Quite impressed by the Countess, Strether agrees to help her as well - though he does not know how he will be able to appease both Mrs. Strether is charmed by the Countess, Madame de Vionnet, a married woman with whom Chad has begun a relationship. He enjoys spending time with Chad's young friends, Miss Barrace and Little John Bilham. Strether arrives in Paris and his trip becomes a return to his own youth. Newsome's 'ambassador,' sent to Paris to protect her interests. Despite the assistance of his old friend, Waymarsh, and his new friend, Maria Gostrey, Strether is unable to fulfill this task. Newsome's son, Chad, has been in Paris for a long time and the Newsomes are worried that Chad will never return home. Lambert Strether is from Woollett, Massachusetts and he has come to Europe at the request of his employer, Mrs. Do what you like so long as you don't make it. 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.

Still, we have the illusion of freedom therefore don't, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion. What one loses one loses make no mistake about that. If you haven't had that what HAVE you had? I'm too old-too old at any rate for what I see. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. 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. The idea of the tale resides indeed in the very fact that an hour of such unprecedented ease should have been felt by him AS a crisis, and he is at pains to express it for us as neatly as we could desire. The whole case, in fine, is in Lambert Strether's irrepressible outbreak to little Bilham on the Sunday afternoon in Gloriani's garden, the candour with which he yields, for his young friend's enlightenment, to the charming admonition of that crisis. Never can a composition of this sort have sprung straighter from a dropped grain of suggestion, and never can that grain, developed, overgrown and smothered, have yet lurked more in the mass as an independent particle.

The situation involved is gathered up betimes, that is in the second chapter of Book Fifth, for the reader's benefit, into as few words as possible-planted or 'sunk,' stiffly and saliently, in the centre of the current, almost perhaps to the obstruction of traffic. Nothing is more easy than to state the subject of 'The Ambassadors,' which first appeared in twelve numbers of The North American Review (1903) and was published as a whole the same year.

The Ambassadors by Henry James