Live all you can; it's a mistake not to”: every heart vibrates to that iron string, no doubt, but what on earth does it mean? As James emphasizes in the Preface, the “whole case” of The Ambassadors (1903) centers in Strether's tutorial effusion to his young painter-friend, Little Bilham, during Gloriani's garden party, but this is fortune-cookie advice at best: “It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.” The key to Strether, apparently, lies in his belatedness - or better, his belated discovery of belatedness under the barrage of impressions that play havoc with his “categories” in Europe. It is “simply too late,” he feels, too late to repair “the injury done his character” by - well, by just about everything: his proverbial New England conscience, his botched job of parenting, his unbuilt “temple of taste,” his cobbled career of all strain and small gain, of much utility for others but meager identity for himself (A 131, AN 308, A 63). There is nothing obscure about his hurt - except, after all, in the kind of “Enjoyment” (that’s James’s capital E) that has eluded “poor fine melancholy, missing, striving Strether” (N 226, 383).