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.

That evening at dinner with Waymarsh, Strether recounts the happenings of the afternoon and his visit to Chad's house. Strether learned that Chad had gone to Cannes a month ago and that Chad's friend, the young man on the balcony, was "keeping the place warm" in his absence. This friend is John Little Bilham, who goes by the name Little Bilham, owing to his small size, and who describes himself as "only a little artist-man." Strether characterizes him to Waymarsh as "very pleasant and curious too" and reveals that Bilham has invited them to a late breakfast the next day. Waymarsh declines, remarking that Strether ought to quit his mission: "You're being used for a thing you ain't fit for. People don't take a fine-tooth comb to groom a horse." Strether replies that it is necessary that Chad be brought back to Woollett, and Waymarsh bluntly asks, "Because if you get him you also get Mrs. Newsome . . . and if you don't get him you don't get her?" Strether acknowledges that this contingency "might have some effect" on his personal understanding with Mrs. Newsome, referring to her as "my future wife." The next day, Strether and Waymarsh, who has suddenly decided to accompany him, go out to meet Little Bilham for breakfast. They eat in Chad's apartment; a friend of Bilham's -- a Miss Barrace -- has also been invited. Although Strether wonders what Bilham is "up to," his detachment under the spell of Paris leads him to the conclusion that "there was no great pulse of haste yet in this process of saving Chad." Strether realizes, however, that he must come to be "clearer as to what . . . he was still condoning."

We learn in this chapter what Strether stands to gain or lose, depending upon his performance as "ambassador." We learn also the degree of influence that Mrs. Newsome exerts and the values from which she draws her power to influence. The narrative development of this chapter follows a common pattern of this novel: Time has passed and action taken place since the preceding chapter, but it is not revealed in straight chronological sequence; rather, James jumps ahead in time to the point where Strether can recount and, more importantly, comment upon his initial meeting with Little Bilham. Then the narrative advances in time .


When Miss Gostrey arrived, at the end of a week, she made him a sign;
he went immediately to see her, and it wasn't till then that he could
again close his grasp on the idea of a corrective. This idea however
was luckily all before him again from the moment he crossed the
threshold of the little entresol of the Quartier Marboeuf into which
she had gathered, as she said, picking them up in a thousand flights
and funny little passionate pounces, the makings of a final nest.  He
recognised in an instant that there really, there only, he should find
the boon with the vision of which he had first mounted Chad's stairs.
He might have been a little scared at the picture of how much more, in
this place, he should know himself "in" hadn't his friend been on the
spot to measure the amount to his appetite.  Her compact and crowded
little chambers, almost dusky, as they at first struck him, with
accumulations, represented a supreme general adjustment to
opportunities and conditions.  Wherever he looked he saw an old ivory
or an old brocade, and he scarce knew where to sit for fear of a
misappliance.  The life of the occupant struck him of a sudden as more
charged with possession even than Chad's or than Miss Barrace's; wide
as his glimpse had lately become of the empire of "things," what was
before him still enlarged it; the lust of the eyes and the pride of
life had indeed thus their temple.  It was the innermost nook of the
shrine--as brown as a pirate's cave.  In the brownness were glints of
gold; patches of purple were in the gloom; objects all that caught,
through the muslin, with their high rarity, the light of the low
windows. Nothing was clear about them but that they were precious, and
they brushed his ignorance with their contempt as a flower, in a
liberty taken with him, might have been whisked under his nose. But
after a full look at his hostess he knew none the less what most
concerned him.  The circle in which they stood together was warm with
life, and every question between them would live there as nowhere else.
A question came up as soon as they had spoken, for his answer, with a
laugh, was quickly:  "Well, they've got hold of me!"  Much of their
talk on this first occasion was his development of that truth.  He was
extraordinarily glad to see her, expressing to her frankly what she
most showed him, that one might live for years without a blessing
unsuspected, but that to know it at last for no more than three days
was to need it or miss it for ever.  She was the blessing that had now
become his need, and what could prove it better than that without her
he had lost himself?

"What do you mean?" she asked with an absence of alarm that, correcting
him as if he had mistaken the "period" of one of her pieces, gave him
afresh a sense of her easy movement through the maze he had but begun
to tread.  "What in the name of all the Pococks have you managed to do?"

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

"Ah that sort of thing was of the essence of your case and to have been
allowed for from the first."  And it was only after this that, quite as
a minor matter, she asked who in the world little Bilham might be. When
she learned that he was a friend of Chad's and living for the time in
Chad's rooms in Chad's absence, quite as if acting in Chad's spirit and
serving Chad's cause, she showed, however, more interest.  "Should you
mind my seeing him? Only once, you know," she added.

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

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

"Never in the world! We escape that with a perfection--! I feel it to
be largely, no doubt, because I don't half-understand him; but our
modus vivendi isn't spoiled even by that.  You must dine with me to
meet him," Strether went on.  "Then you'll see.'

"Are you giving dinners?"

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

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

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

She thought again--she laughed.  "The money you must be spending to
think it cheap! But I must be out of it--to the naked eye."

He looked for a moment as if she were really failing him.  "Then you
won't meet them?"  It was almost as if she had developed an unexpected
personal prudence.

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

"Why little Bilham to begin with."  He kept back for the moment Miss
Barrace.  "And Chad--when he comes--you must absolutely see."

"When then does he come?"

"When Bilham has had time to write him, and hear from him about me.
Bilham, however," he pursued, "will report favourably--favourably for
Chad.  That will make him not afraid to come.  I want you the more
therefore, you see, for my bluff."

"Oh you'll do yourself for your bluff."  She was perfectly easy. "At
the rate you've gone I'm quiet."

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

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

He let her, with this, however ruefully, have the whole truth.  "I
haven't yet found a single thing."

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

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

"Oh oh!"--and her laughter spread.  He was struck in fact by the effect
on her of his joke.  He saw now how he meant it as a joke. SHE saw,
however, still other things, though in an instant she had hidden them.
"You've got at no facts at all?"

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

"Ah that, in Paris," she quickly returned, "proves nothing.  That is
rather it DISproves nothing.  They may very well, you see, the people
your mission is concerned with, have done it FOR him."

"Exactly.  And it was on the scene of their doings then that Waymarsh
and I sat guzzling."

"Oh if you forbore to guzzle here on scenes of doings," she replied,
"you might easily die of starvation."  With which she smiled at him.
"You've worse before you."

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

"They ARE!" said Miss Gostrey.  "You're not therefore, you see," she
added, "wholly without facts.  They've BEEN, in effect, wonderful."

To have got at something comparatively definite appeared at last a
little to help--a wave by which moreover, the next moment, recollection
was washed.  "My young man does admit furthermore that they're our
friend's great interest."

"Is that the expression he uses?"

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

"Something more vivid?  Less?"

He had bent, with neared glasses, over a group of articles on a small
stand; and at this he came up.  "It was a mere allusion, but, on the
lookout as I was, it struck me.  'Awful, you know, as Chad is'--those
were Bilham's words."

"'Awful, you know'--?  Oh!"--and Miss Gostrey turned them over.  She
seemed, however, satisfied.  "Well, what more do you want?"

He glanced once more at a bibelot or two, and everything sent him back.
"But it is all the same as if they wished to let me have it between the
eyes."

She wondered.  "Quoi donc?"

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

"Oh," she answered, "you'll come round! I must see them each," she went
on, "for myself.  I mean Mr. Bilham and Mr. Newsome--Mr. Bilham
naturally first.  Once only--once for each; that will do. But face to
face--for half an hour.  What's Mr. Chad," she immediately pursued,
"doing at Cannes?  Decent men don't go to Cannes with the--well, with
the kind of ladies you mean."

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

"No, elsewhere, but not to Cannes.  Cannes is different.  Cannes is
better.  Cannes is best.  I mean it's all people you know--when you do
know them.  And if HE does, why that's different too.  He must have
gone alone.  She can't be with him."

"I haven't," Strether confessed in his weakness, "the least idea."
There seemed much in what she said, but he was able after a little to
help her to a nearer impression.  The meeting with little Bilham took
place, by easy arrangement, in the great gallery of the Louvre; and
when, standing with his fellow visitor before one of the splendid
Titians--the overwhelming portrait of the young man with the
strangely-shaped glove and the blue-grey eyes--he turned to see the
third member of their party advance from the end of the waxed and
gilded vista, he had a sense of having at last taken hold.  He had
agreed with Miss Gostrey--it dated even from Chester--for a morning at
the Louvre, and he had embraced independently the same idea as thrown
out by little Bilham, whom he had already accompanied to the museum of
the Luxembourg.  The fusion of these schemes presented no difficulty,
and it was to strike him again that in little Bilham's company
contrarieties in general dropped.

"Oh he's all right--he's one of US!" Miss Gostrey, after the first
exchange, soon found a chance to murmur to her companion; and Strether,
as they proceeded and paused and while a quick unanimity between the
two appeared to have phrased itself in half a dozen remarks--Strether
knew that he knew almost immediately what she meant, and took it as
still another sign that he had got his job in hand.  This was the more
grateful to him that he could think of the intelligence now serving him
as an acquisition positively new. He wouldn't have known even the day
before what she meant--that is if she meant, what he assumed, that they
were intense Americans together.  He had just worked round--and with a
sharper turn of the screw than any yet--to the conception of an
American intense as little Bilham was intense.  The young man was his
first specimen; the specimen had profoundly perplexed him; at present
however there was light.  It was by little Bilham's amazing serenity
that he had at first been affected, but he had inevitably, in his
circumspection, felt it as the trail of the serpent, the corruption, as
he might conveniently have said, of Europe; whereas the promptness with
which it came up for Miss Gostrey but as a special little form of the
oldest thing they knew justified it at once to his own vision as well.
He wanted to be able to like his specimen with a clear good conscience,
and this fully permitted it.  What had muddled him was precisely the
small artist-man's way--it was so complete--of being more American than
anybody.  But it now for the time put Strether vastly at his ease to
have this view of a new way.

The amiable youth then looked out, as it had first struck Strether, at
a world in respect to which he hadn't a prejudice. The one our friend
most instantly missed was the usual one in favour of an occupation
accepted.  Little Bilham had an occupation, but it was only an
occupation declined; and it was by his general exemption from alarm,
anxiety or remorse on this score that the impression of his serenity
was made.  He had come out to Paris to paint--to fathom, that is, at
large, that mystery; but study had been fatal to him so far as anything
COULD be fatal, and his productive power faltered in proportion as his
knowledge grew. Strether had gathered from him that at the moment of
his finding him in Chad's rooms he hadn't saved from his shipwreck a
scrap of anything but his beautiful intelligence and his confirmed
habit of Paris.  He referred to these things with an equal fond
familiarity, and it was sufficiently clear that, as an outfit, they
still served him.  They were charming to Strether through the hour
spent at the Louvre, where indeed they figured for him as an
unseparated part of the charged iridescent air, the glamour of the
name, the splendour of the space, the colour of the masters.  Yet they
were present too wherever the young man led, and the day after the
visit to the Louvre they hung, in a different walk, about the steps of
our party.  He had invited his companions to cross the river with him,
offering to show them his own poor place; and his own poor place, which
was very poor, gave to his idiosyncrasies, for Strether--the small
sublime indifference and independences that had struck the latter as
fresh--an odd and engaging dignity. He lived at the end of an alley
that went out of an old short cobbled street, a street that went in
turn out of a new long smooth avenue--street and avenue and alley
having, however, in common a sort of social shabbiness; and he
introduced them to the rather cold and blank little studio which he had
lent to a comrade for the term of his elegant absence.  The comrade was
another ingenuous compatriot, to whom he had wired that tea was to
await them "regardless," and this reckless repast, and the second
ingenuous compatriot, and the faraway makeshift life, with its jokes
and its gaps, its delicate daubs and its three or four chairs, its
overflow of taste and conviction and its lack of nearly all else--these
things wove round the occasion a spell to which our hero unreservedly
surrendered.

He liked the ingenuous compatriots--for two or three others soon
gathered; he liked the delicate daubs and the free
discriminations--involving references indeed, involving enthusiasms and
execrations that made him, as they said, sit up; he liked above all the
legend of good-humoured poverty, of mutual accommodation fairly raised
to the romantic, that he soon read into the scene.  The ingenuous
compatriots showed a candour, he thought, surpassing even the candour
of Woollett; they were red-haired and long-legged, they were quaint and
queer and dear and droll; they made the place resound with the
vernacular, which he had never known so marked as when figuring for the
chosen language, he must suppose, of contemporary art.  They twanged
with a vengeance the aesthetic lyre--they drew from it wonderful airs.
This aspect of their life had an admirable innocence; and he looked on
occasion at Maria Gostrey to see to what extent that element reached
her.  She gave him however for the hour, as she had given him the
previous day, no further sign than to show how she dealt with boys;
meeting them with the air of old Parisian practice that she had for
every one, for everything, in turn. Wonderful about the delicate daubs,
masterful about the way to make tea, trustful about the legs of chairs
and familiarly reminiscent of those, in the other time, the named, the
numbered or the caricatured, who had flourished or failed, disappeared
or arrived, she had accepted with the best grace her second course of
little Bilham, and had said to Strether, the previous afternoon on his
leaving them, that, since her impression was to be renewed, she would
reserve judgement till after the new evidence.

The new evidence was to come, as it proved, in a day or two.  He soon
had from Maria a message to the effect that an excellent box at the
Francais had been lent her for the following night; it seeming on such
occasions not the least of her merits that she was subject to such
approaches.  The sense of how she was always paying for something in
advance was equalled on Strether's part only by the sense of how she
was always being paid; all of which made for his consciousness, in the
larger air, of a lively bustling traffic, the exchange of such values
as were not for him to handle.  She hated, he knew, at the French play,
anything but a box--just as she hated at the English anything but a
stall; and a box was what he was already in this phase girding himself
to press upon her. But she had for that matter her community with
little Bilham:  she too always, on the great issues, showed as having
known in time. It made her constantly beforehand with him and gave him
mainly the chance to ask himself how on the day of their settlement
their account would stand.  He endeavoured even now to keep it a little
straight by arranging that if he accepted her invitation she should
dine with him first; but the upshot of this scruple was that at eight
o'clock on the morrow he awaited her with Waymarsh under the pillared
portico.  She hadn't dined with him, and it was characteristic of their
relation that she had made him embrace her refusal without in the least
understanding it.  She ever caused her rearrangements to affect him as
her tenderest touches.  It was on that principle for instance that,
giving him the opportunity to be amiable again to little Bilham, she
had suggested his offering the young man a seat in their box.  Strether
had dispatched for this purpose a small blue missive to the Boulevard
Malesherbes, but up to the moment of their passing into the theatre he
had received no response to his message.  He held, however, even after
they had been for some time conveniently seated, that their friend, who
knew his way about, would come in at his own right moment.  His
temporary absence moreover seemed, as never yet, to make the right
moment for Miss Gostrey.  Strether had been waiting till tonight to get
back from her in some mirrored form her impressions and conclusions.
She had elected, as they said, to see little Bilham once; but now she
had seen him twice and had nevertheless not said more than a word.

Waymarsh meanwhile sat opposite him with their hostess between; and
Miss Gostrey spoke of herself as an instructor of youth introducing her
little charges to a work that was one of the glories of literature. The
glory was happily unobjectionable, and the little charges were candid;
for herself she had travelled that road and she merely waited on their
innocence.  But she referred in due time to their absent friend, whom
it was clear they should have to give up.  "He either won't have got
your note," she said, "or you won't have got his:  he has had some kind
of hindrance, and, of course, for that matter, you know, a man never
writes about coming to a box."  She spoke as if, with her look, it
might have been Waymarsh who had written to the youth, and the latter's
face showed a mixture of austerity and anguish.  She went on however as
if to meet this.  "He's far and away, you know, the best of them."

"The best of whom, ma'am?"

"Why of all the long procession--the boys, the girls, or the old men
and old women as they sometimes really are; the hope, as one may say,
of our country.  They've all passed, year after year; but there has
been no one in particular I've ever wanted to stop.  I feel--don't
YOU?--that I want to stop little Bilham; he's so exactly right as he
is."  She continued to talk to Waymarsh.  "He's too delightful.  If
he'll only not spoil it! But they always WILL; they always do; they
always have."

"I don't think Waymarsh knows," Strether said after a moment, "quite
what it's open to Bilham to spoil."

"It can't be a good American," Waymarsh lucidly enough replied; "for it
didn't strike me the young man had developed much in THAT shape."

"Ah," Miss Gostrey sighed, "the name of the good American is as easily
given as taken away! What IS it, to begin with, to BE one, and what's
the extraordinary hurry?  Surely nothing that's so pressing was ever so
little defined.  It's such an order, really, that before we cook you
the dish we must at least have your receipt.  Besides the poor chicks
have time! What I've seen so often spoiled," she pursued, "is the happy
attitude itself, the state of faith and--what shall I call it?--the
sense of beauty. You're right about him"--she now took in Strether;
"little Bilham has them to a charm, we must keep little Bilham along."
Then she was all again for Waymarsh.  "The others have all wanted so
dreadfully to do something, and they've gone and done it in too many
cases indeed.  It leaves them never the same afterwards; the charm's
always somehow broken.  Now HE, I think, you know, really won't.  He
won't do the least dreadful little thing.  We shall continue to enjoy
him just as he is.  No--he's quite beautiful.  He sees everything.  He
isn't a bit ashamed.  He has every scrap of the courage of it that one
could ask.  Only think what he MIGHT do. One wants really--for fear of
some accident--to keep him in view. At this very moment perhaps what
mayn't he be up to?  I've had my disappointments--the poor things are
never really safe; or only at least when you have them under your eye.
One can never completely trust them.  One's uneasy, and I think that's
why I most miss him now."

She had wound up with a laugh of enjoyment over her embroidery of her
idea--an enjoyment that her face communicated to Strether, who almost
wished none the less at this moment that she would let poor Waymarsh
alone.  HE knew more or less what she meant; but the fact wasn't a
reason for her not pretending to Waymarsh that he didn't.  It was
craven of him perhaps, but he would, for the high amenity of the
occasion, have liked Waymarsh not to be so sure of his wit.  Her
recognition of it gave him away and, before she had done with him or
with that article, would give him worse.  What was he, all the same, to
do?  He looked across the box at his friend; their eyes met; something
queer and stiff, something that bore on the situation but that it was
better not to touch, passed in silence between them.  Well, the effect
of it for Strether was an abrupt reaction, a final impatience of his
own tendency to temporise.  Where was that taking him anyway?  It was
one of the quiet instants that sometimes settle more matters than the
outbreaks dear to the historic muse.  The only qualification of the
quietness was the synthetic "Oh hang it!" into which Strether's share
of the silence soundlessly flowered.  It represented, this mute
ejaculation, a final impulse to burn his ships.  These ships, to the
historic muse, may seem of course mere cockles, but when he presently
spoke to Miss Gostrey it was with the sense at least of applying the
torch.  "Is it then a conspiracy?"

"Between the two young men?  Well, I don't pretend to be a seer or a
prophetess," she presently replied; "but if I'm simply a woman of sense
he's working for you to-night.  I don't quite know how--but it's in my
bones."  And she looked at him at last as if, little material as she
yet gave him, he'd really understand.  "For an opinion THAT'S my
opinion.  He makes you out too well not to."

"Not to work for me to-night?"  Strether wondered.  "Then I hope he
isn't doing anything very bad."

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

"Do you mean he IS--?"

"They've got you," she merely repeated.  Though she disclaimed the
prophetic vision she was at this instant the nearest approach he had
ever met to the priestess of the oracle.  The light was in her eyes.
"You must face it now."

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

"Every move in the game.  And they've been arranging ever since.  He
has had every day his little telegram from Cannes."

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

"I do better.  I see it.  This was, before I met him, what I wondered
whether I WAS to see.  But as soon as I met him I ceased to wonder, and
our second meeting made me sure.  I took him all in. He was acting--he
is still--on his daily instructions."

"So that Chad has done the whole thing?"

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

"Europe--yes," Strether mused.

"Dear old Paris," she seemed to explain.  But there was more, and, with
one of her turns, she risked it.  "And dear old Waymarsh. You," she
declared, "have been a good bit of it."

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

"Why of the wonderful consciousness of our friend here.  You've helped
too in your way to float him to where he is."

"And where the devil IS he?"

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

He spoke as if he had just been thinking it out.  "Well, quite already
in Chad's hands, it would seem."  And he had had with this another
thought.  "Will that be--just all through Bilham--the way he's going to
work it?  It would be, for him, you know, an idea. And Chad with an
idea--!"

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

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

"Oh as much as you like! But the idea you speak of," she said, "won't
have been his best.  He'll have a better.  It won't be all through
little Bilham that he'll work it."

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

"That's what we shall see!"  But quite as she spoke she turned, and
Strether turned; for the door of the box had opened, with the click of
the ouvreuse,  from the lobby, and a gentleman, a stranger to them, had
come in with a quick step.  The door closed behind him, and, though
their faces showed him his mistake, his air, which was striking, was
all good confidence.  The curtain had just again arisen, and, in the
hush of the general attention, Strether's challenge was tacit, as was
also the greeting, with a quickly deprecating hand and smile, of the
unannounced visitor.  He discreetly signed that he would wait, would
stand, and these things and his face, one look from which she had
caught, had suddenly worked for Miss Gostrey.  She fitted to them all
an answer for Strether's last question.  The solid stranger was simply
the answer--as she now, turning to her friend, indicated.  She brought
it straight out for him--it presented the intruder.  "Why, through this
gentleman!"  The gentleman indeed, at the same time, though sounding
for Strether a very short name, did practically as much to explain.
Strether gasped the name back--then only had he seen Miss Gostrey had
said more than she knew.  They were in presence of Chad himself.

Our friend was to go over it afterwards again and again--he was going
over it much of the time that they were together, and they were
together constantly for three or four days:  the note had been so
strongly struck during that first half-hour that everything happening
since was comparatively a minor development.  The fact was that his
perception of the young man's identity--so absolutely checked for a
minute--had been quite one of the sensations that count in life; he
certainly had never known one that had acted, as he might have said,
with more of a crowded rush.  And the rush though both vague and
multitudinous, had lasted a long time, protected, as it were, yet at
the same time aggravated, by the circumstance of its coinciding with a
stretch of decorous silence. They couldn't talk without disturbing the
spectators in the part of the balcony just below them; and it, for that
matter, came to Strether--being a thing of the sort that did come to
him--that these were the accidents of a high civilisation; the imposed
tribute to propriety, the frequent exposure to conditions, usually
brilliant, in which relief has to await its time.  Relief was never
quite near at hand for kings, queens, comedians and other such people,
and though you might be yourself not exactly one of those, you could
yet, in leading the life of high pressure, guess a little how they
sometimes felt.  It was truly the life of high pressure that Strether
had seemed to feel himself lead while he sat there, close to Chad,
during the long tension of the act.  He was in presence of a fact that
occupied his whole mind, that occupied for the half-hour his senses
themselves all together; but he couldn't without inconvenience show
anything--which moreover might count really as luck.  What he might
have shown, had he shown at all, was exactly the kind of emotion--the
emotion of bewilderment--that he had proposed to himself from the
first, whatever should occur, to show least.  The phenomenon that had
suddenly sat down there with him was a phenomenon of change so complete
that his imagination, which had worked so beforehand, felt itself, in
the connexion, without margin or allowance.  It had faced every
contingency but that Chad should not BE Chad, and this was what it now
had to face with a mere strained smile and an uncomfortable flush.

He asked himself if, by any chance, before he should have in some way
to commit himself, he might feel his mind settled to the new vision,
might habituate it, so to speak, to the remarkable truth. But oh it was
too remarkable, the truth; for what could be more remarkable than this
sharp rupture of an identity?  You could deal with a man as
himself--you couldn't deal with him as somebody else.  It was a small
source of peace moreover to be reduced to wondering how little he might
know in such an event what a sum he was setting you.  He couldn't
absolutely not know, for you couldn't absolutely not let him.  It was a
CASE then simply, a strong case, as people nowadays called such
things,' a case of transformation unsurpassed, and the hope was but in
the general law that strong cases were liable to control from without.
Perhaps he, Strether himself, was the only person after all aware of
it. Even Miss Gostrey, with all her science, wouldn't be, would
she?--and he had never seen any one less aware of anything than
Waymarsh as he glowered at Chad.  The social sightlessness of his old
friend's survey marked for him afresh, and almost in an humiliating
way, the inevitable limits of direct aid from this source.  He was not
certain, however, of not drawing a shade of compensation from the
privilege, as yet untasted, of knowing more about something in
particular than Miss Gostrey did.  His situation too was a case, for
that matter, and he was now so interested, quite so privately agog,
about it, that he had already an eye to the fun it would be to open up
to her afterwards.  He derived during his half-hour no assistance from
her, and just this fact of her not meeting his eyes played a little, it
must be confessed, into his predicament.

He had introduced Chad, in the first minutes, under his breath, and
there was never the primness in her of the person unacquainted; but she
had none the less betrayed at first no vision but of the stage, where
she occasionally found a pretext for an appreciative moment that she
invited Waymarsh to share.  The latter's faculty of participation had
never had, all round, such an assault to meet; the pressure on him
being the sharper for this chosen attitude in her, as Strether judged
it, of isolating, for their natural intercourse, Chad and himself. This
intercourse was meanwhile restricted to a frank friendly look from the
young man, something markedly like a smile, but falling far short of a
grin, and to the vivacity of Strether's private speculation as to
whether HE carried himself like a fool.  He didn't quite see how he
could so feel as one without somehow showing as one.  The worst of that
question moreover was that he knew it as a symptom the sense of which
annoyed him.  "If I'm going to be odiously conscious of how I may
strike the fellow," he reflected, "it was so little what I came out for
that I may as well stop before I begin."  This sage consideration too,
distinctly, seemed to leave untouched the fact that he WAS going to be
conscious.  He was conscious of everything but of what would have
served him.

He was to know afterwards, in the watches of the night, that nothing
would have been more open to him than after a minute or two to propose
to Chad to seek with him the refuge of the lobby. He hadn't only not
proposed it, but had lacked even the presence of mind to see it as
possible.  He had stuck there like a schoolboy wishing not to miss a
minute of the show; though for that portion of the show then presented
he hadn't had an instant's real attention.  He couldn't when the
curtain fell have given the slightest account of what had happened.  He
had therefore, further, not at that moment acknowledged the amenity
added by this acceptance of his awkwardness to Chad's general patience.
Hadn't he none the less known at the very time--known it stupidly and
without reaction--that the boy was accepting something?  He was
modestly benevolent, the boy--that was at least what he had been
capable of the superiority of making out his chance to be; and one had
one's self literally not had the gumption to get in ahead of him.  If
we should go into all that occupied our friend in the watches of the
night we should have to mend our pen; but an instance or two may mark
for us the vividness with which he could remember.  He remembered the
two absurdities that, if his presence of mind HAD failed, were the
things that had had most to do with it.  He had never in his life seen
a young man come into a box at ten o'clock at night, and would, if
challenged on the question in advance, have scarce been ready to
pronounce as to different ways of doing so.  But it was in spite of
this definite to him that Chad had had a way that was wonderful:  a
fact carrying with it an implication that, as one might imagine it, he
knew, he had learned, how.

Here already then were abounding results; he had on the spot and
without the least trouble of intention taught Strether that even in so
small a thing as that there were different ways.  He had done in the
same line still more than this; had by a mere shake or two of the head
made his old friend observe that the change in him was perhaps more
than anything else, for the eye, a matter of the marked streaks of
grey, extraordinary at his age, in his thick black hair; as well as
that this new feature was curiously becoming to him, did something for
him, as characterisation, also even--of all things in the world--as
refinement, that had been a good deal wanted.  Strether felt, however,
he would have had to confess, that it wouldn't have been easy just now,
on this and other counts, in the presence of what had been supplied, to
be quite clear as to what had been missed.  A reflexion a candid critic
might have made of old, for instance, was that it would have been
happier for the son to look more like the mother; but this was a
reflexion that at present would never occur.  The ground had quite
fallen away from it, yet no resemblance whatever to the mother had
supervened.  It would have been hard for a young man's face and air to
disconnect themselves more completely than Chad's at this juncture from
any discerned, from any imaginable aspect of a New England female
parent.  That of course was no more than had been on the cards; but it
produced in Strether none the less one of those frequent phenomena of
mental reference with which all judgement in him was actually beset.

Again and again as the days passed he had had a sense of the pertinence
of communicating quickly with Woollett--communicating with a quickness
with which telegraphy alone would rhyme; the fruit really of a fine
fancy in him for keeping things straight, for the happy forestalment of
error.  No one could explain better when needful, nor put more
conscience into an account or a report; which burden of conscience is
perhaps exactly the reason why his heart always sank when the clouds of
explanation gathered.  His highest ingenuity was in keeping the sky of
life clear of them. Whether or no he had a grand idea of the lucid, he
held that nothing ever was in fact--for any one else--explained.  One
went through the vain motions, but it was mostly a waste of life.  A
personal relation was a relation only so long as people either
perfectly understood or, better still, didn't care if they didn't. From
the moment they cared if they didn't it was living by the sweat of
one's brow; and the sweat of one's brow was just what one might buy
one's self off from by keeping the ground free of the wild weed of
delusion.  It easily grew too fast, and the Atlantic cable now alone
could race with it.  That agency would each day have testified for him
to something that was not what Woollett had argued.  He was not at this
moment absolutely sure that the effect of the morrow's--or rather of
the night's--appreciation of the crisis wouldn't be to determine some
brief missive.  "Have at last seen him, but oh dear!"--some temporary
relief of that sort seemed to hover before him.  It hovered somehow as
preparing them all--yet preparing them for what?  If he might do so
more luminously and cheaply he would tick out in four words:  "Awfully
old--grey hair." To this particular item in Chad's appearance he
constantly, during their mute half-hour, reverted; as if so very much
more than he could have said had been involved in it.  The most he
could have said would have been:  "If he's going to make me feel
young--!" which indeed, however, carried with it quite enough.  If
Strether was to feel young, that is, it would be because Chad was to
feel old; and an aged and hoary sinner had been no part of the scheme.

The question of Chadwick's true time of life was, doubtless, what came
up quickest after the adjournment of the two, when the play was over,
to a cafe in the Avenue de l'Opera.  Miss Gostrey had in due course
been perfect for such a step; she had known exactly what they
wanted--to go straight somewhere and talk; and Strether had even felt
she had known what he wished to say and that he was arranging
immediately to begin.  She hadn't pretended this, as she HAD pretended
on the other hand, to have divined Waymarsh's wish to extend to her an
independent protection homeward; but Strether nevertheless found how,
after he had Chad opposite to him at a small table in the brilliant
halls that his companion straightway selected, sharply and easily
discriminated from others, it was quite, to his mind, as if she heard
him speak; as if, sitting up, a mile away, in the little apartment he
knew, she would listen hard enough to catch.  He found too that he
liked that idea, and he wished that, by the same token, Mrs. Newsome
might have caught as well.  For what had above all been determined in
him as a necessity of the first order was not to lose another hour, nor
a fraction of one; was to advance, to overwhelm, with a rush.  This was
how he would anticipate--by a night-attack, as might be--any forced
maturity that a crammed consciousness of Paris was likely to take upon
itself to assert on behalf of the boy.  He knew to the full, on what he
had just extracted from Miss Gostrey, Chad's marks of alertness; but
they were a reason the more for not dawdling.  If he was himself
moreover to be treated as young he wouldn't at all events be so treated
before he should have struck out at least once.  His arms might be
pinioned afterwards, but it would have been left on record that he was
fifty.  The importance of this he had indeed begun to feel before they
left the theatre; it had become a wild unrest, urging him to seize his
chance.  He could scarcely wait for it as they went; he was on the
verge of the indecency of bringing up the question in the street; he
fairly caught himself going on--so he afterwards invidiously named
it--as if there would be for him no second chance should the present be
lost.  Not till, on the purple divan before the perfunctory bock, he
had brought out the words themselves, was he sure, for that matter,
that the present would be saved.

Book Fourth

Maria arrives in Paris, and Strether goes immediately to see her: "she was the blessing that had now become his need." He tells her that he has made friends with Little Bilham and invites her to meet him. "Haven't you been seeing what there's to protest about?" she asks, referring to Strether's mission. "I haven't yet found a single thing," Strether says. Maria meets Bilham at the Louvre and, after the first exchange, whispers to Strether that Bilham is "all right -- he's one of us!" The next day, Strether and Maria visit Bilham at his own apartment, where they meet several of Bilham's artist-friends -- "ingenuous compatriots," Strether thinks them. Maria tells Strether that she will reserve final judgment on Bilham until she has seen him again. She invites Strether and Waymarsh to accompany her to a performance at the theater and suggests that Strether invite Bilham to attend with them. At the theater, Strether, Waymarsh, and Maria discuss Bilham, who has unaccountably not come. Despite this fact, Maria says that Bilham is "far and away, you know, the best of them . . . of . . . the boys, the girls . . . ; the hope, as one may say, of our country." Maria tells Strether, however, that she believes Chad and Bilham have been working together to soften Strether and compromise his mission, suggesting even that Bilham has been acting on daily instructions by telegram from Chad. "Will that be -- just all through Bilham -- the way he's going to work it?" asks Strether, and when Maria says no, he inquires, "Through whom else then?" At this point, the door of the box opens and Chad Newsome walks in. Strether is so startled to see Chad under these circumstances that he sits "like a schoolboy" through the play instead of proposing to Chad that they speak in the lobby. He is bewildered by the complete change in Chad but finds "the marked streaks of grey, extraordinary at his age, in his thick black hair . . . curiously becoming" as a kind of "refinement." Maria, knowing that Strether and Chad want to go straight somewhere and talk, arranges for Waymarsh to escort her home after the play. Strether and Chad then go to a nearby cafe.

When Maria says of Bilham, "he's one of us!" Strether takes this to mean that they are all "intense Americans together" and that Maria's approval is a sign that Strether has his job well in hand. Maria, however, intends something entirely different by her comment, as the reader will subsequently discover. Strether's impression of the changes in Chad's appearance is only the beginning of what will become a continuous sense on the part of Strether that Chad has been improved by his European experience. Recall that earlier in the story, Strether had rejected Maria's suggestion that Chad might have got "refined" instead of brutalized by his experiences. Strether's use of the word "refinement" to describe Chad in this chapter is an obvious irony. Chad's manner has its effect on Strether: "he had on the spot and without the least trouble of intention taught Strether that even in so small a thing . . . there were different ways."


"I've come, you know, to make you break with everything, neither more
nor less, and take you straight home; so you'll be so good as
immediately and favourably to consider it!"--Strether, face to face
with Chad after the play, had sounded these words almost breathlessly,
and with an effect at first positively disconcerting to himself alone.
For Chad's receptive attitude was that of a person who had been
gracefully quiet while the messenger at last reaching him has run a
mile through the dust.  During some seconds after he had spoken
Strether felt as if HE had made some such exertion; he was not even
certain that the perspiration wasn't on his brow.  It was the kind of
consciousness for which he had to thank the look that, while the strain
lasted, the young man's eyes gave him.  They reflected--and the deuce
of the thing was that they reflected really with a sort of shyness of
kindness--his momentarily disordered state; which fact brought on in
its turn for our friend the dawn of a fear that Chad might simply "take
it out"--take everything out--in being sorry for him.  Such a fear, any
fear, was unpleasant.  But everything was unpleasant; it was odd how
everything had suddenly turned so.  This however was no reason for
letting the least thing go.  Strether had the next minute proceeded as
roundly as if with an advantage to follow up. "Of course I'm a
busybody, if you want to fight the case to the death; but after all
mainly in the sense of having known you and having given you such
attention as you kindly permitted when you were in jackets and
knickerbockers.  Yes--it was knickerbockers, I'm busybody enough to
remember that; and that you had, for your age--I speak of the first
far-away time--tremendously stout legs. Well, we want you to break.
Your mother's heart's passionately set upon it, but she has above and
beyond that excellent arguments and reasons.  I've not put them into
her head--I needn't remind you how little she's a person who needs
that.  But they exist--you must take it from me as a friend both of
hers and yours--for myself as well.  I didn't invent them, I didn't
originally work them out; but I understand them, I think I can explain
them--by which I mean make you actively do them justice; and that's why
you see me here. You had better know the worst at once.  It's a
question of an immediate rupture and an immediate return.  I've been
conceited enough to dream I can sugar that pill.  I take at any rate
the greatest interest in the question.  I took it already before I left
home, and I don't mind telling you that, altered as you are, I take it
still more now that I've seen you.  You're older and--I don't know what
to call it!--more of a handful; but you're by so much the more, I seem
to make out, to our purpose."

"Do I strike you as improved?"  Strether was to recall that Chad had at
this point enquired.

He was likewise to recall--and it had to count for some time as his
greatest comfort--that it had been "given" him, as they said at
Woollett, to reply with some presence of mind:  "I haven't the least
idea."  He was really for a while to like thinking he had been
positively hard.  On the point of conceding that Chad had improved in
appearance, but that to the question of appearance the remark must be
confined, he checked even that compromise and left his reservation
bare.  Not only his moral, but also, as it were, his aesthetic sense
had a little to pay for this, Chad being unmistakeably--and wasn't it a
matter of the confounded grey hair again?--handsomer than he had ever
promised.  That however fell in perfectly with what Strether had said.
They had no desire to keep down his proper expansion, and he wouldn't
be less to their purpose for not looking, as he had too often done of
old, only bold and wild.  There was indeed a signal particular in which
he would distinctly be more so.  Strether didn't, as he talked,
absolutely follow himself; he only knew he was clutching his thread and
that he held it from moment to moment a little tighter; his mere
uninterruptedness during the few minutes helped him to do that.  He had
frequently for a month, turned over what he should say on this very
occasion, and he seemed at last to have said nothing he had thought
of--everything was so totally different.

But in spite of all he had put the flag at the window.  This was what
he had done, and there was a minute during which he affected himself as
having shaken it hard, flapped it with a mighty flutter, straight in
front of his companion's nose.  It gave him really almost the sense of
having already acted his part.  The momentary relief--as if from the
knowledge that nothing of THAT at least could be undone--sprang from a
particular cause, the cause that had flashed into operation, in Miss
Gostrey's box, with direct apprehension, with amazed recognition, and
that had been concerned since then in every throb of his consciousness.
What it came to was that with an absolutely new quantity to deal with
one simply couldn't know.  The new quantity was represented by the fact
that Chad had been made over.  That was all; whatever it was it was
everything.  Strether had never seen the thing so done before--it was
perhaps a speciality of Paris.  If one had been present at the process
one might little by little have mastered the result; but he was face to
face, as matters stood, with the finished business. It had freely been
noted for him that he might be received as a dog among skittles, but
that was on the basis of the old quantity. He had originally thought of
lines and tones as things to be taken, but these possibilities had now
quite melted away.  There was no computing at all what the young man
before him would think or feel or say on any subject whatever.  This
intelligence Strether had afterwards, to account for his nervousness,
reconstituted as he might, just as he had also reconstituted the
promptness with which Chad had corrected his uncertainty.  An
extraordinarily short time had been required for the correction, and
there had ceased to be anything negative in his companion's face and
air as soon as it was made.  "Your engagement to my mother has become
then what they call here a fait accompli?"--it had consisted, the
determinant touch, in nothing more than that.

Well, that was enough, Strether had felt while his answer hung fire. He
had felt at the same time, however, that nothing could less become him
than that it should hang fire too long.  "Yes," he said brightly, "it
was on the happy settlement of the question that I started.  You see
therefore to what tune I'm in your family. Moreover," he added, "I've
been supposing you'd suppose it."

"Oh I've been supposing it for a long time, and what you tell me helps
me to understand that you should want to do something.  To do
something, I mean," said Chad, "to commemorate an event so--what do
they call it?--so auspicious.  I see you make out, and not
unnaturally," he continued, "that bringing me home in triumph as a sort
of wedding-present to Mother would commemorate it better than anything
else.  You want to make a bonfire in fact," he laughed, "and you pitch
me on.  Thank you, thank you!" he laughed again.

He was altogether easy about it, and this made Strether now see how at
bottom, and in spite of the shade of shyness that really cost him
nothing, he had from the first moment been easy about everything.  The
shade of shyness was mere good taste.  People with manners formed could
apparently have, as one of their best cards, the shade of shyness too.
He had leaned a little forward to speak; his elbows were on the table;
and the inscrutable new face that he had got somewhere and somehow was
brought by the movement nearer to his critics There was a fascination
for that critic in its not being, this ripe physiognomy, the face that,
under observation at least, he had originally carried away from
Woollett.  Strether found a certain freedom on his own side in defining
it as that of a man of the world--a formula that indeed seemed to come
now in some degree to his relief; that of a man to whom things had
happened and were variously known.  In gleams, in glances, the past did
perhaps peep out of it; but such lights were faint and instantly
merged.  Chad was brown and thick and strong, and of old Chad had been
rough.  Was all the difference therefore that he was actually smooth?
Possibly; for that he WAS smooth was as marked as in the taste of a
sauce or in the rub of a hand.  The effect of it was general--it had
retouched his features, drawn them with a cleaner line.  It had cleared
his eyes and settled his colour and polished his fine square teeth--the
main ornament of his face; and at the same time that it had given him a
form and a surface, almost a design, it had toned his voice,
established his accent, encouraged his smile to more play and his other
motions to less. He had formerly, with a great deal of action,
expressed very little; and he now expressed whatever was necessary with
almost none at all.  It was as if in short he had really, copious
perhaps but shapeless, been put into a firm mould and turned
successfully out.  The phenomenon--Strether kept eyeing it as a
phenomenon, an eminent case--was marked enough to be touched by the
finger.  He finally put his hand across the table and laid it on Chad's
arm. "If you'll promise me--here on the spot and giving me your word of
honour--to break straight off, you'll make the future the real right
thing for all of us alike.  You'll ease off the strain of this decent
but none the less acute suspense in which I've for so many days been
waiting for you, and let me turn in to rest.  I shall leave you with my
blessing and go to bed in peace."

Chad again fell back at this and, his hands pocketed, settled himself a
little; in which posture he looked, though he rather anxiously smiled,
only the more earnest.  Then Strether seemed to see that he was really
nervous, and he took that as what he would have called a wholesome
sign.  The only mark of it hitherto had been his more than once taking
off and putting on his wide-brimmed crush hat.  He had at this moment
made the motion again to remove it, then had only pushed it back, so
that it hung informally on his strong young grizzled crop.  It was a
touch that gave the note of the familiar--the intimate and the
belated--to their quiet colloquy; and it was indeed by some such
trivial aid that Strether became aware at the same moment of something
else.  The observation was at any rate determined in him by some light
too fine to distinguish from so many others, but it was none the less
sharply determined.  Chad looked unmistakeably during these
instants--well, as Strether put it to himself, all he was worth.  Our
friend had a sudden apprehension of what that would on certain sides
be. He saw him in a flash as the young man marked out by women; and for
a concentrated minute the dignity, the comparative austerity, as he
funnily fancied it, of this character affected him almost with awe.
There was an experience on his interlocutor's part that looked out at
him from under the displaced hat, and that looked out moreover by a
force of its own, the deep fact of its quantity and quality, and not
through Chad's intending bravado or swagger. That was then the way men
marked out by women WERE--and also the men by whom the women were
doubtless in turn sufficiently distinguished.  It affected Strether for
thirty seconds as a relevant truth, a truth which, however, the next
minute, had fallen into its relation.  "Can't you imagine there being
some questions," Chad asked, "that a fellow--however much impressed by
your charming way of stating things--would like to put to you first?"

"Oh yes--easily.  I'm here to answer everything.  I think I can even
tell you things, of the greatest interest to you, that you won't know
enough to ask me.  We'll take as many days to it as you like. But I
want," Strether wound up, "to go to bed now."

"Really?"

Chad had spoken in such surprise that he was amused.  "Can't you
believe it?--with what you put me through?"

The young man seemed to consider.  "Oh I haven't put you through
much--yet."

"Do you mean there's so much more to come?"  Strether laughed.  "All
the more reason then that I should gird myself."  And as if to mark
what he felt he could by this time count on he was already on his feet.

Chad, still seated, stayed him, with a hand against him, as he passed
between their table and the next.  "Oh we shall get on!"

The tone was, as who should say, everything Strether could have
desired; and quite as good the expression of face with which the
speaker had looked up at him and kindly held him.  All these things
lacked was their not showing quite so much as the fruit of experience.
Yes, experience was what Chad did play on him, if he didn't play any
grossness of defiance.  Of course experience was in a manner defiance;
but it wasn't, at any rate--rather indeed quite the
contrary!--grossness; which was so much gained.  He fairly grew older,
Strether thought, while he himself so reasoned.  Then with his mature
pat of his visitor's arm he also got up; and there had been enough of
it all by this time to make the visitor feel that something WAS
settled.  Wasn't it settled that he had at least the testimony of
Chad's own belief in a settlement?  Strether found himself treating
Chad's profession that they would get on as a sufficient basis for
going to bed.  He hadn't nevertheless after this gone to bed directly;
for when they had again passed out together into the mild bright night
a check had virtually sprung from nothing more than a small
circumstance which might have acted only as confirming quiescence.
There were people, expressive sound, projected light, still abroad, and
after they had taken in for a moment, through everything, the great
clear architectural street, they turned off in tacit union to the
quarter of Strether's hotel.  "Of course," Chad here abruptly began,
"of course Mother's making things out with you about me has been
natural--and of course also you've had a good deal to go upon. Still,
you must have filled out."

He had stopped, leaving his friend to wonder a little what point he
wished to make; and this it was that enabled Strether meanwhile to make
one.  "Oh we've never pretended to go into detail.  We weren't in the
least bound to THAT.  It was 'filling out' enough to miss you as we
did."

But Chad rather oddly insisted, though under the high lamp at their
corner, where they paused, he had at first looked as if touched by
Strether's allusion to the long sense, at home, of his absence.  "What
I mean is you must have imagined."

"Imagined what?"

"Well--horrors."

It affected Strether:  horrors were so little--superficially at
least--in this robust and reasoning image.  But he was none the less
there to be veracious.  "Yes, I dare say we HAVE imagined horrors.  But
where's the harm if we haven't been wrong?"

Chad raised his face to the lamp, and it was one of the moments at
which he had, in his extraordinary way, most his air of designedly
showing himself.  It was as if at these instants he just presented
himself, his identity so rounded off, his palpable presence and his
massive young manhood, as such a link in the chain as might practically
amount to a kind of demonstration.  It was as if--and how but
anomalously?--he couldn't after all help thinking sufficiently well of
these things to let them go for what they were worth.  What could there
be in this for Strether but the hint of some self-respect, some sense
of power, oddly perverted; something latent and beyond access, ominous
and perhaps enviable? The intimation had the next thing, in a flash,
taken on a name--a name on which our friend seized as he asked himself
if he weren't perhaps really dealing with an irreducible young Pagan.
This description--he quite jumped at it--had a sound that gratified his
mental ear, so that of a sudden he had already adopted it.  Pagan--yes,
that was, wasn't it?  what Chad WOULD logically be.  It was what he
must be.  It was what he was.  The idea was a clue and, instead of
darkening the prospect, projected a certain clearness. Strether made
out in this quick ray that a Pagan was perhaps, at the pass they had
come to, the thing most wanted at Woollett. They'd be able to do with
one--a good one; he'd find an opening--yes; and Strether's imagination
even now prefigured and accompanied the first appearance there of the
rousing personage. He had only the slight discomfort of feeling, as the
young man turned away from the lamp, that his thought had in the
momentary silence possibly been guessed.  "Well, I've no doubt," said
Chad, "you've come near enough.  The details, as you say, don't matter.
It HAS been generally the case that I've let myself go.  But I'm coming
round--I'm not so bad now."  With which they walked on again to
Strether's hotel.

"Do you mean," the latter asked as they approached the door, "that
there isn't any woman with you now?"

"But pray what has that to do with it?"

"Why it's the whole question."

"Of my going home?"  Chad was clearly surprised.  "Oh not much! Do you
think that when I want to go any one will have any power--"

"To keep you"--Strether took him straight up--"from carrying out your
wish?  Well, our idea has been that somebody has hitherto--or a good
many persons perhaps--kept you pretty well from 'wanting.' That's
what--if you're in anybody's hands--may again happen.  You don't answer
my question"--he kept it up; "but if you aren't in anybody's hands so
much the better.  There's nothing then but what makes for your going."

Chad turned this over.  "I don't answer your question?"  He spoke quite
without resenting it.  "Well, such questions have always a rather
exaggerated side.  One doesn't know quite what you mean by being in
women's 'hands.' It's all so vague.  One is when one isn't.  One isn't
when one is.  And then one can't quite give people away."  He seemed
kindly to explain.  "I've NEVER got stuck--so very hard; and, as
against anything at any time really better, I don't think I've ever
been afraid."  There was something in it that held Strether to wonder,
and this gave him time to go on.  He broke out as with a more helpful
thought.  "Don't you know how I like Paris itself?"

The upshot was indeed to make our friend marvel.  "Oh if THAT'S all
that's the matter with you--!"  It was HE who almost showed resentment.

Chad's smile of a truth more than met it.  "But isn't that enough?"

Strether hesitated, but it came out.  "Not enough for your mother!"
Spoken, however, it sounded a trifle odd--the effect of which was that
Chad broke into a laugh.  Strether, at this, succumbed as well, though
with extreme brevity.  "Permit us to have still our theory.  But if you
ARE so free and so strong you're inexcusable. I'll write in the
morning," he added with decision.  "I'll say I've got you."

This appeared to open for Chad a new interest.  "How often do you
write?"

"Oh perpetually."

"And at great length?"

Strether had become a little impatient.  "I hope it's not found too
great."

"Oh I'm sure not.  And you hear as often?"

Again Strether paused.  "As often as I deserve."

"Mother writes," said Chad, "a lovely letter."

Strether, before the closed porte-cochere, fixed him a moment. "It's
more, my boy, than YOU do!  But our suppositions don't matter," he
added, "if you're actually not entangled."

Chad's pride seemed none the less a little touched.  "I never WAS
that--let me insist.  I always had my own way."  With which he pursued:
"And I have it at present."

"Then what are you here for?  What has kept you," Strether asked, "if
you HAVE been able to leave?"

It made Chad, after a stare, throw himself back.  "Do you think one's
kept only by women?"  His surprise and his verbal emphasis rang out so
clear in the still street that Strether winced till he remembered the
safety of their English speech.  "Is that," the young man demanded,
"what they think at Woollett?"  At the good faith in the question
Strether had changed colour, feeling that, as he would have said, he
had put his foot in it.  He had appeared stupidly to misrepresent what
they thought at Woollett; but before he had time to rectify Chad again
was upon him.  "I must say then you show a low mind!"

It so fell in, unhappily for Strether, with that reflexion of his own
prompted in him by the pleasant air of the Boulevard Malesherbes, that
its disconcerting force was rather unfairly great.  It was a dig that,
administered by himself--and administered even to poor Mrs.
Newsome--was no more than salutary; but administered by Chad--and quite
logically--it came nearer drawing blood.  They HADn't a low mind--nor
any approach to one; yet incontestably they had worked, and with a
certain smugness, on a basis that might be turned against them.  Chad
had at any rate pulled his visitor up; he had even pulled up his
admirable mother; he had absolutely, by a turn of the wrist and a jerk
of the far-flung noose, pulled up, in a bunch, Woollett browsing in its
pride.  There was no doubt Woollett HAD insisted on his coarseness; and
what he at present stood there for in the sleeping street was, by his
manner of striking the other note, to make of such insistence a
preoccupation compromising to the insisters.  It was exactly as if they
had imputed to him a vulgarity that he had by a mere gesture caused to
fall from him.  The devil of the case was that Strether felt it, by the
same stroke, as falling straight upon himself.  He had been wondering a
minute ago if the boy weren't a Pagan, and he found himself wondering
now if he weren't by chance a gentleman.  It didn't in the least, on
the spot, spring up helpfully for him that a person couldn't at the
same time be both. There was nothing at this moment in the air to
challenge the combination; there was everything to give it on the
contrary something of a flourish.  It struck Strether into the bargain
as doing something to meet the most difficult of the questions; though
perhaps indeed only by substituting another.  Wouldn't it be precisely
by having learned to be a gentleman that he had mastered the consequent
trick of looking so well that one could scarce speak to him straight?
But what in the world was the clue to such a prime producing cause?
There were too many clues then that Strether still lacked, and these
clues to clues were among them. What it accordingly amounted to for him
was that he had to take full in the face a fresh attribution of
ignorance.  He had grown used by this time to reminders, especially
from his own lips, of what he didn't know; but he had borne them
because in the first place they were private and because in the second
they practically conveyed a tribute.  He didn't know what was bad,
and--as others didn't know how little he knew it--he could put up with
his state. But if he didn't know, in so important a particular, what
was good, Chad at least was now aware he didn't; and that, for some
reason, affected our friend as curiously public.  It was in fact an
exposed condition that the young man left him in long enough for him to
feel its chill--till he saw fit, in a word, generously again to cover
him.  This last was in truth what Chad quite gracefully did.  But he
did it as with a simple thought that met the whole of the case.  "Oh
I'm all right!"  It was what Strether had rather bewilderedly to go to
bed on.

Forgoing polite preliminaries, Strether comes straight to the point with Chad: "I've come . . . to make you break with everything . . . and take you straight home." Strether is uneasy and concerned because Chad "had been made over. That was all; whatever it was it was everything . . . it was perhaps a specialty of Paris." Strether speaks of Mrs. Newsome's wishes and includes himself by saying, "we want you to break." Chad is aware that Strether is engaged to his mother and views Strether's mission as "bringing me home in triumph as a sort of wedding-present to Mother." Strether continues to be impressed with Chad's changed appearance and manner: His features seem drawn with a cleaner line, his voice toned, his demeanor polished; it was as if Chad had been "put into a firm mould and turned successfully out." His face is "that of a man of the world . . . that of a man to whom things had happened and were variously known." Strether asks Chad about the woman whom he presumes has been keeping Chad from returning to Woollett. Chad replies that it has little to do with the question of his going home and that he has never been "entangled" in that way: "Do you think one's kept only by women? . . . Is that . . . what they think at Woollett? . . . I must say then you show a low mind!"

When Chad tells Strether that it is not a woman who keeps him in France, Strether wonders what else could be the reason; Chad asks him, "Don't you know how I like Paris itself?" to which Strether responds, "Oh if that's all that's the matter with you -- !" This touches upon another important theme of the novel, for Chad's rejoinder -- "But isn't that enough?" -- points up the essential disparity at this point between the attitudes of Strether and Chad, and, by implication, the worlds of Woollett and Paris. The reader should begin now to ask what there is about Paris that makes it the antithesis to Woollett, what is symbolized by Paris that Strether will come to feel himself to have missed in his own life, and finally, to what extent Woollett and Paris can be taken to represent America and Europe, the juxtaposition of the New World and Old.