Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/456

450 question and had encountered a revelation. Advertising scientifically worked presented itself thus as the great new force. "It really does the thing, you know."

They were face to face under the street-lamp as they had been the first night, and Strether, no doubt, looked blank. "Affects, you mean, the sale of the object advertised?"

"Yes—but affects it extraordinarily; really beyond what one had supposed. I mean of course when it's done as one makes out that, in our roaring age, it can be done. I've been finding out a little. It's an art like another, and infinite like all the arts." He went on as if for the joke of it—almost as if his friend's face amused him. "In the hands, naturally, of a master. The right man must take hold. With him to work it—c'est un monde!"

Strether had watched him quite as if, there on the pavement, without a pretext, he had begun to dance a fancy step. "Is what you're thinking of that you yourself, in the case you have in mind, would be the right man?"

Chad had thrown back his light coat and thrust each of his thumbs into an armhole of his waistcoat; in which position his fingers played up and down. "Isn't he what you yourself took me for when you first came out?"

Strether felt a little faint, but he coerced his attention. "Oh, yes, and there's no doubt that, with your natural parts, you'd have much in common with him. Advertising is clearly, at this time of day, the secret of trade. It's quite possible it would be open to you—giving the whole of your mind to it—to make the whole place hum with you. Your mother's appeal is to the whole of your mind, and that's exactly the strength of her case."

Chad's fingers continued to twiddle, but he had something of a drop. "Ah, we've been through my mother's case!"

"So I thought! Why then do you speak of the matter?"

"Only because it was a part of our original discussion. To wind up where we began. My interest's purely platonic. There, at any rate, the fact is—the fact of the possible. I mean the money in it."

"Oh, damn the money in it!" said Strether. And then,