Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/83

 VI

told Waymarsh all about it that very evening, on their dining together at the hotel; which needn't have happened, he was all the while aware, had he not chosen to sacrifice to this occasion a rarer opportunity. The mention to his companion of the sacrifice was moreover exactly what introduced his recital—or, as he would have called it with more confidence in his interlocutor, his confession. His confession was that he had been captured, and that one of the features of the affair had just failed to be his engaging himself on the spot to dinner. As by such a freedom Waymarsh would have lost him, he had obeyed his scruple; and he had likewise obeyed another scruple which bore on the question of his himself bringing a guest.

Waymarsh looked gravely ardent, over the finished soup, at this array of scruples; Strether had not yet got quite used to being so unprepared for the consequences of the impression he made. It was comparatively easy to explain, however, that he hadn't felt sure his guest would please. The person was a young man whose acquaintance he had made but that afternoon in the course of rather a hindered inquiry for another person—an inquiry that his new friend had just prevented, in fact, from being vain. "Oh," said Strether, "I've all sorts of things to tell you!" and he said it in a way that was a virtual hint to Waymarsh to help him to enjoy the telling. He waited for his fish, he drank of his wine, he wiped his long moustache, he leaned back in his chair, he took in the two English ladies who had just creaked past them and whom he would even have articulately greeted if they hadn't rather chilled the impulse; so that all he could do was by way of doing something—to say "Merci, François!" out quite loud when his fish was brought. Everything was there that he wanted, everything that could make the moment an 77