Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/436

430 clumsily to touch it—than if it were something in Timbuctoo. It's only that you don't snub me, as you've had fifty chances to do—it's only your beautiful patience that makes one forget one's manners. In spite of your patience, all the same," she went on, "you'd do anything rather than be with us here, even if that were possible. You'd do everything for us but be mixed up with us—which is a statement you can easily answer to the advantage of your own manners. You can say 'What's the use of talking of things that at the best are impossible?' What is, of course, the use? It's only my little madness. You'd talk if you were tormented. And I don't mean now about him. Oh, for him!" Positively, strangely, bitterly, as it seemed to Strether, she gave "him," for the moment, away. "You don't care what I think of you; but I happen to care what you think of me. And what you might," she added. "What you perhaps even did."

He gained time. "What I did?"

"Did think before. Before this. Didn't you think?"

But he had already stopped her. "I didn't think any thing. I never think a step further than I'm obliged to."

"That's perfectly false, I believe," she returned—"except that you may, no doubt, often pull up when things become too ugly; or even, I'll say, to save you a protest, too beautiful. At any rate, even so far as it's true, we've thrust on you appearances that you've had to see and that have therefore made your obligation. Ugly or beautiful—it doesn't matter what we call them—you were getting on without them, and that's where we're detestable. We bore you—that's where we are. And we may well—for what we've cost you. All you can do now is not to think at all. And I who should have liked to seem to you—well, sublime!"

He could only, after a moment, re-echo Miss Barrace. "You're wonderful."

"I'm old and abject and hideous"—she went on as without hearing him. "Abject above all. Or old above all. It's when one's old that it's worst. I don't care what becomes of it—let what will; there it is. It's a doom—I know it; you can't see it more than I do myself. Things have to happen as they will." With which she