Strether called, his second morning in Paris, on the bankers of the Rue
Scribe to whom his letter of credit was addressed, and he made this
visit attended by Waymarsh, in whose company he had crossed from London
two days before.  They had hastened to the Rue Scribe on the morrow of
their arrival, but Strether had not then found the letters the hope of
which prompted this errand.  He had had as yet none at all; hadn't
expected them in London, but had counted on several in Paris, and,
disconcerted now, had presently strolled back to the Boulevard with a
sense of injury that he felt himself taking for as good a start as any
other.  It would serve, this spur to his spirit, he reflected, as,
pausing at the top of the street, he looked up and down the great
foreign avenue, it would serve to begin business with.  His idea was to
begin business immediately, and it did much for him the rest of his day
that the beginning of business awaited him.  He did little else till
night but ask himself what he should do if he hadn't fortunately had so
much to do; but he put himself the question in many different
situations and connexions.  What carried him hither and yon was an
admirable theory that nothing he could do wouldn't be in some manner
related to what he fundamentally had on hand, or WOULD be--should he
happen to have a scruple--wasted for it.  He did happen to have a
scruple--a scruple about taking no definite step till he should get
letters; but this reasoning carried it off.  A single day to feel his
feet--he had felt them as yet only at Chester and in London--was he
could consider, none too much; and having, as he had often privately
expressed it, Paris to reckon with, he threw these hours of freshness
consciously into the reckoning.  They made it continually greater, but
that was what it had best be if it was to be anything at all, and he
gave himself up till far into the evening, at the theatre and on the
return, after the theatre, along the bright congested Boulevard, to
feeling it grow.  Waymarsh had accompanied him this time to the play,
and the two men had walked together, as a first stage, from the Gymnase
to the Cafe Riche, into the crowded "terrace" of which
establishment--the night, or rather the morning, for midnight had
struck, being bland and populous--they had wedged themselves for
refreshment. Waymarsh, as a result of some discussion with his friend,
had made a marked virtue of his having now let himself go; and there
had been elements of impression in their half-hour over their watered
beer-glasses that gave him his occasion for conveying that he held this
compromise with his stiffer self to have become extreme.  He conveyed
it--for it was still, after all, his stiffer self who gloomed out of
the glare of the terrace--in solemn silence; and there was indeed a
great deal of critical silence, every way, between the companions, even
till they gained the Place de l'Opera, as to the character of their
nocturnal progress.

This morning there WERE letters--letters which had reached London,
apparently all together, the day of Strether's journey, and had taken
their time to follow him; so that, after a controlled impulse to go
into them in the reception-room of the bank, which, reminding him of
the post-office at Woollett, affected him as the abutment of some
transatlantic bridge, he slipped them into the pocket of his loose grey
overcoat with a sense of the felicity of carrying them off.  Waymarsh,
who had had letters yesterday, had had them again to-day, and Waymarsh
suggested in this particular no controlled impulses.  The last one he
was at all events likely to be observed to struggle with was clearly
that of bringing to a premature close any visit to the Rue Scribe.
Strether had left him there yesterday; he wanted to see the papers, and
he had spent, by what his friend could make out, a succession of hours
with the papers.  He spoke of the establishment, with emphasis, as a
post of superior observation; just as he spoke generally of his actual
damnable doom as a device for hiding from him what was going on. Europe
was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for
dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge,
and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations
of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs.  Strether,
on his side, set himself to walk again--he had his relief in his
pocket; and indeed, much as he had desired his budget, the growth of
restlessness might have been marked in him from the moment he had
assured himself of the superscription of most of the missives it
contained.  This restlessness became therefore his temporary law; he
knew he should recognise as soon as see it the best place of all for
settling down with his chief correspondent.  He had for the next hour
an accidental air of looking for it in the windows of shops; he came
down the Rue de la Paix in the sun and, passing across the Tuileries
and the river, indulged more than once--as if on finding himself
determined--in a sudden pause before the book-stalls of the opposite
quay.  In the garden of the Tuileries he had lingered, on two or three
spots, to look; it was as if the wonderful Paris spring had stayed him
as he roamed.  The prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes--in a
soft breeze and a sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the
garden-floor, of bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong
boxes, in the type of ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where
terrace-walls were warm, in the blue-frocked brass-labelled officialism
of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep references of a
straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a white-gaitered red-legged
soldier.  He watched little brisk figures, figures whose movement was
as the tick of the great Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from
point to point; the air had a taste as of something mixed with art,
something that presented nature as a white-capped master-chef.  The
palace was gone, Strether remembered the palace; and when he gazed into
the irremediable void of its site the historic sense in him might have
been freely at play--the play under which in Paris indeed it so often
winces like a touched nerve.  He filled out spaces with dim symbols of
scenes; he caught the gleam of white statues at the base of which, with
his letters out, he could tilt back a straw-bottomed chair.  But his
drift was, for reasons, to the other side, and it floated him unspent
up the Rue de Seine and as far as the Luxembourg.  In the Luxembourg
Gardens he pulled up; here at last he found his nook, and here, on a
penny chair from which terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains, little
trees in green tubs, little women in white caps and shrill little girls
at play all sunnily "composed" together, he passed an hour in which the
cup of his impressions seemed truly to overflow. But a week had elapsed
since he quitted the ship, and there were more things in his mind than
so few days could account for.  More than once, during the time, he had
regarded himself as admonished; but the admonition this morning was
formidably sharp.  It took as it hadn't done yet the form of a
question--the question of what he was doing with such an extraordinary
sense of escape.  This sense was sharpest after he had read his
letters, but that was also precisely why the question pressed.  Four of
the letters were from Mrs. Newsome and none of them short; she had lost
no time, had followed on his heels while he moved, so expressing
herself that he now could measure the probable frequency with which he
should hear.  They would arrive, it would seem, her communications, at
the rate of several a week; he should be able to count, it might even
prove, on more than one by each mail.  If he had begun yesterday with a
small grievance he had therefore an opportunity to begin to-day with
its opposite.  He read the letters successively and slowly, putting
others back into his pocket but keeping these for a long time
afterwards gathered in his lap.  He held them there, lost in thought,
as if to prolong the presence of what they gave him; or as if at the
least to assure them their part in the constitution of some lucidity.
His friend wrote admirably, and her tone was even more in her style
than in her voice--he might almost, for the hour, have had to come this
distance to get its full carrying quality; yet the plentitude of his
consciousness of difference consorted perfectly with the deepened
intensity of the connexion.  It was the difference, the difference of
being just where he was and AS he was, that formed the escape--this
difference was so much greater than he had dreamed it would be; and
what he finally sat there turning over was the strange logic of his
finding himself so free.  He felt it in a manner his duty to think out
his state, to approve the process, and when he came in fact to trace
the steps and add up the items they sufficiently accounted for the sum.
He had never expected--that was the truth of it--again to find himself
young, and all the years and other things it had taken to make him so
were exactly his present arithmetic.  He had to make sure of them to
put his scruple to rest.

It all sprang at bottom from the beauty of Mrs. Newsome's desire that
he should be worried with nothing that was not of the essence of his
task; by insisting that he should thoroughly intermit and break she had
so provided for his freedom that she would, as it were, have only
herself to thank.  Strether could not at this point indeed have
completed his thought by the image of what she might have to thank
herself FOR:  the image, at best, of his own likeness-poor Lambert
Strether washed up on the sunny strand by the waves of a single day,
poor Lambert Strether thankful for breathing-time and stiffening
himself while he gasped.  There he was, and with nothing in his aspect
or his posture to scandalise: it was only true that if he had seen Mrs.
Newsome coming he would instinctively have jumped up to walk away a
little.  He would have come round and back to her bravely, but he would
have had first to pull himself together.  She abounded in news of the
situation at home, proved to him how perfectly she was arranging for
his absence, told him who would take up this and who take up that
exactly where he had left it, gave him in fact chapter and verse for
the moral that nothing would suffer.  It filled for him, this tone of
hers, all the air; yet it struck him at the same time as the hum of
vain things.  This latter effect was what he tried to justify--and with
the success that, grave though the appearance, he at last lighted on a
form that was happy.  He arrived at it by the inevitable recognition of
his having been a fortnight before one of the weariest of men.  If ever
a man had come off tired Lambert Strether was that man; and hadn't it
been distinctly on the ground of his fatigue that his wonderful friend
at home had so felt for him and so contrived?  It seemed to him somehow
at these instants that, could he only maintain with sufficient firmness
his grasp of that truth, it might become in a manner his compass and
his helm.  What he wanted most was some idea that would simplify, and
nothing would do this so much as the fact that he was done for and
finished.  If it had been in such a light that he had just detected in
his cup the dregs of youth, that was a mere flaw of the surface of his
scheme.  He was so distinctly fagged-out that it must serve precisely
as his convenience, and if he could but consistently be good for little
enough he might do everything he wanted.

Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a single boon--the
common unattainable art of taking things as they came.  He appeared to
himself to have given his best years to an active appreciation of the
way they didn't come; but perhaps--as they would seemingly here be
things quite other--this long ache might at last drop to rest.  He
could easily see that from the moment he should accept the notion of
his foredoomed collapse the last thing he would lack would be reasons
and memories.  Oh if he SHOULD do the sum no slate would hold the
figures! The fact that he had failed, as he considered, in everything,
in each relation and in half a dozen trades, as he liked luxuriously to
put it, might have made, might still make, for an empty present; but it
stood solidly for a crowded past.  It had not been, so much achievement
missed, a light yoke nor a short load.  It was at present as if
the backward picture had hung there, the long crooked course, grey in
the shadow of his solitude.  It had been a dreadful cheerful sociable
solitude, a solitude of life or choice, of community; but though there
had been people enough all round it there had been but three or four
persons IN it.  Waymarsh was one of these, and the fact struck him just
now as marking the record.  Mrs. Newsome was another, and Miss Gostrey
had of a sudden shown signs of becoming a third.  Beyond, behind them
was the pale figure of his real youth, which held against its breast
the two presences paler than itself--the young wife he had early lost
and the young son he had stupidly sacrificed.  He had again and again
made out for himself that he might have kept his little boy, his little
dull boy who had died at school of rapid diphtheria, if he had not in
those years so insanely given himself to merely missing the mother.  It
was the soreness of his remorse that the child had in all likelihood
not really been dull--had been dull, as he had been banished and
neglected, mainly because the father had been unwittingly selfish. This
was doubtless but the secret habit of sorrow, which had slowly given
way to time; yet there remained an ache sharp enough to make the
spirit, at the sight now and again of some fair young man just growing
up, wince with the thought of an opportunity lost.  Had ever a man, he
had finally fallen into the way of asking himself, lost so much and
even done so much for so little?  There had been particular reasons why
all yesterday, beyond other days, he should have had in one ear this
cold enquiry.  His name on the green cover, where he had put it for
Mrs. Newsome, expressed him doubtless just enough to make the
world--the world as distinguished, both for more and for less, from
Woollett--ask who he was.  He had incurred the ridicule of having to
have his explanation explained.  He was Lambert Strether because he was
on the cover, whereas it should have been, for anything like glory,
that he was on the cover because he was Lambert Strether.  He would
have done anything for Mrs. Newsome, have been still more
ridiculous--as he might, for that matter, have occasion to be yet;
which came to saying that this acceptance of fate was all he had to
show at fifty-five.

He judged the quantity as small because it WAS small, and all the more
egregiously since it couldn't, as he saw the case, so much as thinkably
have been larger.  He hadn't had the gift of making the most of what he
tried, and if he had tried and tried again--no one but himself knew how
often--it appeared to have been that he might demonstrate what else, in
default of that, COULD be made.  Old ghosts of experiments came back to
him, old drudgeries and delusions, and disgusts, old recoveries with
their relapses, old fevers with their chills, broken moments of good
faith, others of still better doubt; adventures, for the most part, of
the sort qualified as lessons.  The special spring that had constantly
played for him the day before was the recognition--frequent enough to
surprise him--of the promises to himself that he had after his other
visit never kept.  The reminiscence to-day most quickened for him was
that of the vow taken in the course of the pilgrimage that,
newly-married, with the War just over, and helplessly young in spite of
it, he had recklessly made with the creature who was so much younger
still.  It had been a bold dash, for which they had taken money set
apart for necessities, but kept sacred at the moment in a hundred ways,
and in none more so than by this private pledge of his own to treat the
occasion as a relation formed with the higher culture and see that, as
they said at Woollett, it should bear a good harvest.  He had believed,
sailing home again, that he had gained something great, and his
theory--with an elaborate innocent plan of reading, digesting, coming
back even, every few years--had then been to preserve, cherish and
extend it. As such plans as these had come to nothing, however, in
respect to acquisitions still more precious, it was doubtless little
enough of a marvel that he should have lost account of that handful of
seed.  Buried for long years in dark corners at any rate these few
germs had sprouted again under forty-eight hours of Paris.  The process
of yesterday had really been the process of feeling the general stirred
life of connexions long since individually dropped.  Strether had
become acquainted even on this ground with short gusts of
speculation--sudden flights of fancy in Louvre galleries, hungry gazes
through clear plates behind which lemon-coloured volumes were as fresh
as fruit on the tree.

There were instants at which he could ask whether, since there had been
fundamentally so little question of his keeping anything, the fate
after all decreed for him hadn't been only to BE kept.  Kept for
something, in that event, that he didn't pretend, didn't possibly dare
as yet to divine; something that made him hover and wonder and laugh
and sigh, made him advance and retreat, feeling half ashamed of his
impulse to plunge and more than half afraid of his impulse to wait.  He
remembered for instance how he had gone back in the sixties with
lemon-coloured volumes in general on the brain as well as with a
dozen--selected for his wife too--in his trunk; and nothing had at the
moment shown more confidence than this invocation of the finer taste.
They were still somewhere at home, the dozen--stale and soiled and
never sent to the binder; but what had become of the sharp initiation
they represented?  They represented now the mere sallow paint on the
door of the temple of taste that he had dreamed of raising up--a
structure he had practically never carried further.  Strether's present
highest flights were perhaps those in which this particular lapse
figured to him as a symbol, a symbol of his long grind and his want of
odd moments, his want moreover of money, of opportunity, of positive
dignity.  That the memory of the vow of his youth should, in order to
throb again, have had to wait for this last, as he felt it, of all his
accidents--that was surely proof enough of how his conscience had been
encumbered.  If any further proof were needed it would have been to be
found in the fact that, as he perfectly now saw, he had ceased even to
measure his meagreness, a meagreness that sprawled, in this retrospect,
vague and comprehensive, stretching back like some unmapped Hinterland
from a rough coast-settlement.  His conscience had been amusing itself
for the forty-eight hours by forbidding him the purchase of a book; he
held off from that, held off from everything; from the moment he didn't
yet call on Chad he wouldn't for the world have taken any other step.
On this evidence, however, of the way they actually affected him he
glared at the lemon-coloured covers in confession of the
subconsciousness that, all the same, in the great desert of the years,
he must have had of them.  The green covers at home comprised, by the
law of their purpose, no tribute to letters; it was of a mere rich
kernel of economics, politics, ethics that, glazed and, as Mrs. Newsome
maintained rather against HIS view, pre-eminently pleasant to touch,
they formed the specious shell.  Without therefore any needed
instinctive knowledge of what was coming out, in Paris, on the bright
highway, he struck himself at present as having more than once flushed
with a suspicion:  he couldn't otherwise at present be feeling so many
fears confirmed.  There were "movements" he was too late for: weren't
they, with the fun of them, already spent?  There were sequences he had
missed and great gaps in the procession:  he might have been watching
it all recede in a golden cloud of dust.  If the playhouse wasn't
closed his seat had at least fallen to somebody else.  He had had an
uneasy feeling the night before that if he was at the theatre at
all--though he indeed justified the theatre, in the specific sense, and
with a grotesqueness to which his imagination did all honour, as
something he owed poor Waymarsh--he should have been there with, and as
might have been said, FOR Chad.

This suggested the question of whether he could properly have taken him
to such a play, and what effect--it was a point that suddenly rose--his
peculiar responsibility might be held in general to have on his choice
of entertainment.  It had literally been present to him at the
Gymnase--where one was held moreover comparatively safe--that having
his young friend at his side would have been an odd feature of the work
of redemption; and this quite in spite of the fact that the picture
presented might well, confronted with Chad's own private stage, have
seemed the pattern of propriety.  He clearly hadn't come out in the
name of propriety but to visit unattended equivocal performances; yet
still less had he done so to undermine his authority by sharing them
with the graceless youth.  Was he to renounce all amusement for the
sweet sake of that authority? and WOULD such renouncement give him for
Chad a moral glamour?  The little problem bristled the more by reason
of poor Strether's fairly open sense of the irony of things.  Were
there then sides on which his predicament threatened to look rather
droll to him?  Should he have to pretend to believe--either to himself
or the wretched boy--that there was anything that could make the latter
worse?  Wasn't some such pretence on the other hand involved in the
assumption of possible processes that would make him better?  His
greatest uneasiness seemed to peep at him out of the imminent
impression that almost any acceptance of Paris might give one's
authority away.  It hung before him this morning, the vast bright
Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard,
in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably
marked.  It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed
all surface one moment seemed all depth the next.  It was a place of
which, unmistakeably, Chad was fond; wherefore if he, Strether, should
like it too much, what on earth, with such a bond, would become of
either of them?  It all depended of course--which was a gleam of
light--on how the "too much" was measured; though indeed our friend
fairly felt, while he prolonged the meditation I describe, that for
himself even already a certain measure had been reached. It will have
been sufficiently seen that he was not a man to neglect any good chance
for reflexion.  Was it at all possible for instance to like Paris
enough without liking it too much?  He luckily however hadn't promised
Mrs. Newsome not to like it at all.  He was ready to recognise at this
stage that such an engagement WOULD have tied his hands.  The
Luxembourg Gardens were incontestably just so adorable at this hour by
reason--in addition to their intrinsic charm--of his not having taken
it.  The only engagement he had taken, when he looked the thing in the
face, was to do what he reasonably could.

It upset him a little none the less and after a while to find himself
at last remembering on what current of association he had been floated
so far.  Old imaginations of the Latin Quarter had played their part
for him, and he had duly recalled its having been with this scene of
rather ominous legend that, like so many young men in fiction as well
as in fact, Chad had begun.  He was now quite out of it, with his
"home," as Strether figured the place, in the Boulevard Malesherbes;
which was perhaps why, repairing, not to fail of justice either, to the
elder neighbourhood, our friend had felt he could allow for the element
of the usual, the immemorial, without courting perturbation.  He was
not at least in danger of seeing the youth and the particular Person
flaunt by together; and yet he was in the very air of which--just to
feel what the early natural note must have been--he wished most to take
counsel.  It became at once vivid to him that he had originally had,
for a few days, an almost envious vision of the boy's romantic
privilege.  Melancholy Murger, with Francine and Musette and Rodolphe,
at home, in the company of the tattered, one--if he not in his single
self two or three--of the unbound, the paper-covered dozen on the
shelf; and when Chad had written, five years ago, after a sojourn then
already prolonged to six months, that he had decided to go in for
economy and the real thing, Strether's fancy had quite fondly
accompanied him in this migration, which was to convey him, as they
somewhat confusedly learned at Woollett, across the bridges and up the
Montagne Sainte-Genevieve.  This was the region--Chad had been quite
distinct about it--in which the best French, and many other things,
were to be learned at least cost, and in which all sorts of clever
fellows, compatriots there for a purpose, formed an awfully pleasant
set.  The clever fellows, the friendly countrymen were mainly young
painters, sculptors, architects, medical students; but they were, Chad
sagely opined, a much more profitable lot to be with--even on the
footing of not being quite one of them--than the "terrible toughs"
(Strether remembered the edifying discrimination) of the American bars
and banks roundabout the Opera.  Chad had thrown out, in the
communications following this one--for at that time he did once in a
while communicate--that several members of a band of earnest workers
under one of the great artists had taken him right in, making him dine
every night, almost for nothing, at their place, and even pressing him
not to neglect the hypothesis of there being as much "in him" as in any
of them.  There had been literally a moment at which it appeared there
might be something in him; there had been at any rate a moment at which
he had written that he didn't know but what a month or two more might
see him enrolled in some atelier.  The season had been one at which
Mrs. Newsome was moved to gratitude for small mercies; it had broken on
them all as a blessing that their absentee HAD perhaps a
conscience--that he was sated in fine with idleness, was ambitious of
variety.  The exhibition was doubtless as yet not brilliant, but
Strether himself, even by that time much enlisted and immersed, had
determined, on the part of the two ladies, a temperate approval and in
fact, as he now recollected, a certain austere enthusiasm.

But the very next thing that happened had been a dark drop of the
curtain.  The son and brother had not browsed long on the Montagne
Sainte-Genevieve--his effective little use of the name of which, like
his allusion to the best French, appeared to have been but one of the
notes of his rough cunning.  The light refreshment of these vain
appearances had not accordingly carried any of them very far.  On the
other hand it had gained Chad time; it had given him a chance,
unchecked, to strike his roots, had paved the way for initiations more
direct and more deep.  It was Strether's belief that he had been
comparatively innocent before this first migration, and even that the
first effects of the migration would not have been, without some
particular bad accident, to have been deplored.  There had been three
months--he had sufficiently figured it out--in which Chad had wanted to
try.  He HAD tried, though not very hard--he had had his little hour of
good faith.  The weakness of this principle in him was that almost any
accident attestedly bad enough was stronger.  Such had at any rate
markedly been the case for the precipitation of a special series of
impressions. They had proved, successively, these impressions--all of
Musette and Francine, but Musette and Francine vulgarised by the larger
evolution of the type--irresistibly sharp:  he had "taken up," by what
was at the time to be shrinkingly gathered, as it was scantly
mentioned, with one ferociously "interested" little person after
another.  Strether had read somewhere of a Latin motto, a description
of the hours, observed on a clock by a traveller in Spain; and he had
been led to apply it in thought to Chad's number one, number two,
number three.  Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat--they had all morally
wounded, the last had morally killed.  The last had been longest in
possession--in possession, that is, of whatever was left of the poor
boy's finer mortality.  And it hadn't been she, it had been one of her
early predecessors, who had determined the second migration, the
expensive return and relapse, the exchange again, as was fairly to be
presumed, of the vaunted best French for some special variety of the
worst.

He pulled himself then at last together for his own progress back; not
with the feeling that he had taken his walk in vain.  He prolonged it a
little, in the immediate neighbourhood, after he had quitted his chair;
and the upshot of the whole morning for him was that his campaign had
begun.  He had wanted to put himself in relation, and he would be
hanged if he were NOT in relation.  He was that at no moment so much as
while, under the old arches of the Odeon, he lingered before the
charming open-air array of literature classic and casual.  He found the
effect of tone and tint, in the long charged tables and shelves,
delicate and appetising; the impression--substituting one kind of
low-priced consommation for another--might have been that of one of the
pleasant cafes that overlapped, under an awning, to the pavement; but
he edged along, grazing the tables, with his hands firmly behind him.
He wasn't there to dip, to consume--he was there to reconstruct.  He
wasn't there for his own profit--not, that is, the direct; he was there
on some chance of feeling the brush of the wing of the stray spirit of
youth.  He felt it in fact, he had it beside him; the old arcade
indeed, as his inner sense listened, gave out the faint sound, as from
far off, of the wild waving of wings.  They were folded now over the
breasts of buried generations; but a flutter or two lived again in the
turned page of shock-headed slouch-hatted loiterers whose young
intensity of type, in the direction of pale acuteness, deepened his
vision, and even his appreciation, of racial differences, and whose
manipulation of the uncut volume was too often, however, but a
listening at closed doors.  He reconstructed a possible groping Chad of
three or four years before, a Chad who had, after all, simply--for that
was the only way to see it--been too vulgar for his privilege.  Surely
it WAS a privilege to have been young and happy just there.  Well, the
best thing Strether knew of him was that he had had such a dream.

But his own actual business half an hour later was with a third floor
on the Boulevard Malesherbes--so much as that was definite; and the
fact of the enjoyment by the third-floor windows of a continuous
balcony, to which he was helped by this knowledge, had perhaps
something to do with his lingering for five minutes on the opposite
side of the street.  There were points as to which he had quite made up
his mind, and one of these bore precisely on the wisdom of the
abruptness to which events had finally committed him, a policy that he
was pleased to find not at all shaken as he now looked at his watch and
wondered.  He HAD announced himself--six months before; had written out
at least that Chad wasn't to be surprised should he see him some day
turn up.  Chad had thereupon, in a few words of rather carefully
colourless answer, offered him a general welcome; and Strether,
ruefully reflecting that he might have understood the warning as a hint
to hospitality, a bid for an invitation, had fallen back upon silence
as the corrective most to his own taste.  He had asked Mrs. Newsome
moreover not to announce him again; he had so distinct an opinion on
his attacking his job, should he attack it at all, in his own way.  Not
the least of this lady's high merits for him was that he could
absolutely rest on her word.  She was the only woman he had known, even
at Woollett, as to whom his conviction was positive that to lie was
beyond her art. Sarah Pocock, for instance, her own daughter, though
with social ideals, as they said, in some respects different--Sarah who
WAS, in her way, aesthetic, had never refused to human commerce that
mitigation of rigour; there were occasions when he had distinctly seen
her apply it.  Since, accordingly, at all events, he had had it from
Mrs. Newsome that she had, at whatever cost to her more strenuous view,
conformed, in the matter of preparing Chad, wholly to his restrictions,
he now looked up at the fine continuous balcony with a safe sense that
if the case had been bungled the mistake was at least his property. Was
there perhaps just a suspicion of that in his present pause on the edge
of the Boulevard and well in the pleasant light?

Many things came over him here, and one of them was that he should
doubtless presently know whether he had been shallow or sharp. Another
was that the balcony in question didn't somehow show as a convenience
easy to surrender.  Poor Strether had at this very moment to recognise
the truth that wherever one paused in Paris the imagination reacted
before one could stop it.  This perpetual reaction put a price, if one
would, on pauses; but it piled up consequences till there was scarce
room to pick one's steps among them.  What call had he, at such a
juncture, for example, to like Chad's very house?  High broad clear--he
was expert enough to make out in a moment that it was admirably
built--it fairly embarrassed our friend by the quality that, as he
would have said, it "sprang" on him.  He had struck off the fancy that
it might, as a preliminary, be of service to him to be seen, by a happy
accident, from the third-story windows, which took all the March sun,
but of what service was it to find himself making out after a moment
that the quality "sprung," the quality produced by measure and balance,
the fine relation of part to part and space to space, was
probably--aided by the presence of ornament as positive as it was
discreet, and by the complexion of the stone, a cold fair grey, warmed
and polished a little by life--neither more nor less than a case of
distinction, such a case as he could only feel unexpectedly as a sort
of delivered challenge? Meanwhile, however, the chance he had allowed
for--the chance of being seen in time from the balcony--had become a
fact.  Two or three of the windows stood open to the violet air; and,
before Strether had cut the knot by crossing, a young man had come out
and looked about him, had lighted a cigarette and tossed the match
over, and then, resting on the rail, had given himself up to watching
the life below while he smoked.  His arrival contributed, in its order,
to keeping Strether in position; the result of which in turn was that
Strether soon felt himself noticed.  The young man began to look at him
as in acknowledgement of his being himself in observation.

This was interesting so far as it went, but the interest was affected
by the young man's not being Chad.  Strether wondered at first if he
were perhaps Chad altered, and then saw that this was asking too much
of alteration.  The young man was light bright and alert--with an air
too pleasant to have been arrived at by patching.  Strether had
conceived Chad as patched, but not beyond recognition.  He was in
presence, he felt, of amendments enough as they stood; it was a
sufficient amendment that the gentleman up there should be Chad's
friend.  He was young too then, the gentleman up there--he was very
young; young enough apparently to be amused at an elderly watcher, to
be curious even to see what the elderly watcher would do on finding
himself watched.  There was youth in that, there was youth in the
surrender to the balcony, there was youth for Strether at this moment
in everything but his own business; and Chad's thus pronounced
association with youth had given the next instant an extraordinary
quick lift to the issue. The balcony, the distinguished front,
testified suddenly, for Strether's fancy, to something that was up and
up; they placed the whole case materially, and as by an admirable
image, on a level that he found himself at the end of another moment
rejoicing to think he might reach.  The young man looked at him still,
he looked at the young man; and the issue, by a rapid process, was that
this knowledge of a perched privacy appeared to him the last of
luxuries.  To him too the perched privacy was open, and he saw it now
but in one light--that of the only domicile, the only fireside, in the
great ironic city, on which he had the shadow of a claim. Miss Gostrey
had a fireside; she had told him of it, and it was something that
doubtless awaited him; but Miss Gostrey hadn't yet arrived--she
mightn't arrive for days; and the sole attenuation of his excluded
state was his vision of the small, the admittedly secondary hotel in
the bye-street from the Rue de la Paix, in which her solicitude for his
purse had placed him, which affected him somehow as all indoor chill,
glass-roofed court and slippery staircase, and which, by the same
token, expressed the presence of Waymarsh even at times when Waymarsh
might have been certain to be round at the bank.  It came to pass
before he moved that Waymarsh, and Waymarsh alone, Waymarsh not only
undiluted but positively strengthened, struck him as the present
alternative to the young man in the balcony.  When he did move it was
fairly to escape that alternative.  Taking his way over the street at
last and passing through the porte-cochere of the house was like
consciously leaving Waymarsh out.  However, he would tell him all about
it.

Book Third

By this point, Strether has made it to Paris. He pops into a place where he's supposed to receive some letters from America. He hasn't. He's kind of bummed about it. He's such an anxious dude that he's worried about doing anything in Paris--namely enjoying himself in any way--without some sort of permission from Mrs. Newsome in a letter. Yeah, the dude's starting to sound a little whipped. As a sort of self-punishment, he hangs out with Waymarsh for the rest of the day. The next day in Paris, there are letters, and Strether greedily reads them. But he also wants to find an ideal place to read and respond to the letters, so he spends a good chunk of his afternoon wandering around Paris and looking for seats in cafes. Yeah, that can take up a whole bunch of pages when you're Henry James. He finally finds a spot in some public gardens and sits down in a chair to read. Meanwhile, he's been drinking in all the beautiful sights of Paris. The air is sweeter than back home, the birds sing more beautifully, the trees...well, you get the picture. Mrs. Newsome's letters say that she doesn't want him to worry about anything that's not connected to his mission of bringing back Chad. The whole order not to worry thing gives him a huge sense of freedom that helps him enjoy the sights of Paris even more, since now he feels like he has permission to do so. Strether also realizes just how weary he was when he left America. He feels rejuvenated by being able to walk around Paris alone. But not everything is happy for him. He also can't enjoy Paris without thinking about how he's wasted his life being an anxious, play-it-safe kind of guy. Finally, Strether is able to admit to himself what he actually thinks: he's envious that Chad gets to live as a young, wealthy bachelor in this kind of city. Chad mentioned in some of his past letters that he'd become friends with a group of super cool artists living in Paris, and Strether just can't bear how jealous he is. But he also reminds himself that Chad is sleeping around, and this is something Strether could never envy because it's immoral...heh heh. During one of his walks, Strether comes to the building where Chad is supposed to be living. He knows that Chad's giant apartment is up on the third floor, and as he glances up, Strether sees a young man staring down at him from the third floor balcony. He's a little freaked by the fact that he's been watched, but he also realizes that this young man isn't Chad, but some other guy hanging out in his apartment. And we just have to find out who this dude is. What if he's murdered Chad and stolen his identity? We'll just have to keep reading to find out.


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.

Now we find Strether back at his hotel having some grub with Waymarsh, who's being stern as usual. But Strether doesn't mind so much because, glory be, he's just had the most wonderful adventure. He picks up his story where we left off, and tells Waymarsh about what happened after he saw the young man looking down at him from Chad's apartment. It turns out that the young man let Strether in and brought him up to the apartment. Yeah, not as exciting as the murder version. Anyway, Strether's blown away even just remembering all the beautiful things that were in the apartment. It turns out that the young man is a starving artist named Bilham who's a friend of Chad's. Chad is out of town at the moment, and he has lent his apartment to Bilham while he's gone because Bilham really appreciates the opportunity to live in a rich friend's home for a bit. We're skeptical. As for our pal Strether, he doesn't necessarily trust the guy at first, but soon warms up to him. Waymarsh only wants the juicy details, so he comes right out and asks if Chad is living in his apartment with a woman. Strether can only say that he doesn't know. He also doesn't know if Chad has taken a woman with him on his trip or whether he'll come back with one. So Waymarsh just gets frustrated and asks what the heck Strether does know after his trip to Chad's pad. Strether closes the story by mentioning that he's been invited to breakfast by the Bilham guy. Waymarsh can't believe that Strether would even entertain the idea of dining with such immoral people. But Strether reminds Waymarsh that they don't actually know anything about these people. At this point, Strether tells Waymarsh what his deal actually is: if he gets Chad to come home with him, Mrs. Newsome will marry him. If he fails, he might lose his sugar mama. The next morning, Strether gets ready to head to breakfast with Bilham. Waymarsh says it's a dumb idea, but since he doesn't have any other friends, he begrudgingly comes along. At breakfast, Strether and Waymarsh sit down in Chad's apartment with Bilham and a young woman named Miss Barrace. Strether immediately suspects that this woman might be the one who's living with Chad and turning him against his family, because hey, he'll pretty much suspect any lady at this point. Strangely enough, Miss Barrace takes a shining to Waymarsh. She thinks he's a wonderful specimen of a stereotypical American. By the way, that's nothing like today's stereotypical American. Back in those days, everyone thought of Americans as stuck-up prudes. During the meal, Strether notes that Miss Barrace and Bilham don't have the best table manners. But he doesn't really care because he's fascinated by the fact that they don't. They seem to not really mind what other people think of them, and this is astounding to Strether. Like we said, pretty different from today's stereotypes of Americans. Strether is also blown away to hear these people say that Chad Newsome is pretty much the greatest guy in the world. Strether planned on coming to Paris and finding a monster. But he's getting more convinced by the minute that Chad might be a good guy with a good life.