Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/390

384 Miss Gostrey gave a substantial sigh. "The way you reduce people to subjection!"

"It's certainly, on one side, wonderful. But it's quite equalled, on another, by the way I don't. I haven't reduced Sarah since yesterday; though I've succeeded in seeing her again, as I'll presently tell you. The others, however, are all right. Mamie, by that blessed law of ours, must absolutely have a young man."

"But what must poor Mr. Bilham have? Do you mean they're ready to marry for you?"

"I mean that, by the same blessed law, it won't matter a grain if they don't—I shan't have in the least to worry."

She saw, as usual, what he meant. "And Mr. Jim? who goes for him?"

"Oh," Strether had to admit, "I couldn't manage that. He's thrown, as usual, on the world; the world which, after all, by his account—for he has prodigious adventures—seems very good to him. He fortunately—'over here,' as he says—finds the world everywhere; and his most prodigious adventure of all," he went on, "has been of course of the last few days."

Miss Gostrey, already knowing, instantly made the connection. "He has seen Marie again?"

"He went, all by himself, the day after Chad's party—didn't I tell you?—to tea with her. By her invitation—all alone."

"Quite like you!" Maria smiled.

"Oh, but he's more comfortable about her than I!" And then as his friend showed how she could believe it, filling it out, fitting it on to old memories of the wonderful woman: "What I should have liked to manage would have been Mme. de Vionnet's going."

"To Switzerland with the party?"

"For Jim—and for symmetry. If it had been workable, moreover, for a fortnight, she'd have gone. She's ready"—he followed up his renewed vision of her—"for anything."

Miss Gostrey went with him a minute. "She's too perfect!"

"She will, I think," he pursued, "go to-night to the station."