Aware of what Woollett's view of the matter would be, he decides that if their casual introduction and planned excursion are 'wrong. Maria laughs at the thought of the woman in the hotel office who has seen them 'thus scrape acquaintance,' but Strether is a shade alarmed at this idea. Strether's great sense of 'personal freedom' on his arrival in Europe, for example, will be intensified during the course of his experiences in the 'Old World.' Notice that even at this early point, Strether's values have begun to change. Maria and Strether's conversation about 'the failure to enjoy' introduces one of the major themes of the novel it will be developed considerably as the narrative progresses. Strether's relief on finding Waymarsh not yet at the hotel tells us something of their opposite natures, Notice that Waymarsh is also characterized as 'dyspeptic' and 'joyless.' As they approach the hotel, Strether and Maria see that in the doorway, awaiting their return, is Waymarsh. Strether indicates his willingness, and they walk back to the hotel arm in arm. You're not enjoying it.' Strether confesses that he can never enjoy the present without preoccupation: 'I'm always considering something else something else, I mean, than the thing of the moment.' Maria offers to take him in hand, to serve as his guide and confidante.

It has been my fate.'Īs they continue their walk into the streets of the old city, Maria catches Strether looking at his watch and tells him, 'You're doing something that you think not right. Maria, an American living in Paris, describes herself as a 'companion at large' for traveling Americans, something she does not for money but because 'it has come to me. They talk, 'having accepted each other with an absence of preliminaries,' and she quickly puts Strether at ease.Īs they stroll in the garden of the hotel, Strether feels himself launched in something 'quite disconnected from the sense of his past.' The woman's name is Maria Gostrey she is thirty-five, her features 'not freshly young, not markedly fine, but on happy terms with each other.' She appears, however, 'marked and wan' like Strether himself. they shouldn't see enough of each other.' Inquiring at the desk about Waymarsh, he is overheard by a woman who strikes up a conversation with him, saying that she is acquainted with Waymarsh. slightly loose figure of a man' with glasses, full but graying hair, and a thick, dark moustache 'of characteristically American cut,' is somewhat relieved at finding his friend has not yet arrived: 'there was little fear that. Lambert Strether, an American widower of fifty-five, arrives at his hotel in Chester, England, where he is to meet his old friend, Waymarsh.

The Ambassadors by Henry James