Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/45

Rh looked, with her ruff and other matters, like Queen Elizabeth; and it had after this, in truth, been his fancy that, as a consequence of that tenderness and an acceptance of the idea, the form of this special tribute to the "frill" had grown slightly more marked. The connection, as he sat there and let his imagination roam, was to strike him as vaguely pathetic; but there it all was, and pathetic was doubtless, in the conditions, the best thing it could possibly be. It had existed, assuredly, at any rate; for it seemed now to come over him that no gentleman of his age at Woollett could ever, to a lady of Mrs. Newsome's, which was not much less than his, have embarked on such a simile.

All sorts of things, in fact, now seemed to come over him, comparatively few of which his chronicler can hope for space to mention. It came over him, for instance, that Miss Gostrey looked perhaps like Mary Stuart; Lambert Strether had a candour of fancy which could rest for an instant gratified in such an antithesis. It came over him that never before—no, literally, never—had a lady dined with him at a public place before going to the play. The publicity of the place was just in the matter, for Strether, the rare, strange thing; it affected him almost as the achievement of privacy might have affected a man of a different experience. He had married, in the far-away years, so young as to have missed the natural time, in Boston, for taking girls to the Museum; and it was absolutely true of him that—even after the close of the period of conscious detachment occupying the centre of his life, the gray middle desert of the two deaths, that of his wife and that, ten years later, of his boy—he had never taken anyone anywhere. It came over him in especial—though the monition had, as happened, already sounded, fitfully gleamed, in other forms—that the business he had come out on had not yet been so brought home to him as by the sight of the people about him. She gave him the impression, his friend, at first, more straight than he got it for himself—gave it simply by saying with offhand illumination, "Oh yes, they're types!"—but after he had taken it he made to the full, both while he kept silence for the four acts and while he talked in the intervals, his own use of it.