The Ambassadors
by
Henry James

Part 2 out of 9



which could rest for an instant gratified in such an antithesis. It
came over him that never before--no, literally never--had a lady
dined with him at a public place before going to the play. The
publicity of the place was just, in the matter, for Strether, the
rare strange thing; it affected him almost as the achievement of
privacy might have affected a man of a different experience. He had
married, in the far-away years, so young as to have missed the time
natural in Boston for taking girls to the Museum; and it was
absolutely true of hint that--even after the close of the period of
conscious detachment occupying the centre of his life, the grey
middle desert of the two deaths, that of his wife and that, ten
years later, of his boy--he had never taken any one anywhere. It
came over him in especial--though the monition had, as happened,
already sounded, fitfully gleamed, in other forms--that the
business he had come out on hadn't yet been so brought home to him
as by the sight of the people about him. She gave him the
impression, his friend, at first, more straight than he got it for
himself--gave it simply by saying with off-hand illumination: "Oh
yes, they're types!"--but after he had taken it he made to the full
his own use of it; both while he kept silence for the four acts and
while he talked in the intervals. It was an evening, it was a world
of types, and this was a connexion above all in which the figures
and faces in the stalls were interchangeable with those on the
stage.

He felt as if the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow
of his neighbour, a great stripped handsome red-haired lady who
conversed with a gentleman on her other side in stray dissyllables
which had for his ear, in the oddest way in the world, so much
sound that he wondered they hadn't more sense; and he recognised by
the same law, beyond the footlights, what he was pleased to take
for the very flush of English life. He had distracted drops in
which he couldn't have said if it were actors or auditors who were
most true, and the upshot of which, each time, was the consciousness
of new contacts. However he viewed his job it was "types" he should
have to tackle. Those before him and around him were not as the
types of Woollett, where, for that matter, it had begun to seem to
him that there must only have been the male and the female.
These made two exactly, even with the individual varieties. Here,
on the other hand, apart from the personal and the sexual range--
which might be greater or less--a series of strong stamps had been
applied, as it were, from without; stamps that his observation
played with as, before a glass case on a table, it might have
passed from medal to medal and from copper to gold. It befell that
in the drama precisely there was a bad woman in a yellow frock who
made a pleasant weak good-looking young man in perpetual evening
dress do the most dreadful things. Strether felt himself on the
whole not afraid of the yellow frock, but he was vaguely anxious
over a certain kindness into which he found himself drifting for
its victim. He hadn't come out, he reminded himself, to be too
kind, or indeed to be kind at all, to Chadwick Newsome. Would Chad
also be in perpetual evening dress? He somehow rather hoped it--it
seemed so to add to THIS young man's general amenability; though he
wondered too if, to fight him with his own weapons, he himself (a
thought almost startling) would have likewise to be. This young man
furthermore would have been much more easy to handle--at least for
HIM--than appeared probable in respect to Chad.

It came up for him with Miss Gostrey that there were things of
which she would really perhaps after all have heard, and she admitted
when a little pressed that she was never quite sure of what she
heard as distinguished from things such as, on occasions like
the present, she only extravagantly guessed. "I seem with this
freedom, you see, to have guessed Mr. Chad. He's a young man on
whose head high hopes are placed at Woollett; a young man a wicked
woman has got hold of and whom his family over there have sent you
out to rescue. You've accepted the mission of separating him from
the wicked woman. Are you quite sure she's very bad for him?"

Something in his manner showed it as quite pulling him up. "Of
course we are. Wouldn't YOU be?"

"Oh I don't know. One never does--does one?--beforehand. One can
only judge on the facts. Yours are quite new to me; I'm really not
in the least, as you see, in possession of them: so it will be
awfully interesting to have them from you. If you're satisfied,
that's all that's required. I mean if you're sure you ARE sure:
sure it won't do."

"That he should lead such a life? Rather!"

"Oh but I don't know, you see, about his life; you've not told me
about his life. She may be charming--his life!"

"Charming?"--Strether stared before him. "She's base, venal-out of
the streets."

"I see. And HE--?"

"Chad, wretched boy?"

"Of what type and temper is he?" she went on as Strether had
lapsed.

"Well--the obstinate." It was as if for a moment he had been going
to say more and had then controlled himself.

That was scarce what she wished. "Do you like him?"

This time he was prompt. "No. How CAN I?"

"Do you mean because of your being so saddled with him?"

"I'm thinking of his mother," said Strether after a moment. "He has
darkened her admirable life." He spoke with austerity. "He has
worried her half to death."

"Oh that's of course odious." She had a pause as if for renewed
emphasis of this truth, but it ended on another note. "Is her life
very admirable?"

"Extraordinarily."

There was so much in the tone that Miss Gostrey had to devote
another pause to the appreciation of it. "And has he only HER? I
don't mean the bad woman in Paris," she quickly added--"for I
assure you I shouldn't even at the best be disposed to allow him
more than one. But has he only his mother?"

"He has also a sister, older than himself and married; and they're
both remarkably fine women."

"Very handsome, you mean?"

This promptitude--almost, as he might have thought, this
precipitation, gave him a brief drop; but he came up again.
"Mrs. Newsome, I think, is handsome, though she's not of course,
with a son of twenty-eight and a daughter of thirty, in her very
first youth. She married, however, extremely young."

"And is wonderful," Miss Gostrey asked, "for her age?"

Strether seemed to feel with a certain disquiet the pressure of it.
"I don't say she's wonderful. Or rather," he went on the next moment,
"I do say it. It's exactly what she IS--wonderful. But I wasn't
thinking of her appearance," he explained--"striking as that doubtless
is. I was thinking--well, of many other things." He seemed to look at
these as if to mention some of them; then took, pulling himself up,
another turn. "About Mrs. Pocock people may differ."

"Is that the daughter's name--'Pocock'?"

"That's the daughter's name," Strether sturdily confessed.

"And people may differ, you mean, about HER beauty?"

"About everything."

"But YOU admire her?"

He gave his friend a glance as to show how he could bear this "I'm
perhaps a little afraid of her."

"Oh," said Miss Gostrey, "I see her from here! You may say then I
see very fast and very far, but I've already shown you I do. The
young man and the two ladies," she went on, "are at any rate all
the family?"

"Quite all. His father has been dead ten years, and there's no
brother, nor any other sister. They'd do," said Strether, "anything
in the world for him."

"And you'd do anything in the world for THEM?"

He shifted again; she had made it perhaps just a shade too affirmative
for his nerves. "Oh I don't know!"

"You'd do at any rate this, and the 'anything' they'd do is
represented by their MAKING you do it."

"Ah they couldn't have come--either of them. They're very busy
people and Mrs. Newsome in particular has a large full life. She's
moreover highly nervous--and not at all strong."

"You mean she's an American invalid?"

He carefully distinguished. "There's nothing she likes less than to
be called one, but she would consent to be one of those things, I
think," he laughed, "if it were the only way to be the other."

"Consent to be an American in order to be an invalid?"

"No," said Strether, "the other way round. She's at any rate
delicate sensitive high-strung. She puts so much of herself into
everything--"

Ah Maria knew these things! "That she has nothing left for anything
else? Of course she hasn't. To whom do you say it? High-strung?
Don't I spend my life, for them, jamming down the pedal? I see
moreover how it has told on you."

Strether took this more lightly. "Oh I jam down the pedal too!"

"Well," she lucidly returned, "we must from this moment bear on it
together with all our might." And she forged ahead. "Have they
money?"

But it was as if, while her energetic image still held him, her
enquiry fell short. "Mrs. Newsome," he wished further to explain,
"hasn't moreover your courage on the question of contact. If she
had come it would have been to see the person herself."

"The woman? Ah but that's courage."

"No--it's exaltation, which is a very different thing. Courage,"
he, however, accommodatingly threw out, "is what YOU have."

She shook her head. "You say that only to patch me up--to cover the
nudity of my want of exaltation. I've neither the one nor the
other. I've mere battered indifference. I see that what you mean,"
Miss Gostrey pursued, "is that if your friend HAD come she would
take great views, and the great views, to put it simply, would be
too much for her."

Strether looked amused at her notion of the simple, but he adopted
her formula. "Everything's too much for her."

"Ah then such a service as this of yours--"

"Is more for her than anything else? Yes--far more. But so long as
it isn't too much for ME--!"

"Her condition doesn't matter? Surely not; we leave her condition
out; we take it, that is, for granted. I see it, her condition, as
behind and beneath you; yet at the same time I see it as bearing
you up."

"Oh it does bear me up!" Strether laughed.

"Well then as yours bears ME nothing more's needed." With which she
put again her question. "Has Mrs. Newsome money?"

This time he heeded. "Oh plenty. That's the root of the evil.
There's money, to very large amounts, in the concern. Chad has had
the free use of a great deal. But if he'll pull himself together
and come home, all the same, he'll find his account in it."

She had listened with all her interest. "And I hope to goodness
you'll find yours!"

"He'll take up his definite material reward," said Strether without
acknowledgement of this. "He's at the parting of the ways. He can
come into the business now--he can't come later."

"Is there a business?"

"Lord, yes--a big brave bouncing business. A roaring trade."

"A great shop?"

"Yes--a workshop; a great production, a great industry. The
concern's a manufacture--and a manufacture that, if it's only
properly looked after, may well be on the way to become a monopoly.
It's a little thing they make--make better, it appears, than other
people can, or than other people, at any rate, do. Mr. Newsome,
being a man of ideas, at least in that particular line," Strether
explained, "put them on it with great effect, and gave the place
altogether, in his time, an immense lift."

"It's a place in itself?"

"Well, quite a number of buildings; almost a little industrial
colony. But above all it's a thing. The article produced."

"And what IS the article produced?"

Strether looked about him as in slight reluctance to say; then the
curtain, which he saw about to rise, came to his aid. "I'll tell
you next time." But when the next time came he only said he'd tell
her later on--after they should have left the theatre; for she had
immediately reverted to their topic, and even for himself the
picture of the stage was now overlaid with another image. His
postponements, however, made her wonder--wonder if the article
referred to were anything bad. And she explained that she meant
improper or ridiculous or wrong. But Strether, so far as that went,
could satisfy her. "Unmentionable? Oh no, we constantly talk of it;
we are quite familiar and brazen about it. Only, as a small,
trivial, rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use,
it's just wanting in-what shall I say? Well, dignity, or the least
approach to distinction. Right here therefore, with everything
about us so grand--!" In short he shrank.

"It's a false note?"

"Sadly. It's vulgar."

"But surely not vulgarer than this." Then on his wondering as she
herself had done: "Than everything about us." She seemed a trifle
irritated. "What do you take this for?"

"Why for--comparatively--divine! "

"This dreadful London theatre? It's impossible, if you really want
to know."

"Oh then," laughed Strether, "I DON'T really want to know!"

It made between them a pause, which she, however, still fascinated
by the mystery of the production at Woollett, presently broke.
"'Rather ridiculous'? Clothes-pins? Saleratus? Shoe-polish?"

It brought him round. "No--you don't even 'burn.' I don't think,
you know, you'll guess it."

"How then can I judge how vulgar it is?"

"You'll judge when I do tell you"--and he persuaded her to
patience. But it may even now frankly be mentioned that he in the
sequel never WAS to tell her. He actually never did so, and it
moreover oddly occurred that by the law, within her, of the
incalculable, her desire for the information dropped and her
attitude to the question converted itself into a positive
cultivation of ignorance. In ignorance she could humour her fancy,
and that proved a useful freedom. She could treat the little
nameless object as indeed unnameable--she could make their
abstention enormously definite. There might indeed have been for
Strether the portent of this in what she next said.

"Is it perhaps then because it's so bad--because your industry as
you call it, IS so vulgar--that Mr. Chad won't come back? Does he
feel the taint? Is he staying away not to be mixed up in it?"

"Oh," Strether laughed, "it wouldn't appear--would it?--that he
feels 'taints'! He's glad enough of the money from it, and the
money's his whole basis. There's appreciation in that--I mean as to
the allowance his mother has hitherto made him. She has of course
the resource of cutting this allowance off; but even then he has
unfortunately, and on no small scale, his independent supply--money
left him by his grandfather, her own father."

"Wouldn't the fact you mention then," Miss Gostrey asked, "make it
just more easy for him to be particular? Isn't he conceivable as
fastidious about the source--the apparent and public source--of his
income?"

Strether was able quite good-humouredly to entertain the
proposition. "The source of his grandfather's wealth--and thereby
of his own share in it--was not particularly noble."

"And what source was it?"

Strether cast about. "Well--practices."

"In business? Infamies? He was an old swindler?"

"Oh," he said with more emphasis than spirit, "I shan't describe
HIM nor narrate his exploits."

"Lord, what abysses! And the late Mr. Newsome then?"

"Well, what about him?"

"Was he like the grandfather?"

"No--he was on the other side of the house. And he was different."

Miss Gostrey kept it up. "Better?"

Her friend for a moment hung fire. "No."

Her comment on his hesitation was scarce the less marked for being
mute. "Thank you. NOW don't you see," she went on, "why the boy
doesn't come home? He's drowning his shame."

"His shame? What shame?"

"What shame? Comment donc? THE shame."

"But where and when," Strether asked, "is 'THE shame'--where is any
shame--to-day? The men I speak of--they did as every one does; and
(besides being ancient history) it was all a matter of appreciation."

She showed how she understood. "Mrs. Newsome has appreciated?"

"Ah I can't speak for HER!"

"In the midst of such doings--and, as I understand you, profiting
by them, she at least has remained exquisite?"

"Oh I can't talk of her!" Strether said.

"I thought she was just what you COULD talk of. You DON'T trust
me," Miss Gostrey after a moment declared.

It had its effect. "Well, her money is spent, her life conceived
and carried on with a large beneficence--"

"That's a kind of expiation of wrongs? Gracious," she added before
he could speak, "how intensely you make me see her!"

"If you see her," Strether dropped, "it's all that's necessary."

She really seemed to have her. "I feel that. She IS, in spite of
everything, handsome."

This at least enlivened him. "What do you mean by everything?"

"Well, I mean YOU." With which she had one of her swift changes of
ground. "You say the concern needs looking after; but doesn't
Mrs. Newsome look after it?"

"So far as possible. She's wonderfully able, but it's not her
affair, and her life's a good deal overcharged. She has many,
many things."

"And you also?"

"Oh yes--I've many too, if you will."

"I see. But what I mean is," Miss Gostrey amended, "do you also
look after the business?"

"Oh no, I don't touch the business."

"Only everything else?"

"Well, yes--some things."

"As for instance--?"

Strether obligingly thought. "Well, the Review."

"The Review?--you have a Review?"

"Certainly. Woollett has a Review--which Mrs. Newsome, for the
most part, magnificently pays for and which I, not at all
magnificently, edit. My name's on the cover," Strether pursued,
"and I'm really rather disappointed and hurt that you seem never
to have heard of it."

She neglected for a moment this grievance. "And what kind of a
Review is it?"

His serenity was now completely restored. "Well, it's green."

"Do you mean in political colour as they say here--in thought?"

"No; I mean the cover's green--of the most lovely shade."

"And with Mrs. Newsome's name on it too?"

He waited a little. "Oh as for that you must judge if she peeps
out. She's behind the whole thing; but she's of a delicacy and a
discretion--!"

Miss Gostrey took it all. "I'm sure. She WOULD be. I don't
underrate her. She must be rather a swell."

"Oh yes, she's rather a swell!"

"A Woollett swell--bon! I like the idea of a Woollett swell. And
you must be rather one too, to be so mixed up with her."

"Ah no," said Strether, "that's not the way it works."

But she had already taken him up. "The way it works--you needn't
tell me!--is of course that you efface yourself."

"With my name on the cover?" he lucidly objected.

"Ah but you don't put it on for yourself."

"I beg your pardon--that's exactly what I do put it on for. It's
exactly the thing that I'm reduced to doing for myself. It seems
to rescue a little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions,
the refuse-heap of disappointments and failures, my one presentable
little scrap of an identity."

On this she looked at him as to say many things, but what she at
last simply said was: "She likes to see it there. You're the
bigger swell of the two," she immediately continued, "because you
think you're not one. She thinks she IS one. However," Miss
Gostrey added, "she thinks you're one too. You're at all events
the biggest she can get hold of." She embroidered, she abounded.
"I don't say it to interfere between you, but on the day she gets
hold of a bigger one--!" Strether had thrown back his head as in
silent mirth over something that struck him in her audacity or
felicity, and her flight meanwhile was already higher. "Therefore
close with her--!"

"Close with her?" he asked as she seemed to hang poised.

"Before you lose your chance."

Their eyes met over it. "What do you mean by closing?"

"And what do I mean by your chance? I'll tell you when you tell me
all the things YOU don't. Is it her GREATEST fad?" she briskly
pursued.

"The Review?" He seemed to wonder how he could best describe it.
This resulted however but in a sketch. "It's her tribute to the
ideal."

"I see. You go in for tremendous things."

"We go in for the unpopular side--that is so far as we dare."

"And how far DO you dare?"

"Well, she very far. I much less. I don't begin to have her faith.
She provides," said Strether, "three fourths of that. And she
provides, as I've confided to you, ALL the money."

It evoked somehow a vision of gold that held for a little Miss
Gostrey's eyes, and she looked as if she heard the bright dollars
shovelled in. "I hope then you make a good thing--"

"I NEVER made a good thing!" he at once returned.

She just waited. "Don't you call it a good thing to be loved?"

"Oh we're not loved. We're not even hated. We're only just sweetly
ignored."

She had another pause. "You don't trust me!" she once more repeated.

"Don't I when I lift the last veil?--tell you the very secret of
the prison-house?"

Again she met his eyes, but to the result that after an instant
her own turned away with impatience. "You don't sell? Oh I'm glad
of THAT!" After which however, and before he could protest, she was
off again. "She's just a MORAL swell."

He accepted gaily enough the definition. "Yes--I really think that
describes her."

But it had for his friend the oddest connexion. "How does she do
her hair?"

He laughed out. "Beautifully!"

"Ah that doesn't tell me. However, it doesn't matter--I know. It's
tremendously neat--a real reproach; quite remarkably thick and
without, as yet, a single strand of white. There!"

He blushed for her realism, but gaped at her truth. "You're the
very deuce."

"What else SHOULD I be? It was as the very deuce I pounced on you.
But don't let it trouble you, for everything but the very deuce--
at our age--is a bore and a delusion, and even he himself, after all,
but half a joy." With which, on a single sweep of her wing, she
resumed. "You assist her to expiate--which is rather hard when
you've yourself not sinned."

"It's she who hasn't sinned," Strether replied. "I've sinned the
most."

"Ah," Miss Gostrey cynically laughed, "what a picture of HER!
Have you robbed the widow and the orphan?"

"I've sinned enough," said Strether.

"Enough for whom? Enough for what?"

"Well, to be where I am."

"Thank you!" They were disturbed at this moment by the passage
between their knees and the back of the seats before them of a
gentleman who had been absent during a part of the performance and
who now returned for the close; but the interruption left Miss
Gostrey time, before the subsequent hush, to express as a sharp
finality her sense of the moral of all their talk. "I knew you had
something up your sleeve!" This finality, however, left them in its
turn, at the end of the play, as disposed to hang back as if they
had still much to say; so that they easily agreed to let every one
go before them--they found an interest in waiting. They made out
from the lobby that the night had turned to rain; yet Miss Gostrey
let her friend know that he wasn't to see her home. He was simply
to put her, by herself, into a four-wheeler; she liked so in
London, of wet nights after wild pleasures, thinking things over,
on the return, in lonely four-wheelers. This was her great time,
she intimated, for pulling herself together. The delays caused by
the weather, the struggle for vehicles at the door, gave them
occasion to subside on a divan at the back of the vestibule and
just beyond the reach of the fresh damp gusts from the street. Here
Strether's comrade resumed that free handling of the subject to
which his own imagination of it already owed so much. "Does your
young friend in Paris like you?"

It had almost, after the interval, startled him. "Oh I hope not!
Why SHOULD he?"

"Why shouldn't he?" Miss Gostrey asked. "That you're coming down on
him need have nothing to do with it."

"You see more in it," he presently returned, "than I."

"Of course I see you in it."

"Well then you see more in 'me'!"

"Than you see in yourself? Very likely. That's always one's right.
What I was thinking of," she explained, "is the possible particular
effect on him of his milieu."

"Oh his milieu--!" Strether really felt he could imagine it better
now than three hours before.

"Do you mean it can only have been so lowering?"

"Why that's my very starting-point."

"Yes, but you start so far back. What do his letters say?"

"Nothing. He practically ignores us--or spares us. He doesn't
write."

"I see. But there are all the same," she went on, "two quite
distinct things that--given the wonderful place he's in--may have
happened to him. One is that he may have got brutalised. The other
is that he may have got refined."

Strether stared--this WAS a novelty. "Refined?"

"Oh," she said quietly, "there ARE refinements."

The way of it made him, after looking at her, break into a laugh.
"YOU have them!"

"As one of the signs," she continued in the same tone, "they
constitute perhaps the worst."

He thought it over and his gravity returned. "Is it a refinement
not to answer his mother's letters?"

She appeared to have a scruple, but she brought it out. "Oh I
should say the greatest of all."

"Well," said Strether, "I'M quite content to let it, as one of the
signs, pass for the worst that I know he believes he can do what he
likes with me."

This appeared to strike her. "How do you know it?"

"Oh I'm sure of it. I feel it in my bones."

"Feel he CAN do it?"

"Feel that he believes he can. It may come to the same thing!"
Strether laughed.

She wouldn't, however, have this. "Nothing for you will ever come
to the same thing as anything else." And she understood what she
meant, it seemed, sufficiently to go straight on. "You say that if
he does break he'll come in for things at home?"

"Quite positively. He'll come in for a particular chance--a chance
that any properly constituted young man would jump at. The
business has so developed that an opening scarcely apparent three
years ago, but which his father's will took account of as in
certain conditions possible and which, under that will, attaches
to Chad's availing himself of it a large contingent advantage--
this opening, the conditions having come about, now simply awaits
him. His mother has kept it for him, holding out against strong
pressure, till the last possible moment. It requires, naturally,
as it carries with it a handsome 'part,' a large share in profits,
his being on the spot and making a big effort for a big result.
That's what I mean by his chance. If he misses it he comes in, as
you say, for nothing. And to see that he doesn't miss it is, in a
word, what I've come out for."

She let it all sink in. "What you've come out for then is simply
to render him an immense service."

Well, poor Strether was willing to take it so. "Ah if you like."

"He stands, as they say, if you succeed with him, to gain--"

"Oh a lot of advantages." Strether had them clearly at his
fingers' ends.

"By which you mean of course a lot of money."

"Well, not only. I'm acting with a sense for him of other things
too. Consideration and comfort and security--the general safety of
being anchored by a strong chain. He wants, as I see him, to be
protected. Protected I mean from life."

"Ah voila!"--her thought fitted with a click. "From life. What you
REALLY want to get him home for is to marry him."

"Well, that's about the size of it."

"Of course," she said, "it's rudimentary. But to any one in
particular?"

He smiled at this, looking a little more conscious. "You get
everything out."

For a moment again their eyes met. "You put everything in!"

He acknowledged the tribute by telling her. "To Mamie Pocock."

She wondered; then gravely, even exquisitely, as if to make the
oddity also fit: "His own niece?"

"Oh you must yourself find a name for the relation. His
brother-in-law's sister. Mrs. Jim's sister-in-law."

It seemed to have on Miss Gostrey a certain hardening effect. "And
who in the world's Mrs. Jim?"

"Chad's sister--who was Sarah Newsome. She's married--didn't I
mention it?--to Jim Pocock."

"Ah yes," she tacitly replied; but he had mentioned things--!
Then, however, with all the sound it could have, "Who in the
world's Jim Pocock?" she asked.

"Why Sally's husband. That's the only way we distinguish people at
Woollett," he good-humoredly explained.

"And is it a great distinction--being Sally's husband?"

He considered. "I think there can be scarcely a greater--unless it
may become one, in the future, to be Chad's wife."

"Then how do they distinguish YOU?"

"They DON'T--except, as I've told you, by the green cover."

Once more their eyes met on it, and she held him an instant. "The
green cover won't--nor will ANY cover--avail you with ME. You're
of a depth of duplicity!" Still, she could in her own large grasp
of the real condone it. "Is Mamie a great parti?"

"Oh the greatest we have--our prettiest brightest girl."

Miss Gostrey seemed to fix the poor child. "I know what they CAN
be. And with money?"

"Not perhaps with a great deal of that--but with so much of
everything else that we don't miss it. We DON'T miss money much,
you know," Strether added, "in general, in America, in pretty
girls."

"No," she conceded; "but I know also what you do sometimes miss.
And do you," she asked, "yourself admire her?"

It was a question, he indicated, that there might be several ways
of taking; but he decided after an instant for the humorous.
"Haven't I sufficiently showed you how I admire ANY pretty girl?';

Her interest in his problem was by this time such that it scarce
left her freedom, and she kept close to the facts. "I supposed
that at Woollett you wanted them--what shall I call it?--
blameless. I mean your young men for your pretty girls."

"So did I!" Strether confessed. "But you strike there a curious
fact--the fact that Woollett too accommodates itself to the spirit
of the age and the increasing mildness of manners. Everything
changes, and I hold that our situation precisely marks a date. We
SHOULD prefer them blameless, but we have to make the best of them
as we find them. Since the spirit of the age and the increasing
mildness send them so much more to Paris--"

"You've to take them back as they come. When they DO come. Bon!"
Once more she embraced it all, but she had a moment of thought.
"Poor Chad!"

"Ah," said Strether cheerfully "Mamie will save him!"

She was looking away, still in her vision, and she spoke with
impatience and almost as if he hadn't understood her. "YOU'LL save
him. That's who'll save him."

"Oh but with Mamie's aid. Unless indeed you mean," he added, "that
I shall effect so much more with yours!"

It made her at last again look at him. "You'll do more--as you're
so much better--than all of us put together."

"I think I'm only better since I've known YOU!" Strether bravely
returned.

The depletion of the place, the shrinkage of the crowd and now
comparatively quiet withdrawal of its last elements had already
brought them nearer the door and put them in relation with a
messenger of whom he bespoke Miss Gostrey's cab. But this left
them a few minutes more, which she was clearly in no mood not to
use. "You've spoken to me of what--by your success--Mr. Chad
stands to gain. But you've not spoken to me of what you do."

"Oh I've nothing more to gain," said Strether very simply.

She took it as even quite too simple. "You mean you've got it all
'down'? You've been paid in advance?"

"Ah don't talk about payment!" he groaned.

Something in the tone of it pulled her up, but as their messenger
still delayed she had another chance and she put it in another
way. "What--by failure--do you stand to lose?"

He still, however, wouldn't have it. "Nothing!" he exclaimed, and
on the messenger's at this instant reappearing he was able to sink
the subject in their responsive advance. When, a few steps up the
street, under a lamp, he had put her into her four-wheeler and she
had asked him if the man had called for him no second conveyance,
he replied before the door was closed. "You won't take me with
you?"

"Not for the world."

"Then I shall walk."

"In the rain?"

"I like the rain," said Strether. "Good-night!"

She kept him a moment, while his hand was on the door, by not
answering; after which she answered by repeating her question.
"What do you stand to lose?"

Why the question now affected him as other he couldn't have said;
he could only this time meet it otherwise. "Everything."

"So I thought. Then you shall succeed. And to that end I'm yours--"

"Ah, dear lady!" he kindly breathed.

"Till death!" said Maria Gostrey. "Good-night."



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.





Book Third




I


Strether told Waymarsh all about it that very evening, on their
dining together at the hotel; which needn't have happened, he was
all the while aware, hadn't he chosen to sacrifice to this occasion
a rarer opportunity. The mention to his companion of the sacrifice
was moreover exactly what introduced his recital--or, as he would
have called it with more confidence in his interlocutor, his
confession. His confession was that he had been captured and that
one of the features of the affair had just failed to be his
engaging himself on the spot to dinner. As by such a freedom
Waymarsh would have lost him he had obeyed his scruple; and he had
likewise obeyed another scruple--which bore on the question of his
himself bringing a guest.

Waymarsh looked gravely ardent, over the finished soup, at this
array of scruples; Strether hadn't yet got quite used to being so
unprepared for the consequences of the impression he produced. It
was comparatively easy to explain, however, that he hadn't felt
sure his guest would please. The person was a young man whose
acquaintance he had made but that afternoon in the course of rather
a hindered enquiry for another person--an enquiry his new friend
had just prevented in fact from being vain. "Oh," said Strether,
"I've all sorts of things to tell you!"--and he put it in a way
that was a virtual hint to Waymarsh to help him to enjoy the
telling. He waited for his fish, he drank of his wine, he wiped his
long moustache, he leaned back in his chair, he took in the two
English ladies who had just creaked past them and whom he would
even have articulately greeted if they hadn't rather chilled the
impulse; so that all he could do was--by way of doing something--to
say "Merci, Francois!" out quite loud when his fish was brought.
Everything was there that he wanted, everything that could make the
moment an occasion, that would do beautifully--everything but what
Waymarsh might give. The little waxed salle-a-manger was sallow and
sociable; Francois, dancing over it, all smiles, was a man and a
brother; the high-shouldered patronne, with her high-held,
much-rubbed hands, seemed always assenting exuberantly to something
unsaid; the Paris evening in short was, for Strether, in the very
taste of the soup, in the goodness, as he was innocently pleased to
think it, of the wine, in the pleasant coarse texture of the napkin
and the crunch of the thick-crusted bread. These all were things
congruous with his confession, and his confession was that he HAD--
it would come out properly just there if Waymarsh would only take
it properly--agreed to breakfast out, at twelve literally, the next
day. He didn't quite know where; the delicacy of the case came
straight up in the remembrance of his new friend's "We'll see; I'll
take you somewhere!"--for it had required little more than that,
after all, to let him right in. He was affected after a minute,
face to face with his actual comrade, by the impulse to overcolour.
There had already been things in respect to which he knew himself
tempted by this perversity. If Waymarsh thought them bad he should
at least have his reason for his discomfort; so Strether showed
them as worse. Still, he was now, in his way, sincerely perplexed.

Chad had been absent from the Boulevard Malesherbes--was absent
from Paris altogether; he had learned that from the concierge, but
had nevertheless gone up, and gone up--there were no two ways about
it--from an uncontrollable, a really, if one would, depraved
curiosity. The concierge had mentioned to him that a friend of the
tenant of the troisieme was for the time in possession; and this
had been Strether's pretext for a further enquiry, an experiment
carried on, under Chad's roof, without his knowledge. "I found his
friend in fact there keeping the place warm, as he called it, for
him; Chad himself being, as appears, in the south. He went a month
ago to Cannes and though his return begins to be looked for it
can't be for some days. I might, you see, perfectly have waited a
week; might have beaten a retreat as soon as I got this essential
knowledge. But I beat no retreat; I did the opposite; I stayed, I
dawdled, I trifled; above all I looked round. I saw, in fine; and--
I don't know what to call it--I sniffed. It's a detail, but it's as
if there were something--something very good--TO sniff."

Waymarsh's face had shown his friend an attention apparently so
remote that the latter was slightly surprised to find it at this
point abreast with him. "Do you mean a smell? What of?"

"A charming scent. But I don't know."

Waymarsh gave an inferential grunt. "Does he live there with a
woman?"

"I don't know."

Waymarsh waited an instant for more, then resumed. "Has he taken
her off with him?"

"And will he bring her back?"--Strether fell into the enquiry. But
he wound it up as before. "I don't know."

The way he wound it up, accompanied as this was with another drop
back, another degustation of the Leoville, another wipe of his
moustache and another good word for Francois, seemed to produce in
his companion a slight irritation. "Then what the devil DO you
know?"

"Well," said Strether almost gaily, "I guess I don't know anything!"
His gaiety might have been a tribute to the fact that the state he
had been reduced to did for him again what had been done by his talk
of the matter with Miss Gostrey at the London theatre. It was somehow
enlarging; and the air of that amplitude was now doubtless more or
less--and all for Waymarsh to feel--in his further response. "That's
what I found out from the young man."

"But I thought you said you found out nothing."

"Nothing but that--that I don't know anything."

"And what good does that do you?"

"It's just," said Strether, "what I've come to you to help me to
discover. I mean anything about anything over here. I FELT that, up
there. It regularly rose before me in its might. The young man
moreover--Chad's friend--as good as told me so."

"As good as told you you know nothing about anything?" Waymarsh
appeared to look at some one who might have as good as told HIM.
"How old is he?"

"Well, I guess not thirty."

"Yet you had to take that from him?"

"Oh I took a good deal more--since, as I tell you, I took an
invitation to dejeuner."

"And are you GOING to that unholy meal?"

"If you'll come with me. He wants you too, you know. I told him
about you. He gave me his card," Strether pursued, "and his name's
rather funny. It's John Little Bilham, and he says his two surnames
are, on account of his being small, inevitably used together."

"Well," Waymarsh asked with due detachment from these details,
"what's he doing up there?"

"His account of himself is that he's 'only a little artist-man.'
That seemed to me perfectly to describe him. But he's yet in the
phase of study; this, you know, is the great art-school--to pass a
certain number of years in which he came over. And he's a great
friend of Chad's, and occupying Chad's rooms just now because
they're so pleasant. HE'S very pleasant and curious too," Strether
added--"though he's not from Boston."

Waymarsh looked already rather sick of him. "Where is he from?"

Strether thought. "I don't know that, either. But he's
'notoriously,' as he put it himself, not from Boston."

"Well," Waymarsh moralised from dry depths, "every one can't
notoriously be from Boston. Why," he continued, "is he curious?"

"Perhaps just for THAT--for one thing! But really," Strether added,
"for everything. When you meet him you'll see."

"Oh I don't want to meet him," Waymarsh impatiently growled. "Why
don't he go home?"

Strether hesitated. "Well, because he likes it over here."

This appeared in particular more than Waymarsh could bear. "He
ought then to be ashamed of himself, and, as you admit that you
think so too, why drag him in?"

Strether's reply again took time. "Perhaps I do think so myself--
though I don't quite yet admit it. I'm not a bit sure--it's again
one of the things I want to find out. I liked him, and CAN you like
people--? But no matter." He pulled himself up. "There's no doubt I
want you to come down on me and squash me."

Waymarsh helped himself to the next course, which, however proving
not the dish he had just noted as supplied to the English ladies,
had the effect of causing his imagination temporarily to wander.
But it presently broke out at a softer spot. "Have they got a
handsome place up there?"

"Oh a charming place; full of beautiful and valuable things. I
never saw such a place"--and Strether's thought went back to it.
"For a little artist-man--!" He could in fact scarce express it.

But his companion, who appeared now to have a view, insisted.
"Well?"

"Well, life can hold nothing better. Besides, they're things of
which he's in charge."

"So that he does doorkeeper for your precious pair? Can life,"
Waymarsh enquired, "hold nothing better than THAT?" Then as
Strether, silent, seemed even yet to wonder, "Doesn't he know what
SHE is?" he went on.

"I don't know. I didn't ask him. I couldn't. It was impossible. You
wouldn't either. Besides I didn't want to. No more would you."
Strether in short explained it at a stroke. "You can't make out
over here what people do know."

"Then what did you come over for?"

"Well, I suppose exactly to see for myself--without their aid."

"Then what do you want mine for?"

"Oh," Strether laughed, "you're not one of THEM! I do know what you
know."

As, however, this last assertion caused Waymarsh again to look at
him hard--such being the latter's doubt of its implications--he
felt his justification lame. Which was still more the case when
Waymarsh presently said: "Look here, Strether. Quit this."

Our friend smiled with a doubt of his own. "Do you mean my tone?"

"No--damn your tone. I mean your nosing round. Quit the whole job.
Let them stew in their juice. You're being used for a thing you
ain't fit for. People don't take a fine-tooth comb to groom a
horse."

"Am I a fine-tooth comb?" Strether laughed. "It's something I never
called myself!"

"It's what you are, all the same. You ain't so young as you were,
but you've kept your teeth."

He acknowledged his friend's humour. "Take care I don't get them
into YOU! You'd like them, my friends at home, Waymarsh," he
declared; "you'd really particularly like them. And I know"--it was
slightly irrelevant, but he gave it sudden and singular force--"I
know they'd like you!"

"Oh don't work them off on ME!" Waymarsh groaned.

Yet Strether still lingered with his hands in his pockets. "It's
really quite as indispensable as I say that Chad should be got
back."

"Indispensable to whom? To you?"

"Yes," Strether presently said.

"Because if you get him you also get Mrs. Newsome?"

Strether faced it. "Yes."

"And if you don't get him you don't get her?"

It might be merciless, but he continued not to flinch. "I think it
might have some effect on our personal understanding. Chad's of
real importance--or can easily become so if he will--to the
business."

"And the business is of real importance to his mother's husband?"

"Well, I naturally want what my future wife wants. And the thing
will be much better if we have our own man in it."

"If you have your own man in it, in other words," Waymarsh said,
"you'll marry--you personally--more money. She's already rich, as I
understand you, but she'll be richer still if the business can be
made to boom on certain lines that you've laid down."

"I haven't laid them down," Strether promptly returned. "Mr. Newsome
--who knew extraordinarily well what he was about--laid them down
ten years ago."

Oh well, Waymarsh seemed to indicate with a shake of his mane, THAT
didn't matter! "You're fierce for the boom anyway."

His friend weighed a moment in silence the justice of the charge.
"I can scarcely be called fierce, I think, when I so freely take my
chance of the possibility, the danger, of being influenced in a
sense counter to Mrs. Newsome's own feelings."

Waymarsh gave this proposition a long hard look. "I see. You're
afraid yourself of being squared. But you're a humbug," he added,
all the same."

"Oh!" Strether quickly protested.

"Yes, you ask me for protection--which makes you very interesting;
and then you won't take it. You say you want to be squashed--"

"Ah but not so easily! Don't you see," Strether demanded "where my
interest, as already shown you, lies? It lies in my not being
squared. If I'm squared where's my marriage? If I miss my errand I
miss that; and if I miss that I miss everything--I'm nowhere."

Waymarsh--but all relentlessly--took this in. "What do I care where
you are if you're spoiled?"

Their eyes met on it an instant. "Thank you awfully," Strether at
last said. "But don't you think HER judgement of that--?"

"Ought to content me? No."

It kept them again face to face, and the end of this was that
Strether again laughed. "You do her injustice. You really MUST know
her. Good-night."

He breakfasted with Mr. Bilham on the morrow, and, as
inconsequently befell, with Waymarsh massively of the party. The
latter announced, at the eleventh hour and much to his friend's
surprise, that, damn it, he would as soon join him as do anything
else; on which they proceeded together, strolling in a state of
detachment practically luxurious for them to the Boulevard
Malesherbes, a couple engaged that day with the sharp spell of
Paris as confessedly, it might have been seen, as any couple
among the daily thousands so compromised. They walked, wandered,
wondered and, a little, lost themselves; Strether hadn't had for
years so rich a consciousness of time--a bag of gold into which
he constantly dipped for a handful. It was present to him that
when the little business with Mr. Bilham should be over he would
still have shining hours to use absolutely as he liked. There was
no great pulse of haste yet in this process of saving Chad; nor
was that effect a bit more marked as he sat, half an hour later,
with his legs under Chad's mahogany, with Mr. Bilham on one side,
with a friend of Mr. Bilham's on the other, with Waymarsh
stupendously opposite, and with the great hum of Paris coming up
in softness, vagueness-for Strether himself indeed already
positive sweetness--through the sunny windows toward which, the
day before, his curiosity had raised its wings from below. The
feeling strongest with him at that moment had borne fruit almost
faster than he could taste it, and Strether literally felt at the
present hour that there was a precipitation in his fate. He had
known nothing and nobody as he stood in the street; but hadn't
his view now taken a bound in the direction of every one and of
every thing?

"What's he up to, what's he up to?"--something like that was at
the back of his head all the while in respect to little Bilham;
but meanwhile, till he should make out, every one and every thing
were as good as represented for him by the combination of his
host and the lady on his left. The lady on his left, the lady
thus promptly and ingeniously invited to "meet" Mr. Strether and
Mr. Waymarsh--it was the way she herself expressed her case--was
a very marked person, a person who had much to do with our
friend's asking himself if the occasion weren't in its essence
the most baited, the most gilded of traps. Baited it could
properly be called when the repast was of so wise a savour, and
gilded surrounding objects seemed inevitably to need to be when
Miss Barrace--which was the lady's name--looked at them with
convex Parisian eyes and through a glass with a remarkably long
tortoise-shell handle. Why Miss Barrace, mature meagre erect and
eminently gay, highly adorned, perfectly familiar, freely
contradictions and reminding him of some last-century portrait of
a clever head without powder--why Miss Barrace should have been
in particular the note of a "trap" Strether couldn't on the spot
have explained; he blinked in the light of a conviction that he
should know later on, and know well--as it came over him, for
that matter, with force, that he should need to. He wondered what
he was to think exactly of either of his new friends; since the
young man, Chad's intimate and deputy, had, in thus constituting
the scene, practised so much more subtly than he had been
prepared for, and since in especial Miss Barrace, surrounded
clearly by every consideration, hadn't scrupled to figure as a
familiar object. It was interesting to him to feel that he was in
the presence of new measures, other standards, a different scale
of relations, and that evidently here were a happy pair who
didn't think of things at all as he and Waymarsh thought. Nothing
was less to have been calculated in the business than that it
should now be for him as if he and Waymarsh were comparatively
quite at one.

The latter was magnificent--this at least was an assurance
privately given him by Miss Barrace. "Oh your friend's a type,
the grand old American--what shall one call it? The Hebrew
prophet, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, who used when I was a little girl in
the Rue Montaigne to come to see my father and who was usually
the American Minister to the Tuileries or some other court. I
haven't seen one these ever so many years; the sight of it warms
my poor old chilled heart; this specimen is wonderful; in the
right quarter, you know, he'll have a succes fou." Strether
hadn't failed to ask what the right quarter might be, much as he
required his presence of mind to meet such a change in their
scheme. "Oh the artist-quarter and that kind of thing; HERE
already, for instance, as you see." He had been on the point of
echoing "'Here'?--is THIS the artist-quarter?" but she had
already disposed of the question with a wave of all her tortoise-shell
and an easy "Bring him to ME!" He knew on the spot how little he
should be able to bring him, for the very air was by this time,
to his sense, thick and hot with poor Waymarsh's judgement of it.
He was in the trap still more than his companion and, unlike
his companion, not making the best of it; which was precisely what
doubtless gave him his admirable sombre glow. Little did Miss Barrace
know that what was behind it was his grave estimate of her own laxity.
The general assumption with which our two friends had arrived had been
that of finding Mr. Bilham ready to conduct them to one or other of
those resorts of the earnest, the aesthetic fraternity which were shown
among the sights of Paris. In this character it would have justified
them in a proper insistence on discharging their score. Waymarsh's
only proviso at the last had been that nobody should pay for him;
but he found himself, as the occasion developed, paid for on a
scale as to which Strether privately made out that he already
nursed retribution. Strether was conscious across the table of
what worked in him, conscious when they passed back to the small
salon to which, the previous evening, he himself had made so rich
a reference; conscious most of all as they stepped out to the
balcony in which one would have had to be an ogre not to
recognise the perfect place for easy aftertastes. These things
were enhanced for Miss Barrace by a succession of excellent
cigarettes--acknowledged, acclaimed, as a part of the wonderful
supply left behind him by Chad--in an almost equal absorption of
which Strether found himself blindly, almost wildly pushing
forward. He might perish by the sword as well as by famine, and
he knew that his having abetted the lady by an excess that was
rare with him would count for little in the sum--as Waymarsh
might so easily add it up--of her licence. Waymarsh had smoked of
old, smoked hugely; but Waymarsh did nothing now, and that gave
him his advantage over people who took things up lightly just
when others had laid them heavily down. Strether had never
smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted at his friend that this had
been only because of a reason. The reason, it now began to appear
even to himself, was that he had never had a lady to smoke with.

It was this lady's being there at all, however, that was the
strange free thing; perhaps, since she WAS there, her smoking was
the least of her freedoms. If Strether had been sure at each
juncture of what--with Bilham in especial--she talked about, he
might have traced others and winced at them and felt Waymarsh
wince; but he was in fact so often at sea that his sense of the
range of reference was merely general and that he on several
different occasions guessed and interpreted only to doubt. He
wondered what they meant, but there were things he scarce thought
they could be supposed to mean, and "Oh no--not THAT!" was at the
end of most of his ventures. This was the very beginning with him
of a condition as to which, later on, it will be seen, he found
cause to pull himself up; and he was to remember the moment duly
as the first step in a process. The central fact of the place was
neither more nor less, when analysed--and a pressure superficial
sufficed--than the fundamental impropriety of Chad's situation,
round about which they thus seemed cynically clustered.
Accordingly, since they took it for granted, they took for
granted all that was in connexion with it taken for granted at
Woollett--matters as to which, verily, he had been reduced with
Mrs. Newsome to the last intensity of silence. That was the
consequence of their being too bad to be talked about, and was
the accompaniment, by the same token, of a deep conception of
their badness. It befell therefore that when poor Strether put it
to himself that their badness was ultimately, or perhaps even
insolently, what such a scene as the one before him was, so to
speak, built upon, he could scarce shirk the dilemma of reading a
roundabout echo of them into almost anything that came up. This,
he was well aware, was a dreadful necessity; but such was the
stern logic, he could only gather, of a relation to the irregular
life.

It was the way the irregular life sat upon Bilham and Miss
Barrace that was the insidious, the delicate marvel. He was eager
to concede that their relation to it was all indirect, for
anything else in him would have shown the grossness of bad
manners; but the indirectness was none the less consonant--THAT
was striking-with a grateful enjoyment of everything that was
Chad's. They spoke of him repeatedly, invoking his good name and
good nature, and the worst confusion of mind for Strether was
that all their mention of him was of a kind to do him honour.
They commended his munificence and approved his taste, and in
doing so sat down, as it seemed to Strether, in the very soil out
of which these things flowered. Our friend's final predicament
was that he himself was sitting down, for the time, WITH them,
and there was a supreme moment at which, compared with his
collapse, Waymarsh's erectness affected him as really high. One
thing was certain--he saw he must make up his mind. He must
approach Chad, must wait for him, deal with him, master him, but
he mustn't dispossess himself of the faculty of seeing things as
they were. He must bring him to HIM--not go himself, as it were,
so much of the way. He must at any rate be clearer as to what--
should he continue to do that for convenience--he was still
condoning. It was on the detail of this quantity--and what could
the fact be but mystifying?-that Bilham and Miss Barrace threw so
little light. So there they were.



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.


 


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