Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/444

438 can put my hand on him. Did she strike you," he asked, "as anxious."

"She's always anxious."

"After all I've done for her?" And he had one of the last flickers of his occasional mild mirth. "To think that that was just what I came out to prevent!"

She took it up but to reply. "You don't regard him then as safe?"

"I was just going to ask you how, in that respect, you regard Mme. de Vionnet."

She looked at him a little. "What woman was ever safe? She told me," she added—and it was as if at the touch of the connection—"of your extraordinary meeting in the country. After that à quoi se fier?"

"It was, as an accident, in all the possible or impossible chapter," Strether conceded, "astonishing enough. But still, but still"

"But still she didn't mind?"

"She doesn't mind anything."

"Well then, as you don't either, we may all sink to rest!"

He appeared to agree with her, but he had his reservation. "I do mind Chad's disappearance."

"Oh, you'll get him back. But now you know," she said, "why I went to Mentone." He had sufficiently let her see that he had by this time gathered things together, but there was nature in her wish to make them clearer still. "I didn't want you to put it to me."

"To put it to you?"

"The question of what you were at last—a week ago—to see for yourself. I didn't want to have to lie for her. I felt that to be too much for me. A man, of course, is always expected to do it—to do it, I mean, for a woman; but not a woman for another woman; unless perhaps on the tit-for-tat principle, as an indirect way of protecting herself. I don't need protection, so that I was free to 'funk' you—simply to dodge your test. The responsibility was too much for me. I gained time, and when I came back the need of a test had blown over."

Strether serenely recovered it "Yes; when you came back little Bilham had shown me what's expected of a gentleman. Little Bilham had lied like one."