but to take home her full intention. It was none the less his inconsequence that while he had himself been enjoying for weeks the view of the brilliant woman's specific action, he just suffered from any characterisation of it by other lips. "I think tremendously well of her, at the same time that I seem to feel her 'life' to be really none of my business. It's my business, that is, only so far as Chad's own life is affected by it; and what has happened—don't you see?—is that Chad's has been affected so beautifully. The proof of the pudding's in the eating"—he tried, with no great success, to help it out with a touch of pleasantry, while she let him go on as if to sink and sink. He went on, however, well enough, as