The Ambassadors

Sarah’s attitude, by the turn the occasion had, with her appearance, so sensibly taken. Her appearance was really indeed funnier than anything else⁠—the spirit in which he felt her to be there as soon as she was there, the shade of obscurity that cleared up for him as soon as he was seated with her in the small salon de lecture that had, for the most part, in all the weeks, witnessed the wane of his early vivacity of discussion with Waymarsh. It was an immense thing, quite a tremendous thing, for her to have come: this truth opened out to him in spite of his having already arrived for himself at a fairly vivid view of it. He had done exactly what he had given Waymarsh his word for⁠—had walked and re-walked the court while he awaited her advent; acquiring in this exercise an amount of light that affected him at the time as flooding the scene. She had decided upon the step in order to give him the benefit of a doubt, in order to be able to say to her mother that she had, even to abjectness, smoothed the way for him. The doubt had been as to whether he mightn’t take her as not having smoothed it⁠—and the admonition had possibly come from Waymarsh’s more detached spirit. Waymarsh had at any rate, certainly, thrown his weight into the scale⁠—he had pointed to the importance of depriving their friend of a grievance. She had done justice to the plea, and it was to set herself right with a high ideal that she actually sat there in her state. Her calculation was sharp in the immobility with which she held her tall parasol-stick upright and at arm’s length, quite as if she had struck the place to plant her flag; in the separate precautions she took not to show as nervous; in the aggressive repose in which she did quite nothing but wait for him. Doubt ceased to be possible from the moment he had taken in that she had arrived with no proposal whatever; that her concern was simply to show what she had come to receive. She had come to receive his submission, and Waymarsh was to have made it plain to him that she would expect nothing less. He saw fifty things, her host, at this convenient stage; but one of those he most saw was that their anxious friend hadn’t quite had the hand required of him. Waymarsh had, however, uttered the request that she might find him mild, and while hanging about the court before her arrival he had turned over with zeal the different ways in which he could be so. The difficulty was that if he was mild he wasn’t, for her purpose, conscious. If she wished him conscious⁠—as everything about her cried aloud that she did⁠—she must accordingly be at costs to make him so. Conscious he was, for himself⁠—but only of too many things; so she must choose the one she required.

Practically, however, it at last got itself named, and when once that had happened they were quite at the centre of their situation. One thing had really done as well as another; when Strether had spoken of Waymarsh’s leaving him, and that had necessarily brought on a reference to Mrs. Pocock’s similar intention, the jump was but short to supreme lucidity. Light became indeed after that so intense that Strether would doubtless have but half made out, in the prodigious glare, by which of the two the issue had been in fact precipitated. It was, in their contracted quarters, as much there between them as if it had been something suddenly spilled with a crash and a splash on the floor. The form of his submission was to be an engagement to acquit himself within the twenty-four hours. “He’ll go in a moment if you give him the word⁠—he assures me on his honour he’ll do that”: this came in its order, out of its order, in respect to Chad, after the crash had occurred. It came repeatedly during the time taken by Strether to feel that he was even more fixed in his rigour than he had supposed⁠—the time he was not above adding to a little by telling her that such a way of putting it on her brother’s part left him sufficiently surprised. She wasn’t at all funny at last⁠—she was really fine; and he felt easily where she was strong⁠—strong for herself. It hadn’t yet so come home to him that she was nobly and appointedly officious. She was acting in interests grander and clearer than that of her poor little personal, poor little Parisian equilibrium, and all his consciousness of her mother’s moral pressure profited by this proof of its sustaining force. She would be held up; she would be strengthened; he needn’t in the least be anxious for her. What would once more have been distinct to him had he tried to make it so was that, as Mrs. Newsome was essentially all moral pressure, the presence of this element was almost identical with her own presence. It wasn’t perhaps that he felt he was dealing with her straight, but it was certainly as if she had been dealing straight with him. She was reaching him somehow by the lengthened arm of the spirit, and he was having to that extent to take her into account; but he wasn’t reaching her in turn, not making her take him; he was only reaching Sarah, who appeared to take so little of him. “Something has clearly passed between you and Chad,” he presently said, “that I think I ought to know something more about. Does he put it all,” he smiled, “on me?”

“Did you come out,” she asked, “to put it all on him?”

But he replied to this no further than, after an instant, by saying: “Oh it’s all right. Chad I mean’s all right in having said to you⁠—well anything he may have