The Ambassadors by Henry James Page B

only
her
? I don’t mean the bad woman in Paris,” she quickly added—“for I assure you I shouldn’t even at the best be disposed to allow him more than one. But has he only his mother?”
    “He has also a sister, older than himself and married; and they’re both remarkably fine women.”
    “Very handsome, you mean?”
    This promptitude—almost, as he might have thought, this precipitation, gave him a brief drop; but he came up again. “Mrs. Newsome, I think, is handsome, though she’s not of course, with a son of twenty-eight and a daughter of thirty, in her very first youth. She married, however, extremely young.”
    “And is wonderful,” Miss Gostrey asked, “for her age?”
    Strether seemed to feel with a certain disquiet the pressure of it. “I don’t say she’s wonderful. Or rather,” he went on the next moment, “I do say it. It’s exactly what she
is
—wonderful. But I wasn’t thinking of her appearance,” he explained—“striking as that doubtless is. I was thinking—well, of many other things.” He seemed to look at these as if to mention some of them; then took, pulling himself up, another turn. “About Mrs. Pocock people may differ.”
    “Is that the daughter’s name—‘Pocock’?”
    “That’s the daughter’s name,” Strether sturdily confessed.
    “And people may differ, you mean, about
her
beauty?”
    “About everything.”
    “But
you
admire her?”
    He gave his friend a glance as to show how he could bear this. “I’m perhaps a little afraid of her.”
    “Oh,” said Miss Gostrey, “I see her from here! You may say then I see very fast and very far, but I’ve already shown you I do. Theyoung man and the two ladies,” she went on, “are at any rate all the family?”
    “Quite all. His father has been dead ten years, and there’s no brother, nor any other sister. They’d do,” said Strether, “anything in the world for him.”
    “And you’d do anything in the world for
them
?”
    He shifted again; she had made it perhaps just a shade too affirmative for his nerves. “Oh I don’t know!”
    “You’d do at any rate this, and the ‘anything’ they’d do is represented by their
making
you do it.”
    “Ah they couldn’t have come—either of them. They’re very busy people and Mrs. Newsome in particular has a large full life. She’s moreover highly nervous—and not at all strong.”
    “You mean she’s an American invalid?”
    He carefully distinguished. “There’s nothing she likes less than to be called one, but she would consent to be one of those things, I think,” he laughed, “if it were the only way to be the other.”
    “Consent to be an American in order to be an invalid?”
    “No,” said Strether, “the other way round. She’s at any rate delicate sensitive high-strung. She puts so much of herself into everything—”
    Ah Maria knew these things! “That she has nothing left for anything else? Of course she hasn’t. To whom do you say it? High-strung? Don’t I spend my life, for them, jamming down the pedal? I see moreover how it has told on you.”
    Strether took this more lightly. “Oh I jam down the pedal too!”
    “Well,” she lucidly returned, “we must from this moment bear on it together with all our might.” And she forged ahead. “Have they money?”
    But it was as if, while her energetic image still held him, her enquiry fell short. “Mrs. Newsome,” he wished further to explain,“hasn’t moreover your courage on the question of contact. If she had come it would have been to see the person herself.”
    “The woman? Ah but that’s courage.”
    “No—it’s exaltation, which is a very different thing. Courage,” he, however, accommodatingly threw out, “is what
you
have.”
    She shook her head. “You say that only to patch me up—to cover the nudity of my want of exaltation. I’ve neither the one nor the other. I’ve mere battered indifference. I see that what you mean,” Miss Gostrey pursued, “is that