by Henry James

“ Mrs. Ambient, detached, and inscrutable, met neither my eye nor her husband's; she attended to her dinner, watched her servants, arranged the puckers in her dress, exchanged at wide intervals a remark with her sister-in-law and, while she slowly rubbed her lean white hands between the courses, looked out of the window at the first signs of evening--the long June day allowing us to dine without candles. Miss Ambient appeared to give little direct heed to anything said by her brother ”

“ Miss Ambient asked me if I had enjoyed my walk with her brother and whether we had talked of many things.
"Well, of most things," I freely allowed, though I remembered we hadn't talked of Miss Ambient.
"And don't you think some of his theories are very peculiar?"
"Oh I guess I agree with them all." I was very particular, for Miss Ambient's entertainment, to guess.
"Do you think art's everything?" she put to me in a moment.
"In art, of course I do!"
"And do you think beauty's everything?"
"Everything's a big word, which I think we should use as little as possible. ”

“ He's nothing less than supreme, Mrs. Ambient! There are pages in each of his books of a perfection classing them with the greatest things. Accordingly for me to see him in this familiar way, in his habit as he lives, and apparently to find the man as delightful as the artist--well, I can't tell you how much too good to be true it seems and how great a privilege I think it. ”

“ I answered that it was in all conscience enough, the trifle of a woman's regarding her husband's mind as a well of corruption, and she seemed much struck with the novelty of my remark. "But there hasn't been any of the sort of trouble that there so often is among married people," she said. "I suppose you can judge for yourself that Beatrice isn't at all--well, whatever they call it when a woman kicks over! And poor Mark doesn't make love to other people either. ”

“ I may at last lay bare my secret, giving it for what it is worth; now that the main sufferer has gone, that he has begun to be alluded to as one of the famous early dead and that his wife has ceased to survive him; now, too, that Miss Ambient, whom I also saw at intervals during the time that followed, has, with her embroideries and her attitudes, her necromantic glances and strange intuitions, retired to a Sisterhood, where, as I am told, she is deeply immured and quite lost to the world.
Mark came in to breakfast after this lady and I had for some time been seated there. ”

“ There were innumerable things in it, and they chased each other in and out of his face. I have seen people who were grave and gay in quick alternation; but Mark Ambient was grave and gay at one and the same moment. ”

“ There's a hatred of art, there's a hatred of literature--I mean of the genuine kinds. Oh the shams--those they'll swallow by the bucket!" I looked up at the charming house, with its genial colour and crookedness, and I answered with a smile that those evil passions might exist, but that I should never have expected to find them there. ”

“ Ambient. Yet there was no doubt they were, taken together, unprecedented enough, and, with all allowances, I had never been left, or condemned, to draw so many rich inferences.
After the ladies had retired my host took me into his study to smoke, where I appealingly brought him round, or so tried, to some disclosure of fond ideals. I was bent on proving I was worthy to listen to him, on repaying him for what he had said to me before dinner, by showing him how perfectly I understood. He liked to talk; he liked to defend his convictions and his honour (not that I attacked them) ”

“ Then there was another pause. She addressed her attention to the opposite end of the grounds, kept it for her husband's return with the child. "Is Mr. Ambient fond of gardening?" it occurred to me to ask, irresistibly impelled as I felt myself, moreover, to bring the conversation constantly back to him.
"He's very fond of plums," said his wife.
"Ah well, then, I hope your crop will be better than you fear. It's a lovely old place," I continued. "The whole impression's that of certain places he has described. Your house is like one of his pictures." ”

“ Miss Ambient promptly returned.
"Refused to let Mackintosh see him? By heaven I'll smash in the door!" And Mark brought his fist down upon the sideboard, which he had now approached, so that all the breakfast-service rang.
I begged Miss Ambient to go up and try to have speech of her sister- in-law, and I drew Mark out into the garden. "You're exceedingly nervous, and Mrs. Ambient's probably right," I there undertook to plead. "Women know; women should be supreme in such a situation. Trust a mother--a devoted mother, my dear friend!" ”

“ Moreover, I care for seeing things as they are; that's the way I try to show them in any professed picture. But you mustn't talk to Mrs. Ambient about things as they are. She has a mortal dread of things as they are."
"She's afraid of them for Dolcino," I said: surprised a moment afterwards at being in a position--thanks to Miss Ambient--to be so explanatory; and surprised even now that Mark shouldn't have shown visibly that he wondered what the deuce I knew about it. ”

“ Ambient should pay so little attention to her husband. But I wouldn't for the world have betrayed my thought, and, to conceal it, I began loudly to rejoice in the prospect of our having tea in the garden. "Ah she won't let him come!" said my host with a sigh; and we went our way till we reached the two ladies. He mentioned my name to his wife, and I noticed that he addressed her as "My dear," very genially, without a trace of resentment at her detention of the child. ”

“ At last, when I had dallied with my privilege long enough, I despatched to him the missive of the American poet. He had already gone out of town; he shrank from the rigour of the London "season" and it was his habit to migrate on the first of June. Moreover I had heard he was this year hard at work on a new book, into which some of his impressions of the East were to be wrought, so that he desired nothing so much as quiet days. ”

“ This was the first time I had heard him allude to the people who couldn't read him--a class so generally conceived to sit heavy on the consciousness of the man of letters. A being organised for literature as Mark Ambient was must certainly have had the normal proportion of sensitiveness, of irritability; the artistic ego, capable in some cases of such monstrous development, must have been in his composition sufficiently erect and active. ”

“ Such things figure to me now base pimples and ulcers on the brow of beauty!"
"They're very bad, very bad," I said as gravely as I could.
"Very bad? They're the highest social offence I know; it ought--it absolutely ought; I'm quite serious--to be capital. If I knew I should be publicly thrashed else I'd manage to find the true word. The people who can't--some of them don't so much as know it when they see it--would shut their inkstands, and we shouldn't be deluged by this flood of rubbish!" ”

“ After which and another longish pause, broken only by my plea that the pleasure of a walk with our friend would have been quite what I would have chosen, she found for reply: "I believe the Americans walk very little."
"Yes, we always run," I laughingly allowed.
She looked at me seriously, yet with an absence in her pretty eyes. "I suppose your distances are so great."
"Yes, but we break our marches! I can't tell you the pleasure to me of finding myself here," I added. "I've the greatest admiration for Mr. Ambient."
"He'll like that. He likes being admired." ”

“ Mark returned to us with his sister; and Miss Ambient, repeating her mention of the claims of her correspondence, passed into the house. Mark came and stood in front of his wife, looking down at the child, who immediately took hold of his hand and kept it while he stayed. "I think Mackintosh ought to see him," he said; "I think I'll walk over and fetch him."
"That's Gwendolen's idea, I suppose," Mrs. Ambient replied very sweetly.
"It's not such an out-of-the-way idea when one's child's ill," he returned. ”

“ Ambient went on while his son swung his hand.
"Because mamma's holding me close!"
"Oh yes; I know how mamma holds you when I come near!" cried Mark with a grimace at his wife.
She turned her charming eyes up to him without deprecation or concession. "You can go for Mackintosh if you like. I think myself it would be better. You ought to drive."
"She says that to get me away," he put to me with a gaiety that I thought a little false; after which he started for the Doctor's.
I remained there with Mrs. Ambient, though even our exchange of twaddle had run very thin. ”

“ He asked me about his friend in America, about the length of my stay in England, about the last news in London and the people I had seen there; and I remember looking for the signs of genius in the very form of his questions and thinking I found it. ”

“ She had, I believe, the usual allowance of rather vain motives: she wished to be looked at, she wished to be married, she wished to be thought original.
It costs me a pang to speak in this irreverent manner of one of Ambient's name, but I shall have still less gracious things to say before I've finished my anecdote, and moreover--I confess it--I owe the young lady a bit of a grudge. Putting aside the curious cast of her face she had no natural aptitude for an artistic development, had little real intelligence. ”

“ It isn't till one has been watching her some forty years that one finds out half of what she's up to! Therefore one's earlier things must inevitably contain a mass of rot. And with what one sees, on one side, with its tongue in its cheek, defying one to be real enough, and on the other the bonnes gens rolling up their eyes at one's cynicism, the situation has elements of the ludicrous which the poor reproducer himself is doubtless in a position to appreciate better than any one else. ”

“ The Doctor paid a long visit in the nursery, and before he came down I retired to my own quarters, where I remained till dinner-time. On entering the drawing-room at this hour I found Miss Ambient in possession, as she had been the evening before.
"I was right about Dolcino," she said, as soon as she saw me, with an air of triumph that struck me as the climax of perversity. "He's really very ill." ”

“ Miss Ambient's head drooped a little to one side and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then of a sudden came a strange alteration; her face lighted to an effect more joyless than any gloom, to that indeed of a conscious insincere grimace, and she added "When one has children what one writes becomes a great responsibility."
"Children are terrible critics," I prosaically answered. ”

“ We rose to receive the group, and as they came near us Dolcino twisted himself about. His enchanting eyes showed me a smile of recognition, in which, for the moment, I should have taken a due degree of comfort. Miss Ambient, however, received another impression, and I make haste to say that her quick sensibility, which visibly went out to the child, argues that in spite of her affectations she might have been of some human use. "It won't do at all--it won't do at all," she said to me under her breath. "I shall speak to Mark about the Doctor." ”

“ When I see the kind of things Life herself, the brazen hussy, does, I despair of ever catching her peculiar trick. She has an impudence, Life! If one risked a fiftieth part of the effects she risks! It takes ever so long to believe it. ”

“ Beatrice thinks a work of art ought to have a 'purpose.' But she's a charming woman--don't you think her charming? I find in her quite the grand air."
"She's very beautiful," I produced with an effort; while I reflected that though it was apparently true that Mark Ambient was mismated it was also perceptible that his sister was perfidious. She assured me her brother and his wife had no other difference but this--one that she thought his writings immoral and his influence pernicious. It was a fixed idea; she was afraid of these things for the child. ”

“ What helped it to glow were the other influences--the silent suggestive garden-nook, the perfect opportunity (if it was not an opportunity for that it was an opportunity for nothing) and the plea I speak of, which issued from the child's eyes and seemed to make him say: "The mother who bore me and who presses me here to her bosom--sympathetic little organism that I am--has really the kind of sensibility she has been represented to you as lacking, if you only look for it patiently and respectfully. ”

“ But I looked at her hard, and the next thing felt myself turn white. "Dolcino IS dying then-- he's dead?"
"It's too late to save him. His mother has let him die! I tell you that because you're sympathetic, because you've imagination," Miss Ambient was good enough to add, interrupting my expression of horror. "That's why you had the idea of making her read Mark's new book!" ”

“ But she was perfectly grave and turned away from me, as she had presented herself, without relaxing her rigour; after which I settled down to my quarto again with the reflexion that Mrs. Ambient was truly an eccentric. My triumph, too, suddenly seemed to me rather vain. A woman who couldn't unbend at a moment exquisitely indicated would never understand Mark Ambient. He came back to us at last in person, having brought the Doctor with him. "He was away from home," Mark said, "and I went after him to where he was supposed to be. ”

“ Life's really too short for art--one hasn't time to make one's shell ideally hard. Firm and bright, firm and bright is very well to say--the devilish thing has a way sometimes of being bright, and even of being hard, as mere tough frozen pudding is hard, without being firm. ”

“ I have seen poets married to women of whom it was difficult to conceive that they should gratify the poetic fancy--women with dull faces and glutinous minds, who were none the less, however, excellent wives. But there was no obvious disparity in Mark Ambient's union. ”