Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/99

Rh "No; elsewhere, but not to Cannes. Cannes is different. Cannes is better. Cannes is best. I mean it's all people you know—when you do know them. And if he does, why, that's different too. He must have gone alone. She can't be with him."

"I haven't," Strether confessed in his weakness, "the least idea." There seemed much in what she said; out he was able, after a little, to help her to a nearer impression. The meeting with little Bilham took place by easy arrangement in the great gallery of the Louvre; and when, standing with his fellow-visitor before one of the splendid Titians—the overwhelming portrait of the young man with the strangely shaped glove and the blue-gray eyes—he turned to see the third member of their party advance from the end of the waxed and gilded vista, he had a sense of having at last taken hold. He had agreed with Miss Gostrey—it dated even from Chester—for a morning at the Louvre, and he had embraced, independently, the same idea as thrown out by little Bilham, whom he had already accompanied to the museum of the Luxembourg. The fusion of these schemes presented no difficulty, and it was to strike him again that, in little Bilham's company, difficulty in general dropped.

"Oh, he's all right—he's one of us!" Miss Gostrey, after the first exchange, soon found a chance to murmur to her companion; and Strether, as they proceeded and paused, as a quick unanimity between the two appeared to have phrased itself in half a dozen remarks—Strether knew that he knew, almost immediately, what she meant, and took it as still another sign that he had got his job in hand. This was the more grateful to him that he could think of the intelligence now serving him as an acquisition positively new. He wouldn't have known even the day before what she meant—that is if she meant, what he assumed, that they were intense Americans together. He had just worked round—and with a sharper turn of the screw than any yet—to the conception of an American intense as little Bilham was intense. The young man was his first specimen; the specimen had profoundly perplexed him; at present, however, there was light. It was by little Bilham's amazing serenity that he had been at first