Now I hear its faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line.
What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that.The affair--I mean the affair of life--couldn't, no doubt, have been different for me; for it's at the best a tin mould, either fluted and embossed, with ornamental excrescences, or else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one's consciousness is poured--so that one 'takes' the form as the great cook says, and is more or less compactly held by it: one lives in fine as one can.
Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don't be, like me, without the memory of that illusion.I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it; I don't quite know which.
Of course at present I'm a case of reaction against the mistake;and the voice of reaction should, no doubt, always be taken with an allowance.But that doesn't affect the point that the right time is now yours.The right time is ANY time that one is still so lucky as to have.You've plenty; that's the great thing; you're, as I say, damn you, so happily and hatefully young.Don't at any rate miss things out of stupidity.Of course I don't take you for a fool, or Ishouldn't be addressing you thus awfully.Do what you like so long as you don't make MY mistake.For it was a mistake.Live!"...
Slowly and sociably, with full pauses and straight dashes, Strether had so delivered himself; holding little Bilham from step to step deeply and gravely attentive.The end of all was that the young man had turned quite solemn, and that this was a contradiction of the innocent gaiety the speaker had wished to promote.He watched for a moment the consequence of his words, and then, laying a hand on his listener's knee and as if to end with the proper joke: "And now for the eye I shall keep on you!""Oh but I don't know that I want to be, at your age, too different from you!""Ah prepare while you're about it," said Strether, "to be more amusing."Little Bilham continued to think, but at last had a smile."Well, you ARE amusing--to ME.""Impayable, as you say, no doubt.But what am I to myself?"Strether had risen with this, giving his attention now to an encounter that, in the middle of the garden, was in the act of taking place between their host and the lady at whose side Madame de Vionnet had quitted him.This lady, who appeared within a few minutes to have left her friends, awaited Gloriani's eager approach with words on her lips that Strether couldn't catch, but of which her interesting witty face seemed to give him the echo.
He was sure she was prompt and fine, but also that she had met her match, and he liked--in the light of what he was quite sure was the Duchess's latent insolence--the good humour with which the great artist asserted equal resources.Were they, this pair, of the "great world"?--and was he himself, for the moment and thus related to them by his observation, IN it? Then there was something in the great world covertly tigerish, which came to him across the lawn and in the charming air as a waft from the jungle.
Yet it made him admire most of the two, made him envy, the glossy male tiger, magnificently marked.These absurdities of the stirred sense, fruits of suggestion ripening on the instant, were all reflected in his next words to little Bilham."I know--if we talk of that--whom I should enjoy being like!"Little Bilham followed his eyes; but then as with a shade of knowing surprise: "Gloriani?"Our friend had in fact already hesitated, though not on the hint of his companion's doubt, in which there were depths of critical reserve.He had just made out, in the now full picture, something and somebody else; another impression had been superimposed.Ayoung girl in a white dress and a softly plumed white hat had suddenly come into view, and what was presently clear was that her course was toward them.What was clearer still was that the handsome young man at her side was Chad Newsome, and what was clearest of all was that she was therefore Mademoiselle de Vionnet, that she was unmistakeably pretty--bright gentle shy happy wonderful--and that Chad now, with a consummate calculation of effect, was about to present her to his old friend's vision.
What was clearest of all indeed was something much more than this, something at the single stroke of which--and wasn't it simply juxtaposition?--all vagueness vanished.It was the click of a spring--he saw the truth.He had by this time also met Chad's look; there was more of it in that; and the truth, accordingly, so far as Bilham's enquiry was concerned, had thrust in the answer.
