Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/72

66 the procession; he might have been watching it all recede in a golden cloud of dust. If the playhouse was not closed, his seat at least had fallen to somebody else. He had had an uneasy feeling the night before that if he was at the theatre at all—though he indeed justified the theatre, in the specific sense, and with a grotesqueness to which his imagination did all honour, as something he owed poor Waymarsh—he should have been there with and, as might have been said, for Chad.

With his letters in his lap then, in his Luxembourg nook—letters held with nervous, unconscious intensity—he thought of things in a strange, vast order, swinging at moments off into space, into past and future, and then dropping fast, with some loss of breath, but with a soft, reassuring thud, down to yesterday and to-day. Thus it was that he came back to his puzzle of the evening, the question of whether he could have taken Chad to such a play, and what effect—it was a point that suddenly rose—his responsibility in respect to Chad might be held to have, in general, on his choice of entertainment. It had literally been present to him at the Gymnase—where one was held moreover comparatively safe—that having his young friend at his side would have been an odd feature of the work of redemption; and this quite in spite of the fact that the picture presented might well, confronted with Chad's own private stage, have seemed the pattern of propriety. He hadn't, clearly, come out in the name of propriety only to visit unattended equivocal performances; yet still less had he done so to undermine his authority by sharing them with the graceless youth. Was he to renounce all amusement for the sweet sake of that authority? and would such renouncement give him for Chad a moral glamour? This little problem bristled the more by reason of poor Strether's fairly open sense of the irony of things. Were there then sides on which his predicament threatened a little to look droll to him? Should he have to pretend to believe either to himself or to the wretched boy that there was anything that could make the latter worse? Was not some such pretence on the other hand involved in the assumption that there were things that would make it better? His greatest