Strether

“ She has only to know what you've done to him never again to raise a finger."
"I've done," said Strether, "what I could—one can't do more. He protests his devotion and his horror. But I'm not sure I've saved him. He protests too much. He asks how one can dream of his being tired. But he has all life before him." ”

“ Strether, for a moment, said nothing; then he spoke gravely, with a return of his dryness. "Oh, if you didn't do her justice———!"
"I should be a beast, eh?"
Strether devoted no time to saying what he would be; that, visibly, would take them far. If there was nothing for it but to repeat, however, repetition was no mistake. "You owe her everything—very much more than she can ever owe you. You've in other words duties to her of the most positive sort; and I don't see what other duties—as the others are presented to you—can be held to go before them."
Chad looked at him with a smile. ”

“ Strether hesitated, but it came out. “Not enough for your mother!” Spoken, however, it sounded a trifle odd—the effect of which was that Chad broke into a laugh. Strether, at this, succumbed as well, though with extreme brevity. “Permit us to have still our theory. But if you are so free and so strong you’re inexcusable. ”

“ Chad had risked it jocosely, but Strether remained blank. “Enough?”
“If one should wish to live on one’s accumulations?” After which, however, as his friend appeared cold to the joke, the young man as easily dropped it. “Of course I really never forget, night or day, what I owe her. I owe her everything. I give you my word of honour,” he frankly rang out, “that I’m not a bit tired of her.” Strether at this only gave him a stare: the way youth could express itself was again and again a wonder. ”

“ It was a part of the deep impression for Strether, and not the least of the deep interest, that they could so communicate—that Chad, in particular, could let her know he left it to her. He habitually left things to others, as Strether was so well aware, and it in fact came over our friend in these meditations that there had been as yet no such vivid illustration of his famous knowing how to live. ”

“ Strether's situation flawlessly fits James's idea. To get the largest value from them James had of course to make Strether another of his exquisite intelligences—rather too exquisite for his upbringing; he had, too, to make this abundant life into which Strether is initiated a life of lovely line and color, of gorgeous vesture and sweet, subtle, intoxicating atmosphere. All James's old powers came in upon hint, with his new freedom. The execution of The Ambassadors, which he thought his most perfectly constructed novel, is as richly imaginative as it is deliberate. ”

“ It was, to Strether’s mind, as if she sat on her own ground, the light honours of which, at an open gate, she thus easily did him, while all the vastness and mystery of the domain stretched off behind. When people were so completely in possession they could be extraordinarily civil ”

“ Mixed with everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether’s part, that it would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in quite a sufficient degree.
That note had been meanwhile—since the previous afternoon, thanks to this happier device—such a consciousness of personal freedom as he hadn’t known for years; such a deep taste of change and of having above all for the moment nobody and nothing to consider, as promised already, if headlong hope were not too foolish, to colour his adventure with cool success. ”

“ That’s when a woman pities.”
“Ah but I do help you!” she cheerfully insisted.
Again he looked at her hard, and then after a pause: “No you don’t!”
Her tortoise-shell, on its long chain, rattled down. “I help you with Sitting Bull. That’s a good deal.”
“Oh that, yes.” But Strether hesitated. “Do you mean he talks of me?”
“So that I have to defend you? No, never.’
“I see,” Strether mused. “It’s too deep.”
“That’s his only fault,” she returned—“that everything, with him, is too deep. He has depths of silence—which he breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark. ”

“ Meanwhile, however, the chance he had allowed for—the chance of being seen, in time, from the balcony—had become a fact. Two or three of the windows stood open to the violet air; and, before Strether had cut the knot by crossing, a young man had come out and looked about him, had lighted a cigarette and tossed the match over, and then, resting on the rail, had given himself up, while he smoked, to watching the life below. His arrival contributed, in its order, to keeping Strether in position; the result of which, in turn, was that Strether soon felt himself noticed. ”

“ Strether felt for a moment as if Sarah were actually walking up and down outside. Wasn’t she hanging about the porte-cochère while her friend thus summarily opened a way? Strether would meet her but to take it, and everything would be for the best in the best of possible worlds. He had never so much known what any one meant as, in the light of this demonstration, he knew what Mrs. Newsome did. It had reached Waymarsh from Sarah, but it had reached Sarah from her mother, and there was no break in the chain by which it reached him. ”

“ And he was quite right," said Strether. "It would certainly have been nicer. Even when a thing's already nice there mostly is some other thing that would have been nicer—or as to which we wonder if it wouldn't. ”

“ Newsome’s desire that he should be worried with nothing that was not of the essence of his task; by insisting that he should thoroughly intermit and break she had so provided for his freedom that she would, as it were, have only herself to thank. Strether could not at this point indeed have completed his thought by the image of what she might have to thank herself for: the image, at best, of his own likeness—poor Lambert Strether washed up on the sunny strand by the waves of a single day, poor Lambert Strether thankful for breathing-time and stiffening himself while he gasped. ”

“ I’m fantastic and ridiculous—I don’t explain myself even to myself. How can they then,” Strether asked, “understand me? So I don’t quarrel with them.”
“I see. They quarrel,” said Chad rather comfortably, “with us.” Strether noted once more the comfort, but his young friend had already gone on. “I should feel greatly ashamed, all the same, if I didn’t put it before you again that you ought to think, after all, tremendously well. I mean before giving up beyond recall—” With which insistence, as from a certain delicacy, dropped.
Ah but Strether wanted it. “Say it all, say it all.” ”

“ There was no computing at all what the young man before him would think or feel or say on any subject whatever. This intelligence Strether had afterwards, to account for his nervousness, reconstituted as he might, just as he had also reconstituted the promptness with which Chad had corrected his uncertainty. ”

“ After which Chad observed: "But she doesn't like me. In fact she hates me."
Strether's interest grew. "Then why does she want you at home?"
"Because when you hate, you want to triumph; and if she should get me neatly stuck there she would triumph."
Strether followed afresh, but looking as he went. "Certainly—in a manner. But it would scarce be a triumph worth having if, once entangled, feeling her dislike, and possibly conscious in time of a certain quantity of your own, you should, on the spot, make yourself unpleasant to her." ”

“ He went up to town to meet Strether who had taken a couple of tickets for a matinée of Peter Pan, with which play his friend's curious personality was violently intrigued. The artist in Paul revelled in the fairy tale, and deep called to deep before the boy who would not grow up. But his passionate creed would not let him alone.
"It's all very well, Gus Strether," he said, arm in arm in Regent Street, "but do you think a girl ought to dress up like that in boy's clothes? And what good does it do? It's like sitting down to play a round game while the house is on fire!" ”

“ Strether was conscious across the table of what worked in him, conscious when they passed back to the small salon to which, the previous evening, he himself had made so rich a reference; conscious most of all as they stepped out to the balcony in which one would have had to be an ogre not to recognise the perfect place for easy aftertastes. ”

“ Chad had said it all, from his natural scruple, only to that extent; so that Strether, after an instant, himself took a hand. "My absence of an assured future. The little I have to show toward the power to take care of myself. ”

“ Chad returned. “Sally took a place, certainly; but it was never, I saw from the first moment, to be yours. No one—with us—will ever take yours. It wouldn’t be possible.”
“Ah of course,” sighed Strether, “I knew it. I believe you’re right. No one in the world, I imagine, was ever so portentously solemn. ”

“ Strether read, on the instant, his story—how, astir for the previous hour, the sprinkled newness of the day, so pleasant, at that season, in Paris, he was fairly panting with the pulse of adventure and had been with Mrs. Pocock, unmistakably, to the Marché aux Fleurs. Strether really knew in this vision of him a joy that was akin to envy ”

“ Strether took it smoothly in. "Ah then, I shall have news of her."
"I don't want to frighten you, but I think that likely. However," little Bilham continued, "if I'm of the least use to you to hold on by———!"
"You're not of the least!"—and Strether laid an appreciative hand on him to say it. "No one's of the least." With which, to mark how gaily he could take it, he patted his companion's knee. "I must meet my fate alone, and I shall—oh, you'll see! And yet," he pursued the next moment, "you can help me too. You once said to me"—he followed this further—"that you held Chad should marry. ”

“ The night was hot and heavy and the single lamp sufficient; the great flare of the lighted city, rising high, spending itself afar, played up from the Boulevard and, through the vague vista of the successive rooms, brought objects into view and added to their dignity. Strether found himself in possession as he never yet had been; he had been there alone, had turned over books and prints, had invoked, in Chad’s absence, the spirit of the place, but never at the witching hour and never with a relish quite so like a pang. ”

“ Once achieved and installed it may always be trusted to make the poor seeker feel he would have blushed to the roots of his hair for failing of it; yet, how, as its virtue can be essentially but the virtue of the whole, the wayside traps set in the interest of muddlement and pleading but the cause of the moment, of the particular bit in itself, have to be kicked out of the path! All the sophistications in life, for example, might have appeared to muster on behalf of the menace—the menace to a bright variety—involved in Strether’s having all the subjective “say,” as it were, to himself. ”

“ There was a fascination for that critic in its not being, this ripe physiognomy, the face that, under observation at least, he had originally carried away from Woollett. Strether found a certain freedom on his own side in defining it as that of a man of the world—a formula that indeed seemed to come now in some degree to his relief; that of a man to whom things had happened and were variously known. In gleams, in glances, the past did perhaps peep out of it; but such lights were faint and instantly merged. Chad was brown and thick and strong, and of old Chad had been rough. ”

“ He watched little brisk figures, figures whose movement was as the tick of the great Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from point to point; the air had a taste as of something mixed with art, something that presented nature as a white-capped master-chef. The palace was gone, Strether remembered the palace; and when he gazed into the irremediable void of its site the historic sense in him might have been freely at play—the play under which in Paris indeed it so often winces like a touched nerve. ”

“ Miss Barrace quite agreed; and it was as if, for a moment, they saw the quantity in each other's face.
But indeed the whole thing was present. "How much she must care!"
"Ah, there it is. She does care. But it isn't, is it," Miss Barrace considerately added, "as if you had ever had any doubt of that?"
Strether seemed suddenly to like to feel that he really never had. "Why, of course it's the whole point."
"Voilà!" Miss Barrace smiled.
"It's why one came out," Strether went on. "And it's why one has stayed so long. And it's also"—he abounded—"why one's going home. ”

“ The windows were all open, their redundant hangings swaying a little, and he heard once more, from the empty court, the small plash of the fountain. From beyond this, and as from a great distance—beyond the court, beyond the corps de logis forming the front—came, as if excited and exciting, the vague voice of Paris. Strether had all along been subject to sudden gusts of fancy in connexion with such matters as these—odd starts of the historic sense, suppositions and divinations with no warrant but their intensity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors, who, having gone from "Woollett Massachusetts" to save a young friend from the naughtinesses of Paris, himself surrenders to the beautifully beguiling universe he has entered—even Strether holds fast to the integrity which has all along given strength to his natural sympathy and which will not allow him to profit by his amiable betrayal of his mission. ”