Whom does Strether really love?: The Ambassadors

In Book Third (!) of Henry James's novel "The Ambassadors" (which not only is not about my junior-high rock band but also, contrary to earlier assumption, was written and published just after The Wings of the Dove - so it really is late, not near-late James - though I do find it more readable than Wings in that it is, at least, somewhat driven by plot and conflict and character, the staple ingredients of most fiction - yet, qualifying a bit further in a Jamesian mode - there are passages that I'm reading about which I just writing in the margin: Huh?) the protagonist, Strether, at last meets his quarry: Chad, the son of the wealthy Connecticut woman whom he (Strether) plans to marry (and secure his waning fortunes - though he seems able to roam about Europe for months at a time with no discernible income, as do all the characters in this novel and most in most of James's novels - infuriating - don't these people ever work a day in their lives?). Strether is a tormented character. Ostensibly, he's a 55-year-old widow who is dead to the world, a man without feeling. His mission - to find the Bohemian Chad and bring him back to Connecticut and into the fold and into the head office of the family business, whatever that maybe - has led him to meet some young people whom he would never have met before - and he's, whether he knows it or not, "won" over (Jamesian quotation marks there). But there are complications: he's supposed to me in love with Chad's mother (whom we have not met in this novel) but there's obviously little affecion for anything but her money. Meanwhile, he's been taken in, or taken up, by an American woman who calls herself a "guide," and it's obvious he is falling in love with her - or thinks he is (I suspect that she, Miss G., is falling for Strether's friend Waymarsh - we'll see); I also suspect that Strether is really falling for Chad's young friend, Little-Belham: they "cute meet" when Strether spies Belham on a balcony, and then spend a lot of time together at the Louvre and elsewhere, and it's obvious to a modern reader - though maybe not even to James - that Strether is smitten. That's the secret subplot of The Ambassadors, I think: all this struggle about love and marriage and obligation is a kind of cover or screen to hide the homo-erotic desires that James's unleashes, for a few moments, at the outset of the novel and hints at throughout.