VOLUME I - BOOK SECOND - CHAPTER II

Strether called, his second morning in Paris, on the bankers of

the Rue Scribe to whom his letter of credit was addressed, and he

made this visit attended by Waymarsh, in whose company he had

crossed from London two days before. They had hastened to the Rue

Scribe on the morrow of their arrival, but Strether had not then

found the letters the hope of which prompted this errand. He had

had as yet none at all; hadn't expected them in London, but had

counted on several in Paris, and, disconcerted now, had presently

strolled back to the Boulevard with a sense of injury that he felt

himself taking for as good a start as any other. It would serve,

this spur to his spirit, he reflected, as, pausing at the top of

the street, he looked up and down the great foreign avenue, it

would serve to begin business with. His idea was to begin business

immediately, and it did much for him the rest of his day that the

beginning of business awaited him. He did little else till night

but ask himself what he should do if he hadn't fortunately had so

much to do; but he put himself the question in many different

situations and connexions. What carried him hither and yon was an

admirable theory that nothing he could do wouldn't be in some

manner related to what he fundamentally had on hand, or WOULD be--

should he happen to have a scruple--wasted for it. He did happen

to have a scruple--a scruple about taking no definite step till he

should get letters; but this reasoning carried it off. A single

day to feel his feet--he had felt them as yet only at Chester and

in London--was he could consider, none too much; and having, as he

had often privately expressed it, Paris to reckon with, he threw

these hours of freshness consciously into the reckoning. They made

it continually greater, but that was what it had best be if it was

to be anything at all, and he gave himself up till far into the

evening, at the theatre and on the return, after the theatre,

along the bright congested Boulevard, to feeling it grow. Waymarsh

had accompanied him this time to the play, and the two men had

walked together, as a first stage, from the Gymnase to the Cafe

Riche, into the crowded "terrace" of which establishment--the

night, or rather the morning, for midnight had struck, being bland

and populous--they had wedged themselves for refreshment.

Waymarsh, as a result of some discussion with his friend, had made

a marked virtue of his having now let himself go; and there had

been elements of impression in their half-hour over their watered

beer-glasses that gave him his occasion for conveying that he held

this compromise with his stiffer self to have become extreme. He

conveyed it--for it was still, after all, his stiffer self who

gloomed out of the glare of the terrace--in solemn silence; and

there was indeed a great deal of critical silence, every way,

between the companions, even till they gained the Place de l'Opera,

as to the character of their nocturnal progress.

This morning there WERE letters--letters which had reached London,

apparently all together, the day of Strether's journey, and had

taken their time to follow him; so that, after a controlled

impulse to go into them in the reception-room of the bank, which,

reminding him of the post-office at Woollett, affected him as the

abutment of some transatlantic bridge, he slipped them into the

pocket of his loose grey overcoat with a sense of the felicity of

carrying them off. Waymarsh, who had had letters yesterday, had

had them again to-day, and Waymarsh suggested in this particular

no controlled impulses. The last one he was at all events likely

to be observed to struggle with was clearly that of bringing to a

premature close any visit to the Rue Scribe. Strether had left him

there yesterday; he wanted to see the papers, and he had spent, by

what his friend could make out, a succession of hours with the

papers. He spoke of the establishment, with emphasis, as a post of

superior observation; just as he spoke generally of his actual

damnable doom as a device for hiding from him what was going on.

Europe was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for

dissociating the confined American from that indispensable

knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these

occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering

western airs. Strether, on his side, set himself to walk again--he

had his relief in his pocket; and indeed, much as he had desired

his budget, the growth of restlessness might have been marked in

him from the moment he had assured himself of the superscription

of most of the missives it contained. This restlessness became

therefore his temporary law; he knew he should recognise as soon

as see it the best place of all for settling down with his chief

correspondent. He had for the next hour an accidental air of

looking for it in the windows of shops; he came down the Rue de la

Paix in the sun and, passing across the Tuileries and the river,

indulged more than once--as if on finding himself determined--in a

sudden pause before the book-stalls of the opposite quay. In the

garden of the Tuileries he had lingered, on two or three spots, to

look; it was as if the wonderful Paris spring had stayed him as he

roamed. The prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes--in a

soft breeze and a sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the

garden-floor, of bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong

boxes, in the type of ancient thrifty persons basking betimes

where terrace-walls were warm, in the blue-frocked brass-labelled

officialism of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep references

of a straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a white-gaitered

red-legged soldier. He watched little brisk figures, figures whose

movement was as the tick of the great Paris clock, take their

smooth diagonal from point to point; the air had a taste as of

something mixed with art, something that presented nature as a

white-capped master-chef. The palace was gone, Strether remembered

the palace; and when he gazed into the irremediable void of its

site the historic sense in him might have been freely at play--the

play under which in Paris indeed it so often winces like a touched

nerve. He filled out spaces with dim symbols of scenes; he caught

the gleam of white statues at the base of which, with his letters

out, he could tilt back a straw-bottomed chair. But his drift was,

for reasons, to the other side, and it floated him unspent up the

Rue de Seine and as far as the Luxembourg. In the Luxembourg

Gardens he pulled up; here at last he found his nook, and here, on

a penny chair from which terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains,

little trees in green tubs, little women in white caps and shrill

little girls at play all sunnily "composed" together, he passed an

hour in which the cup of his impressions seemed truly to overflow.

But a week had elapsed since he quitted the ship, and there were

more things in his mind than so few days could account for. More

than once, during the time, he had regarded himself as admonished;

but the admonition this morning was formidably sharp. It took as

it hadn't done yet the form of a question--the question of what he

was doing with such an extraordinary sense of escape. This sense

was sharpest after he had read his letters, but that was also

precisely why the question pressed. Four of the letters were from

Mrs. Newsome and none of them short; she had lost no time, had

followed on his heels while he moved, so expressing herself that

he now could measure the probable frequency with which he should

hear. They would arrive, it would seem, her communications, at the

rate of several a week; he should be able to count, it might even

prove, on more than one by each mail. If he had begun yesterday

with a small grievance he had therefore an opportunity to begin

to-day with its opposite. He read the letters successively and

slowly, putting others back into his pocket but keeping these for

a long time afterwards gathered in his lap. He held them there,

lost in thought, as if to prolong the presence of what they gave

him; or as if at the least to assure them their part in the

constitution of some lucidity. His friend wrote admirably, and her

tone was even more in her style than in her voice--he might

almost, for the hour, have had to come this distance to get its

full carrying quality; yet the plentitude of his consciousness of

difference consorted perfectly with the deepened intensity of the

connexion. It was the difference, the difference of being just

where he was and AS he was, that formed the escape--this

difference was so much greater than he had dreamed it would be;

and what he finally sat there turning over was the strange logic

of his finding himself so free. He felt it in a manner his duty to

think out his state, to approve the process, and when he came in

fact to trace the steps and add up the items they sufficiently

accounted for the sum. He had never expected--that was the truth

of it--again to find himself young, and all the years and other

things it had taken to make him so were exactly his present

arithmetic. He had to make sure of them to put his scruple to

rest.

It all sprang at bottom from the beauty of Mrs. Newsome's desire

that he should be worried with nothing that was not of the essence

of his task; by insisting that he should thoroughly intermit and

break she had so provided for his freedom that she would, as it

were, have only herself to thank. Strether could not at this point

indeed have completed his thought by the image of what she might

have to thank herself FOR: the image, at best, of his own

likeness-poor Lambert Strether washed up on the sunny strand by

the waves of a single day, poor Lambert Strether thankful for

breathing-time and stiffening himself while he gasped. There he

was, and with nothing in his aspect or his posture to scandalise:

it was only true that if he had seen Mrs. Newsome coming he would

instinctively have jumped up to walk away a little. He would have

come round and back to her bravely, but he would have had first to

pull himself together. She abounded in news of the situation at

home, proved to him how perfectly she was arranging for his

absence, told him who would take up this and who take up that

exactly where he had left it, gave him in fact chapter and verse

for the moral that nothing would suffer. It filled for him, this

tone of hers, all the air; yet it struck him at the same time as

the hum of vain things. This latter effect was what he tried to

justify--and with the success that, grave though the appearance,

he at last lighted on a form that was happy. He arrived at it by

the inevitable recognition of his having been a fortnight before

one of the weariest of men. If ever a man had come off tired

Lambert Strether was that man; and hadn't it been distinctly on

the ground of his fatigue that his wonderful friend at home had so

felt for him and so contrived? It seemed to him somehow at these

instants that, could he only maintain with sufficient firmness his

grasp of that truth, it might become in a manner his compass and

his helm. What he wanted most was some idea that would simplify,

and nothing would do this so much as the fact that he was done for

and finished. If it had been in such a light that he had just

detected in his cup the dregs of youth, that was a mere flaw of

the surface of his scheme. He was so distinctly fagged-out that it

must serve precisely as his convenience, and if he could but

consistently be good for little enough he might do everything he

wanted.

Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a single boon--the

common unattainable art of taking things as they came. He appeared

to himself to have given his best years to an active appreciation

of the way they didn't come; but perhaps--as they would seemingly

here be things quite other--this long ache might at last drop to

rest. He could easily see that from the moment he should accept

the notion of his foredoomed collapse the last thing he would lack

would be reasons and memories. Oh if he SHOULD do the sum no slate

would hold the figures! The fact that he had failed, as he

considered, in everything, in each relation and in half a dozen

trades, as he liked luxuriously to put it, might have made, might

still make, for an empty present; but it stood solidly for a

crowded past. It had not been, so much achievement missed, a light

yoke nor a short load.[sic] It was at present as if the backward

picture had hung there, the long crooked course, grey in the

shadow of his solitude. It had been a dreadful cheerful sociable

solitude, a solitude of life or choice, of community; but though

there had been people enough all round it there had been but three

or four persons IN it. Waymarsh was one of these, and the fact

struck him just now as marking the record. Mrs. Newsome was

another, and Miss Gostrey had of a sudden shown signs of becoming

a third. Beyond, behind them was the pale figure of his real

youth, which held against its breast the two presences paler than

itself--the young wife he had early lost and the young son he had

stupidly sacrificed. He had again and again made out for himself

that he might have kept his little boy, his little dull boy who

had died at school of rapid diphtheria, if he had not in those

years so insanely given himself to merely missing the mother. It

was the soreness of his remorse that the child had in all

likelihood not really been dull--had been dull, as he had been

banished and neglected, mainly because the father had been

unwittingly selfish. This was doubtless but the secret habit of

sorrow, which had slowly given way to time; yet there remained an

ache sharp enough to make the spirit, at the sight now and again

of some fair young man just growing up, wince with the thought of

an opportunity lost. Had ever a man, he had finally fallen into

the way of asking himself, lost so much and even done so much for

so little? There had been particular reasons why all yesterday,

beyond other days, he should have had in one ear this cold

enquiry. His name on the green cover, where he had put it for Mrs.

Newsome, expressed him doubtless just enough to make the world--

the world as distinguished, both for more and for less, from

Woollett--ask who he was. He had incurred the ridicule of having

to have his explanation explained. He was Lambert Strether because

he was on the cover, whereas it should have been, for anything

like glory, that he was on the cover because he was Lambert

Strether. He would have done anything for Mrs. Newsome, have been

still more ridiculous--as he might, for that matter, have occasion

to be yet; which came to saying that this acceptance of fate was

all he had to show at fifty-five.

He judged the quantity as small because it WAS small, and all the

more egregiously since it couldn't, as he saw the case, so much as

thinkably have been larger. He hadn't had the gift of making the

most of what he tried, and if he had tried and tried again--no one

but himself knew how often--it appeared to have been that he might

demonstrate what else, in default of that, COULD be made. Old

ghosts of experiments came back to him, old drudgeries and

delusions, and disgusts, old recoveries with their relapses, old

fevers with their chills, broken moments of good faith, others of

still better doubt; adventures, for the most part, of the sort

qualified as lessons. The special spring that had constantly

played for him the day before was the recognition--frequent enough

to surprise him--of the promises to himself that he had after his

other visit never kept. The reminiscence to-day most quickened for

him was that of the vow taken in the course of the pilgrimage

that, newly-married, with the War just over, and helplessly young

in spite of it, he had recklessly made with the creature who was

so much younger still. It had been a bold dash, for which they had

taken money set apart for necessities, but kept sacred at the

moment in a hundred ways, and in none more so than by this private

pledge of his own to treat the occasion as a relation formed with

the higher culture and see that, as they said at Woollett, it

should bear a good harvest. He had believed, sailing home again,

that he had gained something great, and his theory--with an

elaborate innocent plan of reading, digesting, coming back even,

every few years--had then been to preserve, cherish and extend it.

As such plans as these had come to nothing, however, in respect to

acquisitions still more precious, it was doubtless little enough

of a marvel that he should have lost account of that handful of

seed. Buried for long years in dark corners at any rate these few

germs had sprouted again under forty-eight hours of Paris. The

process of yesterday had really been the process of feeling the

general stirred life of connexions long since individually

dropped. Strether had become acquainted even on this ground with

short gusts of speculation--sudden flights of fancy in Louvre

galleries, hungry gazes through clear plates behind which

lemon-coloured volumes were as fresh as fruit on the tree.

There were instants at which he could ask whether, since there had

been fundamentally so little question of his keeping anything, the

fate after all decreed for him hadn't been only to BE kept. Kept

for something, in that event, that he didn't pretend, didn't

possibly dare as yet to divine; something that made him hover and

wonder and laugh and sigh, made him advance and retreat, feeling

half ashamed of his impulse to plunge and more than half afraid of

his impulse to wait. He remembered for instance how he had gone

back in the sixties with lemon-coloured volumes in general on the

brain as well as with a dozen--selected for his wife too--in his

trunk; and nothing had at the moment shown more confidence than

this invocation of the finer taste. They were still somewhere at

home, the dozen--stale and soiled and never sent to the binder;

but what had become of the sharp initiation they represented? They

represented now the mere sallow paint on the door of the temple of

taste that he had dreamed of raising up--a structure he had

practically never carried further. Strether's present highest

flights were perhaps those in which this particular lapse figured

to him as a symbol, a symbol of his long grind and his want of odd

moments, his want moreover of money, of opportunity, of positive

dignity. That the memory of the vow of his youth should, in order

to throb again, have had to wait for this last, as he felt it, of

all his accidents--that was surely proof enough of how his

conscience had been encumbered. If any further proof were needed

it would have been to be found in the fact that, as he perfectly

now saw, he had ceased even to measure his meagreness, a

meagreness that sprawled, in this retrospect, vague and

comprehensive, stretching back like some unmapped Hinterland from

a rough coast-settlement. His conscience had been amusing itself

for the forty-eight hours by forbidding him the purchase of a

book; he held off from that, held off from everything; from the

moment he didn't yet call on Chad he wouldn't for the world have

taken any other step. On this evidence, however, of the way they

actually affected him he glared at the lemon-coloured covers in

confession of the subconsciousness that, all the same, in the

great desert of the years, he must have had of them. The green

covers at home comprised, by the law of their purpose, no tribute

to letters; it was of a mere rich kernel of economics, politics,

ethics that, glazed and, as Mrs. Newsome maintained rather against

HIS view, pre-eminently pleasant to touch, they formed the

specious shell. Without therefore any needed instinctive knowledge

of what was coming out, in Paris, on the bright highway, he struck

himself at present as having more than once flushed with a

suspicion: he couldn't otherwise at present be feeling so many

fears confirmed. There were "movements" he was too late for:

weren't they, with the fun of them, already spent? There were

sequences he had missed and great gaps in the procession: he might

have been watching it all recede in a golden cloud of dust. If the

playhouse wasn't closed his seat had at least fallen to somebody

else. He had had an uneasy feeling the night before that if he was

at the theatre at all--though he indeed justified the theatre, in

the specific sense, and with a grotesqueness to which his

imagination did all honour, as something he owed poor Waymarsh--he

should have been there with, and as might have been said, FOR

Chad.

This suggested the question of whether he could properly have

taken him to such a play, and what effect--it was a point that

suddenly rose--his peculiar responsibility might be held in

general to have on his choice of entertainment. It had literally

been present to him at the Gymnase--where one was held moreover

comparatively safe--that having his young friend at his side would

have been an odd feature of the work of redemption; and this quite

in spite of the fact that the picture presented might well,

confronted with Chad's own private stage, have seemed the pattern

of propriety. He clearly hadn't come out in the name of propriety

but to visit unattended equivocal performances; yet still less had

he done so to undermine his authority by sharing them with the

graceless youth. Was he to renounce all amusement for the sweet

sake of that authority? and WOULD such renouncement give him for

Chad a moral glamour? The little problem bristled the more by

reason of poor Strether's fairly open sense of the irony of

things. Were there then sides on which his predicament threatened

to look rather droll to him? Should he have to pretend to believe--

either to himself or the wretched boy--that there was anything

that could make the latter worse? Wasn't some such pretence on the

other hand involved in the assumption of possible processes that

would make him better? His greatest uneasiness seemed to peep at

him out of the imminent impression that almost any acceptance of

Paris might give one's authority away. It hung before him this

morning, the vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent

object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be

discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and

trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one

moment seemed all depth the next. It was a place of which,

unmistakeably, Chad was fond; wherefore if he, Strether, should

like it too much, what on earth, with such a bond, would become of

either of them? It all depended of course--which was a gleam of

light--on how the "too much" was measured; though indeed our

friend fairly felt, while he prolonged the meditation I describe,

that for himself even already a certain measure had been reached.

It will have been sufficiently seen that he was not a man to

neglect any good chance for reflexion. Was it at all possible for

instance to like Paris enough without liking it too much? He

luckily however hadn't promised Mrs. Newsome not to like it at

all. He was ready to recognise at this stage that such an

engagement WOULD have tied his hands. The Luxembourg Gardens were

incontestably just so adorable at this hour by reason--in addition

to their intrinsic charm--of his not having taken it. The only

engagement he had taken, when he looked the thing in the face, was

to do what he reasonably could.

It upset him a little none the less and after a while to find

himself at last remembering on what current of association he had

been floated so far. Old imaginations of the Latin Quarter had

played their part for him, and he had duly recalled its having

been with this scene of rather ominous legend that, like so many

young men in fiction as well as in fact, Chad had begun. He was

now quite out of it, with his "home," as Strether figured the

place, in the Boulevard Malesherbes; which was perhaps why,

repairing, not to fail of justice either, to the elder

neighbourhood, our friend had felt he could allow for the element

of the usual, the immemorial, without courting perturbation. He

was not at least in danger of seeing the youth and the particular

Person flaunt by together; and yet he was in the very air of

which--just to feel what the early natural note must have been--he

wished most to take counsel. It became at once vivid to him that

he had originally had, for a few days, an almost envious vision of

the boy's romantic privilege. Melancholy Murger, with Francine and

Musette and Rodolphe, at home, in the company of the tattered,

one--if he not in his single self two or three--of the unbound,

the paper-covered dozen on the shelf; and when Chad had written,

five years ago, after a sojourn then already prolonged to six

months, that he had decided to go in for economy and the real

thing, Strether's fancy had quite fondly accompanied him in this

migration, which was to convey him, as they somewhat confusedly

learned at Woollett, across the bridges and up the Montagne

Sainte-Genevieve. This was the region--Chad had been quite

distinct about it--in which the best French, and many other

things, were to be learned at least cost, and in which all sorts

of clever fellows, compatriots there for a purpose, formed an

awfully pleasant set. The clever fellows, the friendly countrymen

were mainly young painters, sculptors, architects, medical

students; but they were, Chad sagely opined, a much more

profitable lot to be with--even on the footing of not being quite

one of them--than the "terrible toughs" (Strether remembered the

edifying discrimination) of the American bars and banks

roundabout the Opera. Chad had thrown out, in the communications

following this one--for at that time he did once in a while

communicate--that several members of a band of earnest workers

under one of the great artists had taken him right in, making him

dine every night, almost for nothing, at their place, and even

pressing him not to neglect the hypothesis of there being as much

"in him" as in any of them. There had been literally a moment at

which it appeared there might be something in him; there had been

at any rate a moment at which he had written that he didn't know

but what a month or two more might see him enrolled in some

atelier. The season had been one at which Mrs. Newsome was moved

to gratitude for small mercies; it had broken on them all as a

blessing that their absentee HAD perhaps a conscience--that he was

sated in fine with idleness, was ambitious of variety. The

exhibition was doubtless as yet not brilliant, but Strether

himself, even by that time much enlisted and immersed, had

determined, on the part of the two ladies, a temperate approval

and in fact, as he now recollected, a certain austere enthusiasm.

But the very next thing that happened had been a dark drop of the

curtain. The son and brother had not browsed long on the Montagne

Sainte-Genevieve--his effective little use of the name of which,

like his allusion to the best French, appeared to have been but

one of the notes of his rough cunning. The light refreshment of

these vain appearances had not accordingly carried any of them

very far. On the other hand it had gained Chad time; it had given

him a chance, unchecked, to strike his roots, had paved the way

for initiations more direct and more deep. It was Strether's

belief that he had been comparatively innocent before this first

migration, and even that the first effects of the migration would

not have been, without some particular bad accident, to have been

deplored. There had been three months--he had sufficiently figured

it out--in which Chad had wanted to try. He HAD tried, though not

very hard--he had had his little hour of good faith. The weakness

of this principle in him was that almost any accident attestedly

bad enough was stronger. Such had at any rate markedly been the

case for the precipitation of a special series of impressions.

They had proved, successively, these impressions--all of Musette

and Francine, but Musette and Francine vulgarised by the larger

evolution of the type--irresistibly sharp: he had "taken up," by

what was at the time to be shrinkingly gathered, as it was scantly

mentioned, with one ferociously "interested" little person after

another. Strether had read somewhere of a Latin motto, a

description of the hours, observed on a clock by a traveller in

Spain; and he had been led to apply it in thought to Chad's number

one, number two, number three. Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat--they

had all morally wounded, the last had morally killed. The last had

been longest in possession--in possession, that is, of whatever

was left of the poor boy's finer mortality. And it hadn't been

she, it had been one of her early predecessors, who had determined

the second migration, the expensive return and relapse, the

exchange again, as was fairly to be presumed, of the vaunted best

French for some special variety of the worst.

He pulled himself then at last together for his own progress back;

not with the feeling that he had taken his walk in vain. He

prolonged it a little, in the immediate neighbourhood, after he

had quitted his chair; and the upshot of the whole morning for him

was that his campaign had begun. He had wanted to put himself in

relation, and he would be hanged if he were NOT in relation. He

was that at no moment so much as while, under the old arches of

the Odeon, he lingered before the charming open-air array of

literature classic and casual. He found the effect of tone and

tint, in the long charged tables and shelves, delicate and

appetising; the impression--substituting one kind of low-priced

consommation for another--might have been that of one of the

pleasant cafes that overlapped, under an awning, to the pavement;

but he edged along, grazing the tables, with his hands firmly

behind him. He wasn't there to dip, to consume--he was there to

reconstruct. He wasn't there for his own profit--not, that is, the

direct; he was there on some chance of feeling the brush of the

wing of the stray spirit of youth. He felt it in fact, he had it

beside him; the old arcade indeed, as his inner sense listened,

gave out the faint sound, as from far off, of the wild waving of

wings. They were folded now over the breasts of buried generations;

but a flutter or two lived again in the turned page of shock-headed

slouch-hatted loiterers whose young intensity of type, in the direction

of pale acuteness, deepened his vision, and even his appreciation,

of racial differences, and whose manipulation of the uncut volume was

too often, however, but a listening at closed doors. He reconstructed

a possible groping Chad of three or four years before, a Chad who had,

after all, simply--for that was the only way to see it--been too vulgar

for his privilege. Surely it WAS a privilege to have been young and

happy just there. Well, the best thing Strether knew of him was that

he had had such a dream.

But his own actual business half an hour later was with a third

floor on the Boulevard Malesherbes--so much as that was definite;

and the fact of the enjoyment by the third-floor windows of a

continuous balcony, to which he was helped by this knowledge, had

perhaps something to do with his lingering for five minutes on the

opposite side of the street. There were points as to which he had

quite made up his mind, and one of these bore precisely on the

wisdom of the abruptness to which events had finally committed him,

a policy that he was pleased to find not at all shaken as he now

looked at his watch and wondered. He HAD announced himself--six

months before; had written out at least that Chad wasn't to be

surprised should he see him some day turn up. Chad had thereupon,

in a few words of rather carefully colourless answer, offered him a

general welcome; and Strether, ruefully reflecting that he might

have understood the warning as a hint to hospitality, a bid for an

invitation, had fallen back upon silence as the corrective most to

his own taste. He had asked Mrs. Newsome moreover not to announce

him again; he had so distinct an opinion on his attacking his job,

should he attack it at all, in his own way. Not the least of this

lady's high merits for him was that he could absolutely rest on her

word. She was the only woman he had known, even at Woollett, as to

whom his conviction was positive that to lie was beyond her art.

Sarah Pocock, for instance, her own daughter, though with social

ideals, as they said, in some respects different--Sarah who WAS, in

her way, aesthetic, had never refused to human commerce that

mitigation of rigour; there were occasions when he had distinctly

seen her apply it. Since, accordingly, at all events, he had had it

from Mrs. Newsome that she had, at whatever cost to her more

strenuous view, conformed, in the matter of preparing Chad, wholly

to his restrictions, he now looked up at the fine continuous

balcony with a safe sense that if the case had been bungled the

mistake was at least his property. Was there perhaps just a

suspicion of that in his present pause on the edge of the Boulevard

and well in the pleasant light?

Many things came over him here, and one of them was that he should

doubtless presently know whether he had been shallow or sharp.

Another was that the balcony in question didn't somehow show as a

convenience easy to surrender. Poor Strether had at this very

moment to recognise the truth that wherever one paused in Paris the

imagination reacted before one could stop it. This perpetual

reaction put a price, if one would, on pauses; but it piled up

consequences till there was scarce room to pick one's steps among

them. What call had he, at such a juncture, for example, to like

Chad's very house? High broad clear--he was expert enough to make

out in a moment that it was admirably built--it fairly embarrassed

our friend by the quality that, as he would have said, it "sprang"

on him. He had struck off the fancy that it might, as a

preliminary, be of service to him to be seen, by a happy accident,

from the third-story windows, which took all the March sun, but of

what service was it to find himself making out after a moment that

the quality "sprung," the quality produced by measure and balance,

the fine relation of part to part and space to space, was probably--

aided by the presence of ornament as positive as it was discreet,

and by the complexion of the stone, a cold fair grey, warmed and

polished a little by life--neither more nor less than a case of

distinction, such a case as he could only feel unexpectedly as a

sort of delivered challenge? Meanwhile, however, the chance he had

allowed for--the chance of being seen in time from the balcony--had

become a fact. Two or three of the windows stood open to the violet

air; and, before Strether had cut the knot by crossing, a young man

had come out and looked about him, had lighted a cigarette and

tossed the match over, and then, resting on the rail, had given

himself up to watching the life below while he smoked. His arrival

contributed, in its order, to keeping Strether in position; the

result of which in turn was that Strether soon felt himself

noticed. The young man began to look at him as in acknowledgement

of his being himself in observation.

This was interesting so far as it went, but the interest was

affected by the young man's not being Chad. Strether wondered at

first if he were perhaps Chad altered, and then saw that this was

asking too much of alteration. The young man was light bright and

alert--with an air too pleasant to have been arrived at by

patching. Strether had conceived Chad as patched, but not beyond

recognition. He was in presence, he felt, of amendments enough as

they stood; it was a sufficient amendment that the gentleman up

there should be Chad's friend. He was young too then, the gentleman

up there--he was very young; young enough apparently to be amused

at an elderly watcher, to be curious even to see what the elderly

watcher would do on finding himself watched. There was youth in

that, there was youth in the surrender to the balcony, there was

youth for Strether at this moment in everything but his own

business; and Chad's thus pronounced association with youth had

given the next instant an extraordinary quick lift to the issue.

The balcony, the distinguished front, testified suddenly, for

Strether's fancy, to something that was up and up; they placed the

whole case materially, and as by an admirable image, on a level

that he found himself at the end of another moment rejoicing to

think he might reach. The young man looked at him still, he looked

at the young man; and the issue, by a rapid process, was that this

knowledge of a perched privacy appeared to him the last of

luxuries. To him too the perched privacy was open, and he saw it

now but in one light--that of the only domicile, the only fireside,

in the great ironic city, on which he had the shadow of a claim.

Miss Gostrey had a fireside; she had told him of it, and it was

something that doubtless awaited him; but Miss Gostrey hadn't yet

arrived--she mightn't arrive for days; and the sole attenuation of

his excluded state was his vision of the small, the admittedly

secondary hotel in the bye-street from the Rue de la Paix, in which

her solicitude for his purse had placed him, which affected him

somehow as all indoor chill, glass-roofed court and slippery

staircase, and which, by the same token, expressed the presence of

Waymarsh even at times when Waymarsh might have been certain to be

round at the bank. It came to pass before he moved that Waymarsh,

and Waymarsh alone, Waymarsh not only undiluted but positively

strengthened, struck him as the present alternative to the young

man in the balcony. When he did move it was fairly to escape that

alternative. Taking his way over the street at last and passing

through the porte-cochere of the house was like consciously leaving

Waymarsh out. However, he would tell him all about it.

Read next: VOLUME I#BOOK THIRD#CHAPTER I

Read previous: VOLUME I#BOOK SECOND#CHAPTER I

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