Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/57

Rh before the subsequent hush, to express as a sharp finality her sense of the moral of all their talk. "I knew you had something up your sleeve!" This finality, however, left them, in its turn, at the end of the play, as disposed to hang back as if they had still much to say; so that they easily agreed to let everyone go before them—they found an interest in waiting. They made out from the lobby that the night had turned to rain; yet Miss Gostrey let her friend know that he was not to see her home. He was simply to put her, by herself, into a four-wheeler; she liked so, in London, of wet nights, after wild pleasures, thinking things over, on the return, in lonely four-wheelers. This was her great time, she intimated, for pulling herself together. The delays caused by the weather, the struggle for vehicles at the door, gave them occasion to subside on a divan at the back of the vestibule and just beyond the reach of the fresh, damp gusts from the street. Here Strether's comrade resumed that free handling of the subject to which his own imagination of it already owed so much.

"Does your young friend in Paris like you?"

It had almost, after the interval, startled him. "Oh, I hope not! Why should he?"

"Why shouldn't he?" Miss Gostrey asked. "That you're coming down on him need have nothing to do with it."

"You see more in it," he presently returned, "than I."

"Of course I see you in it."

"Well then, you see more in me"

"Than you see in yourself? Very likely. That's always one's right. What I was thinking of," she explained, "is the possible particular effect on him of his milieu.'

"Oh, his milieu!" Strether really felt that he could now imagine it better than three hours before.

"Do you mean it can only have been so lowering?"

"Why, that's my very starting-point."

"Yes, but you start so far back. What do his letters say?"

"Nothing. He ignores us—or spares us. He doesn't write."