Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/75

Rh and ambitious of variety. The exhibition was doubtless as yet not brilliant, but Strether himself, even by that time much enlisted and immersed, had determined, on the part of the two ladies, a temperate approval and, in fact, as he now recollected, a certain austere enthusiasm.

The very next thing to take place, however, had been a dark drop of the curtain. The son and brother had not browsed long on the Montagne Sainte-Genevieve—his effective little use of the name of which, like his allusion to the best French, appeared to have been but one of the notes of his rough cunning. The light refreshment of these vain appearances had not, accordingly, carried any of them very far. On the other hand, it had given him a chance, unchecked, to strike his roots; had paved the way for initiations more direct and more deep. It was Strether's belief that he had been comparatively innocent before this first migration, and even that the first effects of the migration would not have been, without some particular bad accident, to have been deplored. There had been three months—he sufficiently figured it out—in which Chad had wanted to try. He had tried, though not very hard; he had had his little hour of good faith. The weakness of that principle in him was that almost any accident that was bad enough was stronger. The fever in his blood, early recognised, yet so difficult to account for, had broken out once for all, becoming a chronic affection. This had, at any rate, markedly been the case for the precipitation of a special series of impressions. They had proved, successively, these impressions—all of Musette and Francine, but Musette and Francine vulgarised by the larger evolution of the type—overwhelmingly intense; the wretched youth had "taken up," by what was at the time to be shrinkingly gathered, as it was scarce permissibly to be mentioned, with one ferociously "interested" little person after another. Strether had read somewhere in Théophile Gautier of a Latin motto, a description of the hours, observed on a clock by the traveller in Spain; and he had been led to apply it in short to Chad's number one, number two, number three—through numbers indeed as to which it might be a question whether those of mere modest clock-faces wouldn't be exceeded. Omnes vulnerant, ultima