THE   AMBASSADORS

at hand for kings, queens, comedians and other such people, and
though you might be yourself not exactly one of those, you could
yet, in leading the life of high pressure, guess a little how they
sometimes felt. It was truly the life of high pressure that Strether
had seemed to feel himself leading while he sat there, close to Chad,
during the long tension of the act. He was in presence of a fact
that occupied his whole mind, that occupied for the half-hour his
senses themselves all together; but he couldn't without incon-
venience show anything—which moreover might count really as
luck. What he might have shown, had he shown at all, was exactly
the kind of emotion—the emotion of bewilderment—that he had
proposed to himself from the first, whatever should occur, to show
least. The phenomenon that had suddenly sat down there with him
was a phenomenon of change so complete that his imagination,
which had worked so beforehand, felt itself, in the connection,
without margin or allowance. It had faced every contingency but
that Chad should not be Chad, and this was what it now had to face
with a mere strained smile and an uncomfortable flush.
He asked himself if, by any chance, before he should have in
some way to commit himself, he might feel his mind settled to the
new vision, might habituate it, so to speak, to the remarkable truth.
But oh, it was too remarkable, the truth; for what could be more re-
markable than this sharp rupture of an identity? You could deal
with a man as himself—you couldn't deal with him as somebody
else. It was a small source of peace, moreover, to be reduced to
wondering how little he might know in such an event what a sum he
was setting you. He couldn't absolutely not know, for you couldn't
absolutely not let him. It was a case then, simply, a strong case,
as people nowadays called such things, a case of transformation
unsurpassed, and the hope was but in the general law that strong
cases were liable to control from without. Perhaps he, Strether
himself, was the only person, after all, aware of it. Even Miss
Gostrey, with all her science, wouldn't be, would she?—and he had
never seen any one less aware of anything than Waymarsh as he
glowered at Chad. The social sightlessness of his old friend's sur-
vey marked for him afresh, and almost in an humiliating way, the
inevitable limits of direct aid from this source. He was not cer-
tain, however, of not drawing a shade of compensation from the
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