VOLUME I - BOOK THIRD - CHAPTER II

When Miss Gostrey arrived, at the end of a week, she made him a

sign; he went immediately to see her, and it wasn't till then

that he could again close his grasp on the idea of a corrective.

This idea however was luckily all before him again from the

moment he crossed the threshold of the little entresol of the

Quartier Marboeuf into which she had gathered, as she said,

picking them up in a thousand flights and funny little passionate

pounces, the makings of a final nest. He recognised in an instant

that there really, there only, he should find the boon with the

vision of which he had first mounted Chad's stairs. He might have

been a little scared at the picture of how much more, in this

place, he should know himself "in" hadn't his friend been on the

spot to measure the amount to his appetite. Her compact and

crowded little chambers, almost dusky, as they at first struck

him, with accumulations, represented a supreme general adjustment

to opportunities and conditions. Wherever he looked he saw an old

ivory or an old brocade, and he scarce knew where to sit for fear

of a misappliance. The life of the occupant struck him of a

sudden as more charged with possession even than Chad's or than

Miss Barrace's; wide as his glimpse had lately become of the

empire of "things," what was before him still enlarged it; the

lust of the eyes and the pride of life had indeed thus their

temple. It was the innermost nook of the shrine--as brown as a

pirate's cave. In the brownness were glints of gold; patches of

purple were in the gloom; objects all that caught, through the

muslin, with their high rarity, the light of the low windows.

Nothing was clear about them but that they were precious, and

they brushed his ignorance with their contempt as a flower, in a

liberty taken with him, might have been whisked under his nose.

But after a full look at his hostess he knew none the less what

most concerned him. The circle in which they stood together was

warm with life, and every question between them would live there

as nowhere else. A question came up as soon as they had spoken,

for his answer, with a laugh, was quickly: "Well, they've got

hold of me!" Much of their talk on this first occasion was his

development of that truth. He was extraordinarily glad to see

her, expressing to her frankly what she most showed him, that one

might live for years without a blessing unsuspected, but that to

know it at last for no more than three days was to need it or

miss it for ever. She was the blessing that had now become his

need, and what could prove it better than that without her he had

lost himself?

"What do you mean?" she asked with an absence of alarm that,

correcting him as if he had mistaken the "period" of one of her

pieces, gave him afresh a sense of her easy movement through the

maze he had but begun to tread. "What in the name of all the

Pococks have you managed to do?"

"Why exactly the wrong thing. I've made a frantic friend of

little Bilham."

"Ah that sort of thing was of the essence of your case and to

have been allowed for from the first." And it was only after this

that, quite as a minor matter, she asked who in the world little

Bilham might be. When she learned that he was a friend of Chad's

and living for the time in Chad's rooms in Chad's absence, quite

as if acting in Chad's spirit and serving Chad's cause, she

showed, however, more interest. "Should you mind my seeing him?

Only once, you know," she added.

"Oh the oftener the better: he's amusing--he's original."

"He doesn't shock you?" Miss Gostrey threw out.

"Never in the world! We escape that with a perfection--! I feel

it to be largely, no doubt, because I don't half-understand him;

but our modus vivendi isn't spoiled even by that. You must dine

with me to meet him," Strether went on. "Then you'll see.'

"Are you giving dinners?"

"Yes--there I am. That's what I mean."

All her kindness wondered. "That you're spending too much money?"

"Dear no--they seem to cost so little. But that I do it to THEM.

I ought to hold off."

She thought again--she laughed. "The money you must be spending

to think it cheap! But I must be out of it--to the naked eye."

He looked for a moment as if she were really failing him. "Then

you won't meet them?" It was almost as if she had developed an

unexpected personal prudence.

She hesitated. "Who are they--first?"

"Why little Bilham to begin with." He kept back for the moment

Miss Barrace. "And Chad--when he comes--you must absolutely see."

"When then does he come?"

"When Bilham has had time to write him, and hear from him about

me. Bilham, however," he pursued, "will report favourably--

favourably for Chad. That will make him not afraid to come. I

want you the more therefore, you see, for my bluff."

"Oh you'll do yourself for your bluff." She was perfectly easy.

"At the rate you've gone I'm quiet."

"Ah but I haven't," said Strether, "made one protest."

She turned it over. "Haven't you been seeing what there's to

protest about?"

He let her, with this, however ruefully, have the whole truth. "I

haven't yet found a single thing."

"Isn't there any one WITH him then?"

"Of the sort I came out about?" Strether took a moment. "How do I

know? And what do I care?"

"Oh oh!"--and her laughter spread. He was struck in fact by the

effect on her of his joke. He saw now how he meant it as a joke.

SHE saw, however, still other things, though in an instant she

had hidden them. "You've got at no facts at all?"

He tried to muster them. "Well, he has a lovely home."

"Ah that, in Paris," she quickly returned, "proves nothing. That

is rather it DISproves nothing. They may very well, you see, the

people your mission is concerned with, have done it FOR him."

"Exactly. And it was on the scene of their doings then that

Waymarsh and I sat guzzling."

"Oh if you forbore to guzzle here on scenes of doings," she

replied, "you might easily die of starvation." With which she

smiled at him. "You've worse before you."

"Ah I've EVERYTHING before me. But on our hypothesis, you know,

they must be wonderful."

"They ARE!" said Miss Gostrey. "You're not therefore, you see,"

she added, "wholly without facts. They've BEEN, in effect,

wonderful."

To have got at something comparatively definite appeared at last a

little to help--a wave by which moreover, the next moment,

recollection was washed. "My young man does admit furthermore that

they're our friend's great interest."

"Is that the expression he uses?"

Strether more exactly recalled. "No--not quite."

"Something more vivid? Less?"

He had bent, with neared glasses, over a group of articles on a

small stand; and at this he came up. "It was a mere allusion, but,

on the lookout as I was, it struck me. 'Awful, you know, as Chad

is'--those were Bilham's words."

"'Awful, you know'--? Oh!"--and Miss Gostrey turned them over. She

seemed, however, satisfied. "Well, what more do you want?"

He glanced once more at a bibelot or two, and everything sent him

back. "But it is all the same as if they wished to let me have it

between the eyes."

She wondered. "Quoi donc?"

"Why what I speak of. The amenity. They can stun you with that as

well as with anything else."

"Oh," she answered, "you'll come round! I must see them each," she

went on, "for myself. I mean Mr. Bilham and Mr. Newsome--Mr.

Bilham naturally first. Once only--once for each; that will do.

But face to face--for half an hour. What's Mr. Chad," she

immediately pursued, "doing at Cannes? Decent men don't go to

Cannes with the--well, with the kind of ladies you mean."

"Don't they?" Strether asked with an interest in decent men that

amused her.

"No, elsewhere, but not to Cannes. Cannes is different. Cannes is

better. Cannes is best. I mean it's all people you know--when you

do know them. And if HE does, why that's different too. He must

have gone alone. She can't be with him."

"I haven't," Strether confessed in his weakness, "the least

idea." There seemed much in what she said, but he was able after a

little to help her to a nearer impression. The meeting with little

Bilham took place, by easy arrangement, in the great gallery of

the Louvre; and when, standing with his fellow visitor before one

of the splendid Titians--the overwhelming portrait of the young

man with the strangely-shaped glove and the blue-grey eyes--he

turned to see the third member of their party advance from the end

of the waxed and gilded vista, he had a sense of having at last

taken hold. He had agreed with Miss Gostrey--it dated even from

Chester--for a morning at the Louvre, and he had embraced

independently the same idea as thrown out by little Bilham, whom

he had already accompanied to the museum of the Luxembourg. The

fusion of these schemes presented no difficulty, and it was to

strike him again that in little Bilham's company contrarieties in

general dropped.

"Oh he's all right--he's one of US!" Miss Gostrey, after the first

exchange, soon found a chance to murmur to her companion; and

Strether, as they proceeded and paused and while a quick unanimity

between the two appeared to have phrased itself in half a dozen

remarks--Strether knew that he knew almost immediately what she

meant, and took it as still another sign that he had got his job

in hand. This was the more grateful to him that he could think of

the intelligence now serving him as an acquisition positively new.

He wouldn't have known even the day before what she meant--that

is if she meant, what he assumed, that they were intense Americans

together. He had just worked round--and with a sharper turn of the

screw than any yet--to the conception of an American intense as

little Bilham was intense. The young man was his first specimen;

the specimen had profoundly perplexed him; at present however

there was light. It was by little Bilham's amazing serenity that

he had at first been affected, but he had inevitably, in his

circumspection, felt it as the trail of the serpent, the

corruption, as he might conveniently have said, of Europe; whereas

the promptness with which it came up for Miss Gostrey but as a

special little form of the oldest thing they knew justified it at

once to his own vision as well. He wanted to be able to like his

specimen with a clear good conscience, and this fully permitted

it. What had muddled him was precisely the small artist-man's way

--it was so complete--of being more American than anybody. But it

now for the time put Strether vastly at his ease to have this view

of a new way.

The amiable youth then looked out, as it had first struck

Strether, at a world in respect to which he hadn't a prejudice.

The one our friend most instantly missed was the usual one in

favour of an occupation accepted. Little Bilham had an occupation,

but it was only an occupation declined; and it was by his general

exemption from alarm, anxiety or remorse on this score that the

impression of his serenity was made. He had come out to Paris to

paint--to fathom, that is, at large, that mystery; but study had

been fatal to him so far as anything COULD be fatal, and his

productive power faltered in proportion as his knowledge grew.

Strether had gathered from him that at the moment of his finding

him in Chad's rooms he hadn't saved from his shipwreck a scrap of

anything but his beautiful intelligence and his confirmed habit of

Paris. He referred to these things with an equal fond familiarity,

and it was sufficiently clear that, as an outfit, they still

served him. They were charming to Strether through the hour spent

at the Louvre, where indeed they figured for him as an unseparated

part of the charged iridescent air, the glamour of the name, the

splendour of the space, the colour of the masters. Yet they were

present too wherever the young man led, and the day after the

visit to the Louvre they hung, in a different walk, about the

steps of our party. He had invited his companions to cross the

river with him, offering to show them his own poor place; and his

own poor place, which was very poor, gave to his idiosyncrasies,

for Strether--the small sublime indifference and independences

that had struck the latter as fresh--an odd and engaging dignity.

He lived at the end of an alley that went out of an old short

cobbled street, a street that went in turn out of a new long

smooth avenue--street and avenue and alley having, however, in

common a sort of social shabbiness; and he introduced them to the

rather cold and blank little studio which he had lent to a comrade

for the term of his elegant absence. The comrade was another

ingenuous compatriot, to whom he had wired that tea was to await

them "regardless," and this reckless repast, and the second

ingenuous compatriot, and the faraway makeshift life, with its

jokes and its gaps, its delicate daubs and its three or four

chairs, its overflow of taste and conviction and its lack of

nearly all else--these things wove round the occasion a spell to

which our hero unreservedly surrendered.

He liked the ingenuous compatriots--for two or three others soon

gathered; he liked the delicate daubs and the free

discriminations--involving references indeed, involving

enthusiasms and execrations that made him, as they said, sit up;

he liked above all the legend of good-humoured poverty, of mutual

accommodation fairly raised to the romantic, that he soon read

into the scene. The ingenuous compatriots showed a candour, he

thought, surpassing even the candour of Woollett; they were

red-haired and long-legged, they were quaint and queer and dear

and droll; they made the place resound with the vernacular, which

he had never known so marked as when figuring for the chosen

language, he must suppose, of contemporary art. They twanged with

a vengeance the aesthetic lyre--they drew from it wonderful airs.

This aspect of their life had an admirable innocence; and he

looked on occasion at Maria Gostrey to see to what extent that

element reached her. She gave him however for the hour, as she had

given him the previous day, no further sign than to show how she

dealt with boys; meeting them with the air of old Parisian

practice that she had for every one, for everything, in turn.

Wonderful about the delicate daubs, masterful about the way to

make tea, trustful about the legs of chairs and familiarly

reminiscent of those, in the other time, the named, the numbered

or the caricatured, who had flourished or failed, disappeared or

arrived, she had accepted with the best grace her second course of

little Bilham, and had said to Strether, the previous afternoon on

his leaving them, that, since her impression was to be renewed,

she would reserve judgement till after the new evidence.

The new evidence was to come, as it proved, in a day or two. He

soon had from Maria a message to the effect that an excellent box at

the Francais had been lent her for the following night; it seeming

on such occasions not the least of her merits that she was subject

to such approaches. The sense of how she was always paying for

something in advance was equalled on Strether's part only by the

sense of how she was always being paid; all of which made for his

consciousness, in the larger air, of a lively bustling traffic,

the exchange of such values as were not for him to handle. She

hated, he knew, at the French play, anything but a box--just as

she hated at the English anything but a stall; and a box was what

he was already in this phase girding himself to press upon her.

But she had for that matter her community with little Bilham: she

too always, on the great issues, showed as having known in time.

It made her constantly beforehand with him and gave him mainly the

chance to ask himself how on the day of their settlement their

account would stand. He endeavoured even now to keep it a little

straight by arranging that if he accepted her invitation she

should dine with him first; but the upshot of this scruple was

that at eight o'clock on the morrow he awaited her with Waymarsh

under the pillared portico. She hadn't dined with him, and it was

characteristic of their relation that she had made him embrace her

refusal without in the least understanding it. She ever caused her

rearrangements to affect him as her tenderest touches. It was on

that principle for instance that, giving him the opportunity to be

amiable again to little Bilham, she had suggested his offering the

young man a seat in their box. Strether had dispatched for this

purpose a small blue missive to the Boulevard Malesherbes, but up

to the moment of their passing into the theatre he had received no

response to his message. He held, however, even after they had

been for some time conveniently seated, that their friend, who

knew his way about, would come in at his own right moment. His

temporary absence moreover seemed, as never yet, to make the right

moment for Miss Gostrey. Strether had been waiting till tonight to

get back from her in some mirrored form her impressions and

conclusions. She had elected, as they said, to see little Bilham

once; but now she had seen him twice and had nevertheless not said

more than a word.

Waymarsh meanwhile sat opposite him with their hostess between;

and Miss Gostrey spoke of herself as an instructor of youth

introducing her little charges to a work that was one of the

glories of literature. The glory was happily unobjectionable, and

the little charges were candid; for herself she had travelled that

road and she merely waited on their innocence. But she referred in

due time to their absent friend, whom it was clear they should

have to give up. "He either won't have got your note," she said,

"or you won't have got his: he has had some kind of hindrance,

and, of course, for that matter, you know, a man never writes

about coming to a box." She spoke as if, with her look, it might

have been Waymarsh who had written to the youth, and the latter's

face showed a mixture of austerity and anguish. She went on

however as if to meet this. "He's far and away, you know, the best

of them."

"The best of whom, ma'am?"

"Why of all the long procession--the boys, the girls, or the old

men and old women as they sometimes really are; the hope, as one

may say, of our country. They've all passed, year after year; but

there has been no one in particular I've ever wanted to stop. I

feel--don't YOU?--that I want to stop little Bilham; he's so

exactly right as he is." She continued to talk to Waymarsh. "He's

too delightful. If he'll only not spoil it! But they always WILL;

they always do; they always have."

"I don't think Waymarsh knows," Strether said after a moment,

"quite what it's open to Bilham to spoil."

"It can't be a good American," Waymarsh lucidly enough replied;

"for it didn't strike me the young man had developed much in THAT

shape."

"Ah," Miss Gostrey sighed, "the name of the good American is as

easily given as taken away! What IS it, to begin with, to BE one,

and what's the extraordinary hurry? Surely nothing that's so

pressing was ever so little defined. It's such an order, really,

that before we cook you the dish we must at least have your

receipt. Besides the poor chicks have time! What I've seen so

often spoiled," she pursued, "is the happy attitude itself, the

state of faith and--what shall I call it?--the sense of beauty.

You're right about him"--she now took in Strether; "little Bilham

has them to a charm, we must keep little Bilham along." Then she

was all again for Waymarsh. "The others have all wanted so

dreadfully to do something, and they've gone and done it in too

many cases indeed. It leaves them never the same afterwards; the

charm's always somehow broken. Now HE, I think, you know, really

won't. He won't do the least dreadful little thing. We shall

continue to enjoy him just as he is. No--he's quite beautiful. He

sees everything. He isn't a bit ashamed. He has every scrap of

the courage of it that one could ask. Only think what he MIGHT do.

One wants really--for fear of some accident--to keep him in view.

At this very moment perhaps what mayn't he be up to? I've had my

disappointments--the poor things are never really safe; or only at

least when you have them under your eye. One can never completely

trust them. One's uneasy, and I think that's why I most miss him

now."

She had wound up with a laugh of enjoyment over her embroidery of

her idea--an enjoyment that her face communicated to Strether, who

almost wished none the less at this moment that she would let poor

Waymarsh alone. HE knew more or less what she meant; but the fact

wasn't a reason for her not pretending to Waymarsh that he

didn't. It was craven of him perhaps, but he would, for the high

amenity of the occasion, have liked Waymarsh not to be so sure of

his wit. Her recognition of it gave him away and, before she had

done with him or with that article, would give him worse. What was

he, all the same, to do? He looked across the box at his friend;

their eyes met; something queer and stiff, something that bore on

the situation but that it was better not to touch, passed in

silence between them. Well, the effect of it for Strether was an

abrupt reaction, a final impatience of his own tendency to

temporise. Where was that taking him anyway? It was one of the

quiet instants that sometimes settle more matters than the

outbreaks dear to the historic muse. The only qualification of the

quietness was the synthetic "Oh hang it!" into which Strether's

share of the silence soundlessly flowered. It represented, this

mute ejaculation, a final impulse to burn his ships. These ships,

to the historic muse, may seem of course mere cockles, but when he

presently spoke to Miss Gostrey it was with the sense at least of

applying the torch. "Is it then a conspiracy?"

"Between the two young men? Well, I don't pretend to be a seer or

a prophetess," she presently replied; "but if I'm simply a woman

of sense he's working for you to-night. I don't quite know how--

but it's in my bones." And she looked at him at last as if, little

material as she yet gave him, he'd really understand. "For an

opinion THAT'S my opinion. He makes you out too well not to."

"Not to work for me to-night?" Strether wondered. "Then I hope he

isn't doing anything very bad."

"They've got you," she portentously answered.

"Do you mean he IS--?"

"They've got you," she merely repeated. Though she disclaimed the

prophetic vision she was at this instant the nearest approach he

had ever met to the priestess of the oracle. The light was in her

eyes. "You must face it now."

He faced it on the spot. "They HAD arranged--?"

"Every move in the game. And they've been arranging ever since. He

has had every day his little telegram from Cannes."

It made Strether open his eyes. "Do you KNOW that?"

"I do better. I see it. This was, before I met him, what I

wondered whether I WAS to see. But as soon as I met him I ceased

to wonder, and our second meeting made me sure. I took him all in.

He was acting--he is still--on his daily instructions."

"So that Chad has done the whole thing?"

"Oh no--not the whole. WE'VE done some of it. You and I and

'Europe.'"

"Europe--yes," Strether mused.

"Dear old Paris," she seemed to explain. But there was more, and,

with one of her turns, she risked it. "And dear old Waymarsh.

You," she declared, "have been a good bit of it."

He sat massive. "A good bit of what, ma'am?"

"Why of the wonderful consciousness of our friend here. You've

helped too in your way to float him to where he is."

"And where the devil IS he?"

She passed it on with a laugh. "Where the devil, Strether, are

you?"

He spoke as if he had just been thinking it out. "Well, quite

already in Chad's hands, it would seem." And he had had with this

another thought. "Will that be--just all through Bilham--the way

he's going to work it? It would be, for him, you know, an idea.

And Chad with an idea--!"

"Well?" she asked while the image held him.

"Well, is Chad--what shall I say?--monstrous?"

"Oh as much as you like! But the idea you speak of," she said,

"won't have been his best. He'll have a better. It won't be all

through little Bilham that he'll work it."

This already sounded almost like a hope destroyed. "Through whom

else then?"

"That's what we shall see!" But quite as she spoke she turned, and

Strether turned; for the door of the box had opened, with the

click of the ouvreuse, from the lobby, and a gentleman, a stranger

to them, had come in with a quick step. The door closed behind

him, and, though their faces showed him his mistake, his air,

which was striking, was all good confidence. The curtain had just

again arisen, and, in the hush of the general attention,

Strether's challenge was tacit, as was also the greeting, with a

quickly deprecating hand and smile, of the unannounced visitor. He

discreetly signed that he would wait, would stand, and these

things and his face, one look from which she had caught, had

suddenly worked for Miss Gostrey. She fitted to them all an answer

for Strether's last question. The solid stranger was simply the

answer--as she now, turning to her friend, indicated. She brought

it straight out for him--it presented the intruder. "Why, through

this gentleman!" The gentleman indeed, at the same time, though

sounding for Strether a very short name, did practically as much

to explain. Strether gasped the name back--then only had he seen

Miss Gostrey had said more than she knew. They were in presence of

Chad himself.

Our friend was to go over it afterwards again and again--he was

going over it much of the time that they were together, and they

were together constantly for three or four days: the note had been

so strongly struck during that first half-hour that everything

happening since was comparatively a minor development. The fact

was that his perception of the young man's identity--so absolutely

checked for a minute--had been quite one of the sensations that

count in life; he certainly had never known one that had acted, as

he might have said, with more of a crowded rush. And the rush

though both vague and multitudinous, had lasted a long time,

protected, as it were, yet at the same time aggravated, by the

circumstance of its coinciding with a stretch of decorous silence.

They couldn't talk without disturbing the spectators in the part

of the balcony just below them; and it, for that matter, came to

Strether--being a thing of the sort that did come to him--that

these were the accidents of a high civilisation; the imposed

tribute to propriety, the frequent exposure to conditions, usually

brilliant, in which relief has to await its time. Relief was never

quite near at hand for kings, queens, comedians and other such

people, and though you might be yourself not exactly one of those,

you could yet, in leading the life of high pressure, guess a

little how they sometimes felt. It was truly the life of high

pressure that Strether had seemed to feel himself lead while he

sat there, close to Chad, during the long tension of the act. He

was in presence of a fact that occupied his whole mind, that

occupied for the half-hour his senses themselves all together; but

he couldn't without inconvenience show anything--which moreover

might count really as luck. What he might have shown, had he shown

at all, was exactly the kind of emotion--the emotion of

bewilderment--that he had proposed to himself from the first,

whatever should occur, to show least. The phenomenon that had

suddenly sat down there with him was a phenomenon of change so

complete that his imagination, which had worked so beforehand,

felt itself, in the connexion, without margin or allowance. It had

faced every contingency but that Chad should not BE Chad, and this

was what it now had to face with a mere strained smile and an

uncomfortable flush.

He asked himself if, by any chance, before he should have in some

way to commit himself, he might feel his mind settled to the new

vision, might habituate it, so to speak, to the remarkable truth.

But oh it was too remarkable, the truth; for what could be more

remarkable than this sharp rupture of an identity? You could deal

with a man as himself--you couldn't deal with him as somebody

else. It was a small source of peace moreover to be reduced to

wondering how little he might know in such an event what a sum he

was setting you. He couldn't absolutely not know, for you couldn't

absolutely not let him. It was a CASE then simply, a strong

case, as people nowadays called such things,' a case of

transformation unsurpassed, and the hope was but in the general

law that strong cases were liable to control from without. Perhaps

he, Strether himself, was the only person after all aware of it.

Even Miss Gostrey, with all her science, wouldn't be, would she?

--and he had never seen any one less aware of anything than

Waymarsh as he glowered at Chad. The social sightlessness of his

old friend's survey marked for him afresh, and almost in an

humiliating way, the inevitable limits of direct aid from this

source. He was not certain, however, of not drawing a shade of

compensation from the privilege, as yet untasted, of knowing more

about something in particular than Miss Gostrey did. His situation

too was a case, for that matter, and he was now so interested,

quite so privately agog, about it, that he had already an eye to

the fun it would be to open up to her afterwards. He derived

during his half-hour no assistance from her, and just this fact of

her not meeting his eyes played a little, it must be confessed,

into his predicament.

He had introduced Chad, in the first minutes, under his breath,

and there was never the primness in her of the person

unacquainted; but she had none the less betrayed at first no

vision but of the stage, where she occasionally found a pretext

for an appreciative moment that she invited Waymarsh to share. The

latter's faculty of participation had never had, all round, such

an assault to meet; the pressure on him being the sharper for this

chosen attitude in her, as Strether judged it, of isolating, for

their natural intercourse, Chad and himself. This intercourse was

meanwhile restricted to a frank friendly look from the young man,

something markedly like a smile, but falling far short of a grin,

and to the vivacity of Strether's private speculation as to

whether HE carried himself like a fool. He didn't quite see how

he could so feel as one without somehow showing as one. The worst

of that question moreover was that he knew it as a symptom the

sense of which annoyed him. "If I'm going to be odiously conscious

of how I may strike the fellow," he reflected, "it was so little

what I came out for that I may as well stop before I begin." This

sage consideration too, distinctly, seemed to leave untouched the

fact that he WAS going to be conscious. He was conscious of

everything but of what would have served him.

He was to know afterwards, in the watches of the night, that

nothing would have been more open to him than after a minute or

two to propose to Chad to seek with him the refuge of the lobby.

He hadn't only not proposed it, but had lacked even the presence

of mind to see it as possible. He had stuck there like a schoolboy

wishing not to miss a minute of the show; though for that portion

of the show then presented he hadn't had an instant's real

attention. He couldn't when the curtain fell have given the

slightest account of what had happened. He had therefore, further,

not at that moment acknowledged the amenity added by this

acceptance of his awkwardness to Chad's general patience. Hadn't

he none the less known at the very time--known it stupidly and

without reaction--that the boy was accepting something? He was

modestly benevolent, the boy--that was at least what he had been

capable of the superiority of making out his chance to be; and one

had one's self literally not had the gumption to get in ahead of

him. If we should go into all that occupied our friend in the

watches of the night we should have to mend our pen; but an

instance or two may mark for us the vividness with which he could

remember. He remembered the two absurdities that, if his presence

of mind HAD failed, were the things that had had most to do with

it. He had never in his life seen a young man come into a box at

ten o'clock at night, and would, if challenged on the question in

advance, have scarce been ready to pronounce as to different ways

of doing so. But it was in spite of this definite to him that Chad

had had a way that was wonderful: a fact carrying with it an

implication that, as one might imagine it, he knew, he had

learned, how.

Here already then were abounding results; he had on the spot and

without the least trouble of intention taught Strether that even

in so small a thing as that there were different ways. He had

done in the same line still more than this; had by a mere shake or

two of the head made his old friend observe that the change in him

was perhaps more than anything else, for the eye, a matter of the

marked streaks of grey, extraordinary at his age, in his thick

black hair; as well as that this new feature was curiously

becoming to him, did something for him, as characterisation, also

even--of all things in the world--as refinement, that had been a

good deal wanted. Strether felt, however, he would have had to

confess, that it wouldn't have been easy just now, on this and

other counts, in the presence of what had been supplied, to be

quite clear as to what had been missed. A reflexion a candid

critic might have made of old, for instance, was that it would

have been happier for the son to look more like the mother; but

this was a reflexion that at present would never occur. The ground

had quite fallen away from it, yet no resemblance whatever to the

mother had supervened. It would have been hard for a young man's

face and air to disconnect themselves more completely than Chad's

at this juncture from any discerned, from any imaginable aspect of

a New England female parent. That of course was no more than had

been on the cards; but it produced in Strether none the less one

of those frequent phenomena of mental reference with which all

judgement in him was actually beset.

Again and again as the days passed he had had a sense of the

pertinence of communicating quickly with Woollett--communicating

with a quickness with which telegraphy alone would rhyme; the

fruit really of a fine fancy in him for keeping things straight,

for the happy forestalment of error. No one could explain better

when needful, nor put more conscience into an account or a report;

which burden of conscience is perhaps exactly the reason why his

heart always sank when the clouds of explanation gathered. His

highest ingenuity was in keeping the sky of life clear of them.

Whether or no he had a grand idea of the lucid, he held that nothing

ever was in fact--for any one else--explained. One went through

the vain motions, but it was mostly a waste of life. A personal

relation was a relation only so long as people either perfectly

understood or, better still, didn't care if they didn't. From

the moment they cared if they didn't it was living by the sweat

of one's brow; and the sweat of one's brow was just what one

might buy one's self off from by keeping the ground free of the

wild weed of delusion. It easily grew too fast, and the Atlantic

cable now alone could race with it. That agency would each day

have testified for him to something that was not what Woollett had

argued. He was not at this moment absolutely sure that the effect

of the morrow's--or rather of the night's--appreciation of the

crisis wouldn't be to determine some brief missive. "Have at last

seen him, but oh dear!"--some temporary relief of that sort seemed

to hover before him. It hovered somehow as preparing them all--yet

preparing them for what? If he might do so more luminously and

cheaply he would tick out in four words: "Awfully old--grey hair."

To this particular item in Chad's appearance he constantly, during

their mute half-hour, reverted; as if so very much more than he

could have said had been involved in it. The most he could have

said would have been: "If he's going to make me feel young--!"

which indeed, however, carried with it quite enough. If Strether

was to feel young, that is, it would be because Chad was to feel

old; and an aged and hoary sinner had been no part of the scheme.

The question of Chadwick's true time of life was, doubtless, what

came up quickest after the adjournment of the two, when the play

was over, to a cafe in the Avenue de l'Opera. Miss Gostrey had in

due course been perfect for such a step; she had known exactly

what they wanted--to go straight somewhere and talk; and Strether

had even felt she had known what he wished to say and that he was

arranging immediately to begin. She hadn't pretended this, as she

HAD pretended on the other hand, to have divined Waymarsh's wish

to extend to her an independent protection homeward; but Strether

nevertheless found how, after he had Chad opposite to him at a

small table in the brilliant halls that his companion straightway

selected, sharply and easily discriminated from others, it was

quite, to his mind, as if she heard him speak; as if, sitting up,

a mile away, in the little apartment he knew, she would listen

hard enough to catch. He found too that he liked that idea, and he

wished that, by the same token, Mrs. Newsome might have caught as

well. For what had above all been determined in him as a necessity

of the first order was not to lose another hour, nor a fraction of

one; was to advance, to overwhelm, with a rush. This was how he

would anticipate--by a night-attack, as might be--any forced

maturity that a crammed consciousness of Paris was likely to take

upon itself to assert on behalf of the boy. He knew to the full,

on what he had just extracted from Miss Gostrey, Chad's marks of

alertness; but they were a reason the more for not dawdling. If he

was himself moreover to be treated as young he wouldn't at all

events be so treated before he should have struck out at least

once. His arms might be pinioned afterwards, but it would have

been left on record that he was fifty. The importance of this he

had indeed begun to feel before they left the theatre; it had

become a wild unrest, urging him to seize his chance. He could

scarcely wait for it as they went; he was on the verge of the

indecency of bringing up the question in the street; he fairly

caught himself going on--so he afterwards invidiously named it--as

if there would be for him no second chance should the present be

lost. Not till, on the purple divan before the perfunctory bock,

he had brought out the words themselves, was he sure, for that

matter, that the present would be saved.

Read next: VOLUME I#BOOK FOURTH#CHAPTER I

Read previous: VOLUME I#BOOK THIRD#CHAPTER I

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