desire. The remarks to which he thus gives utterance contain the essence of
"The Ambassadors," his fingers close, before he has done, round the
stem of the full-blown flower; which, after that fashion, he continues
officiously to present to us. "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.
It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you
have your life. If you haven't had that what HAVE you had? I'm too
old--too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses;
make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom;
therefore don't, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion.
I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it,
and now I'm a case of reaction against the mistake. Do what you like
so long as you don't make it. For it WAS a mistake. Live, live!"
Such is the gist of Strether's appeal to the impressed youth, whom
he likes and whom he desires to befriend; the word "mistake" occurs
several times, it will be seen, in the course of his remarks--
which gives the measure of the signal warning he feels attached
to his case. He has accordingly missed too much, though perhaps
after all constitutionally qualified for a better part, and he wakes up
to it in conditions that press the spring of a terrible question.
WOULD there yet perhaps be time for reparation?--reparation, that is,
for the injury done his character; for the affront, he is quite ready to
say, so stupidly put upon it and in which he has even himself had
so clumsy a hand? The answer to which is that he now at all events SEES;
so that the business of my tale and the march of my action, not to say
the precious moral of everything, is just my demonstration of this
process of vision.

Nothing can exceed the closeness with which the whole fits again
into its germ. That had been given me bodily, as usual, by the
spoken word, for I was to take the image over exactly as I