She kept on him a moment, through her glasses and through his own, a certain pleasant pointedness."Ah no, you're not! You're not in the least, thank goodness! If you had been we shouldn't so soon have found ourselves here together.I think," she comfortably concluded, "you trust me.""I think I do!--but that's exactly what I'm afraid of.I shouldn't mind if I didn't.It's falling thus in twenty minutes so utterly into your hands.I dare say," Strether continued, "it's a sort of thing you're thoroughly familiar with; but nothing more extraordinary has ever happened to me."She watched him with all her kindness."That means simply that you've recognised me--which IS rather beautiful and rare.You see what I am." As on this, however, he protested, with a good-humoured headshake, a resignation of any such claim, she had a moment of explanation."If you'll only come on further as you HAVE come you'll at any rate make out.My own fate has been too many for me, and I've succumbed to it.I'm a general guide--to 'Europe,' don't you know? I wait for people--l put them through.I pick them up--I set them down.I'm a sort of superior 'courier-maid.' I'm a companion at large.I take people, as I've told you, about.I never sought it--it has come to me.It has been my fate, and one's fate one accepts.It's a dreadful thing to have to say, in so wicked a world, but I verily believe that, such as you see me, there's nothing I don't know.I know all the shops and the prices--but Iknow worse things still.I bear on my back the huge load of our national consciousness, or, in other words--for it comes to that--of our nation itself.Of what is our nation composed but of the men and women individually on my shoulders? I don't do it, you know, for any particular advantage.I don't do it, for instance--some people do, you know--for money."Strether could only listen and wonder and weigh his chance."And yet, affected as you are then to so many of your clients, you can scarcely be said to do it for love." He waited a moment."How do we reward you?"She had her own hesitation, but "You don't!" she finally returned, setting him again in motion.They went on, but in a few minutes, though while still thinking over what she had said, he once more took out his watch; mechanically, unconsciously and as if made nervous by the mere exhilaration of what struck him as her strange and cynical wit.He looked at the hour without seeing it, and then, on something again said by his companion, had another pause.
"You're really in terror of him."
He smiled a smile that he almost felt to be sickly."Now you can see why I'm afraid of you.""Because I've such illuminations? Why they're all for your help!
It's what I told you," she added, "just now.You feel as if this were wrong."He fell back once more, settling himself against the parapet as if to hear more about it."Then get me out!"Her face fairly brightened for the joy of the appeal, but, as if it were a question of immediate action, she visibly considered."Out of waiting for him?--of seeing him at all?""Oh no--not that," said poor Strether, looking grave."I've got to wait for him--and I want very much to see him.But out of the terror.You did put your finger on it a few minutes ago.It's general, but it avails itself of particular occasions.That's what it's doing for me now.I'm always considering something else;something else, I mean, than the thing of the moment.The obsession of the other thing is the terror.I'm considering at present for instance something else than YOU."She listened with charming earnestness."Oh you oughtn't to do that!""It's what I admit.Make it then impossible."She continued to think."Is it really an 'order' from you?--that Ishall take the job? WILL you give yourself up?"Poor Strether heaved his sigh."If I only could! But that's the deuce of it--that I never can.No--I can't."She wasn't, however, discouraged."But you want to at least?""Oh unspeakably!"
"Ah then, if you'll try!"--and she took over the job, as she had called it, on the spot."Trust me!" she exclaimed, and the action of this, as they retraced their steps, was presently to make him pass his hand into her arm in the manner of a benign dependent paternal old person who wishes to be "nice" to a younger one.If he drew it out again indeed as they approached the inn this may have been because, after more talk had passed between them, the relation of age, or at least of experience--which, for that matter, had already played to and fro with some *******--affected him as incurring a readjustment.It was at all events perhaps lucky that they arrived in sufficiently separate fashion within range of the hotel-door.The young lady they had left in the glass cage watched as if she had come to await them on the threshold.At her side stood a person equally interested, by his attitude, in their return, and the effect of the sight of whom was instantly to determine for Strether another of those responsive arrests that we have had so repeatedly to note.He left it to Miss Gostrey to name, with the fine full bravado as it almost struck him, of her "Mr.Waymarsh!" what was to have been, what--he more than ever felt as his short stare of suspended welcome took things in--would have been, but for herself, his doom.It was already upon him even at that distance--Mr.Waymarsh was for HIS part joyless.
II