Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/85

Rh opposite; I stayed, I dawdled, I trifled; above all I looked round. I saw, in fine; and—I don't know what to call it—I sniffed. It's a detail, but it's as if there were something—something very good—to sniff."

Waymarsh's face had shown his friend an attention apparently so remote that the latter was slightly surprised to find it at this point abreast with him. "Do you mean a smell? What of?"

"A charming scent. But I don't know."

Waymarsh gave an inferential grunt. "Does he live there with a woman?"

But Strether had already answered. "I don't know."

Waymarsh waited an instant for more, then resumed: "Has he taken her off with him?"

"And will he bring her back?"—Strether fell into the inquiry. But he wound it up as before. "I don't know."

The way he wound it up, accompanied as this was with another drop back, another degustation of the Léoville, another wipe of his moustache and another good word for François, produced apparently in his companion a slight irritation. "Then what the devil do you know."

"Well," said Strether, almost gaily, "I guess I don't know anything!" His gaiety might have been a tribute to the fact that the state he had been reduced to did for him again what had been done by his talk of the matter with Miss Gostrey at the London theatre. It was somehow enlarging; and the air of that amplitude was now doubtless more or less—and all for Waymarsh to feel—in his further response. "That's what I found out from the young man."

"But I thought you said you found out nothing."

"Nothing but that—that I don't know anything."

"And what good does that do you?"

"It's just," said Strether, "what I've come to you to help me to discover. I mean anything about anything over here. I felt that, up there. It regularly rose before me in its might. The young man, moreover—Chad's friend—as good as told me so."

"As good as told you you know nothing about anything?" Waymarsh seemed to look at someone who might have as good as told him. "How old is he?"