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He was conscious now of the final reality, which was that there wasn't so much a doubt as a difference altogether; all the more that over the difference the famous sculptor seemed to signal almost condolingly, yet oh how vacantly! as across some great flat sheet of water. He threw out the bridge of a charming hollow civility on which Strether wouldn't have trusted his own full weight a moment.
He had invited his companions to cross the river with him, offering to show them his own poor place; and his own poor place, which was very poor, gave to his idiosyncrasies, for Strether the small sublime indifference and independences that had struck the latter as fresh an odd and engaging dignity.
Oh little Bilham had for this enquiry the sharpest of all his controls. "How can he 'do' on any terms whatever when he's flagrantly spoiled?" Strether could only meet the question with his passive, his receptive pleasure. "Well, thank goodness, YOU'RE not!
Maria had a pause; then she spoke as if for conscience. "She wouldn't have done with YOU. She feels she has lost you yet that she might have been better for you." "Oh she has been quite good enough!" Strether laughed. "She thinks you and she might at any rate have been friends." "We might certainly. That's just" he continued to laugh "why I'm going."
Only I'd simply rather die simply. And I've not the least difficulty in making up my mind not to, and in knowing exactly why, and in defending my ground against all comers. All the same," he wound up, "I assure you I don't say a word against it for himself, I mean to Chad. I seem to see it as much the best thing for him. You see he's not happy." "DO I?" Strether stared.
What could there be in this for Strether but the hint of some self-respect, some sense of power, oddly perverted; something latent and beyond access, ominous and perhaps enviable? The intimation had the next thing, in a flash, taken on a name a name on which our friend seized as he asked himself if he weren't perhaps really dealing with an irreducible young Pagan.
No, never before had he been so ready to take him as he was. What was it that had suddenly so cleared up? It was just everybody's character; that is everybody's but in a measure his own. Strether felt HIS character receive for the instant a smutch from all the wrong things he had suspected or believed.
The modern world has not yet touched her, nor ever shall. The Duchess of Crole had three months ago a son, Henry Fitzgeorge, Marquis of Strether. Very fortunate that the first-born should be a son, very fortunate also that the first-born should be one of the healthiest, liveliest, merriest babies that it has ever been any one's good fortune to encounter.
"Well," said Strether, who fell as much as possible into step, "I guess I don't FEEL sick now that I've started. But I had pretty well run down before I did start." Waymarsh raised his melancholy look. "Ain't you about up to your usual average?"
The present evening had a different stamp; if the company was much more numerous, so, inevitably, were the ideas set in motion. It was on the other hand, however, now strongly marked that the talkers moved, in respect to such matters, round an inner, a protected circle. They knew at any rate what really concerned them to-night, and Strether had begun by keeping his companion close to it.
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