Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/60

54 He considered. "I think there can be scarcely a greater—unless it may become one, in the future, to be Chad's wife."

"Then how do they distinguish you?"

"They don't—except, as I have told you, by the green cover."

Once more their eyes met on it, and she held him an instant. "The green cover won't—nor will any cover—avail you with me. You're of a depth of duplicity!" Still, she could in her own large grasp of truth condone it. "Is Mamie a great parti?"

"Oh, the greatest we have—our prettiest, brightest girl."

Miss Gostrey seemed to fix the poor child. "I know what they can be. And with money?"

"Not perhaps with a great deal of that—but with so much of everything else that we don't miss it. We don't miss money much, you know," Strether added, "in general, in America, in pretty girls."

"No," she conceded; "but I know also what you do sometimes miss. And do you," she asked, "yourself admire her?"

It was a question, he indicated, that there might be several ways of taking; but he decided after an instant for the humorous. "Haven't I sufficiently showed you how I admire any pretty girl?"

Her interest in his problem was, however, by this time such that it scarce left her freedom, and she kept close to the facts. "I suppose that at Woollett you wanted them—what shall I call it?—blameless. I mean your young men for your pretty girls."

"So did I," Strether confessed. "But you strike there a curious fact—the fact that Woollett too accommodates itself to the spirit of the age and the increasing mildness of manners. Everything changes, and I hold that our situation precisely marks a date. We should prefer them blameless, but we have to make the best of them as we find them. Since the spirit of the age and the increasing mildness send them so much more to Paris"

"You've to take them back as they come. When they do come. Bon!" Once more she embraced it all, but she had a moment of thought. "Poor Chad!"