Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/455

Rh Chad looked at him with a smile. "And you know of course about the others, eh?—since it's you yourself who have done the presenting."

"Much of it, yes—and to the best of my ability. But not all—from the moment your sister took my place."

"She didn't," Chad returned; "Sally took a place certainly, but it was never, I saw from the first moment, to be yours. No one—with us—will ever take yours. It wouldn't be possible."

"Ah, of course," sighed Strether, "I knew it. I believe you're right. No one in the world, I imagine, was ever so portentously solemn. There I am," he added with another sigh, as if weary enough, on occasion, of this truth. "I was made so."

Chad appeared, for a little, to consider the way he was made; he might, for this purpose, have measured him up and down. His conclusion favoured the fact. The intention of kindness was, at any rate, all there; Chad continued to show it as a protest and a promise, and, picking up a hat in the vestibule, came out with him, came downstairs, taking his arm to help and guide him, treating him a little as aged and infirm, seeing him safely to the street and keeping on with him, while they walked, to the next corner and the next. "You needn't tell me, you needn't tell me!"—this again, as they proceeded, he wished to make him feel. What Strether needn't tell him was now at last, in the geniality of separation, anything at all it concerned him to know. He knew, up to the hilt—that really came over him; he understood, felt, promised; and they lingered on it as they had lingered in their walk to Strether's hotel the night of their first meeting. The latter took, at this hour, all he could get; he had given all he had had to give; he was as depleted as if he had spent his last sou. But there was just one thing for which, before they broke off, Chad seemed disposed slightly to bargain. Strether needn't, as he said, tell him, but he might himself mention that he had been getting some news of the art of advertisement. He came out quite suddenly with this announcement, while Strether wondered if his revived interest were what had taken him, with strange inconsequence, over to London. He appeared at all events to have been looking into the