Strether's first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his
friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive
till evening he was not wholly disconcerted.  A telegram from him
bespeaking a room "only if not noisy," reply paid, was produced for the
enquirer at the office, so that the understanding they should meet at
Chester rather than at Liverpool remained to that extent sound.  The
same secret principle, however, that had prompted Strether not
absolutely to desire Waymarsh's presence at the dock, that had led him
thus to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of it, now operated to
make him feel he could still wait without disappointment.  They would
dine together at the worst, and, with all respect to dear old
Waymarsh--if not even, for that matter, to himself--there was little
fear that in the sequel they shouldn't see enough of each other.  The
principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most
newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive--the fruit of a
sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking,
after so much separation, into his comrade's face, his business would
be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to
present itself to the nearing steamer as the first "note," of Europe.
Mixed with everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether's
part, that it would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in
quite a sufficient degree.

That note had been meanwhile--since the previous afternoon, thanks to
this happier device--such a consciousness of personal freedom as he
hadn't known for years; such a deep taste of change and of having above
all for the moment nobody and nothing to consider, as promised already,
if headlong hope were not too foolish, to colour his adventure with
cool success.  There were people on the ship with whom he had easily
consorted--so far as ease could up to now be imputed to him--and who
for the most part plunged straight into the current that set from the
landing-stage to London; there were others who had invited him to a
tryst at the inn and had even invoked his aid for a "look round" at the
beauties of Liverpool; but he had stolen away from every one alike, had
kept no appointment and renewed no acquaintance, had been indifferently
aware of the number of persons who esteemed themselves fortunate in
being, unlike himself, "met," and had even independently, unsociably,
alone, without encounter or relapse and by mere quiet evasion, given
his afternoon and evening to the immediate and the sensible.  They
formed a qualified draught of Europe, an afternoon and an evening on
the banks of the Mersey, but such as it was he took his potion at least
undiluted.  He winced a little, truly, at the thought that Waymarsh
might be already at Chester; he reflected that, should he have to
describe himself there as having "got in" so early, it would be
difficult to make the interval look particularly eager; but he was like
a man who, elatedly finding in his pocket more money than usual,
handles it a while and idly and pleasantly chinks it before addressing
himself to the business of spending.  That he was prepared to be vague
to Waymarsh about the hour of the ship's touching, and that he both
wanted extremely to see him and enjoyed extremely the duration of
delay--these things, it is to be conceived, were early signs in him
that his relation to his actual errand might prove none of the
simplest.  He was burdened, poor Strether--it had better be confessed
at the outset--with the oddity of a double consciousness.  There was
detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.

After the young woman in the glass cage had held up to him across her
counter the pale-pink leaflet bearing his friend's name, which she
neatly pronounced, he turned away to find himself, in the hall, facing
a lady who met his eyes as with an intention suddenly determined, and
whose features--not freshly young, not markedly fine, but on happy
terms with each other--came back to him as from a recent vision.  For a
moment they stood confronted; then the moment placed her:  he had
noticed her the day before, noticed her at his previous inn,
where--again in the hall--she had been briefly engaged with some people
of his own ship's company.  Nothing had actually passed between them,
and he would as little have been able to say what had been the sign of
her face for him on the first occasion as to name the ground of his
present recognition. Recognition at any rate appeared to prevail on her
own side as well--which would only have added to the mystery.  All she
now began by saying to him nevertheless was that, having chanced to
catch his enquiry, she was moved to ask, by his leave, if it were
possibly a question of Mr. Waymarsh of Milrose Connecticut--Mr.
Waymarsh the American lawyer.

"Oh yes," he replied, "my very well-known friend.  He's to meet me
here, coming up from Malvern, and I supposed he'd already have arrived.
But he doesn't come till later, and I'm relieved not to have kept him.
Do you know him?" Strether wound up.

It wasn't till after he had spoken that he became aware of how much
there had been in him of response; when the tone of her own rejoinder,
as well as the play of something more in her face--something more, that
is, than its apparently usual restless light--seemed to notify him.
"I've met him at Milrose--where I used sometimes, a good while ago, to
stay; I had friends there who were friends of his, and I've been at his
house.  I won't answer for it that he would know me," Strether's new
acquaintance pursued; "but I should be delighted to see him.  Perhaps,"
she added, "I shall--for I'm staying over."  She paused while our
friend took in these things, and it was as if a good deal of talk had
already passed. They even vaguely smiled at it, and Strether presently
observed that Mr. Waymarsh would, no doubt, be easily to be seen. This,
however, appeared to affect the lady as if she might have advanced too
far.  She appeared to have no reserves about anything. "Oh," she said,
"he won't care!"--and she immediately thereupon remarked that she
believed Strether knew the Munsters; the Munsters being the people he
had seen her with at Liverpool.

But he didn't, it happened, know the Munsters well enough to give the
case much of a lift; so that they were left together as if over the
mere laid table of conversation.  Her qualification of the mentioned
connexion had rather removed than placed a dish, and there seemed
nothing else to serve.  Their attitude remained, none the less, that of
not forsaking the board; and the effect of this in turn was to give
them the appearance of having accepted each other with an absence of
preliminaries practically complete.  They moved along the hall
together, and Strether's companion threw off that the hotel had the
advantage of a garden.  He was aware by this time of his strange
inconsequence:  he had shirked the intimacies of the steamer and had
muffled the shock of Waymarsh only to find himself forsaken, in this
sudden case, both of avoidance and of caution.  He passed, under this
unsought protection and before he had so much as gone up to his room,
into the garden of the hotel, and at the end of ten minutes had agreed
to meet there again, as soon as he should have made himself tidy, the
dispenser of such good assurances.  He wanted to look at the town, and
they would forthwith look together.  It was almost as if she had been
in possession and received him as a guest.  Her acquaintance with the
place presented her in a manner as a hostess, and Strether had a rueful
glance for the lady in the glass cage.  It was as if this personage had
seen herself instantly superseded.

When in a quarter of an hour he came down, what his hostess saw, what
she might have taken in with a vision kindly adjusted, was the lean,
the slightly loose figure of a man of the middle height and something
more perhaps than the middle age--a man of five-and-fifty, whose most
immediate signs were a marked bloodless brownness of face, a thick dark
moustache, of characteristically American cut, growing strong and
falling low, a head of hair still abundant but irregularly streaked
with grey, and a nose of bold free prominence, the even line, the high
finish, as it might have been called, of which, had a certain effect of
mitigation.  A perpetual pair of glasses astride of this fine ridge,
and a line, unusually deep and drawn, the prolonged pen-stroke of time,
accompanying the curve of the moustache from nostril to chin, did
something to complete the facial furniture that an attentive observer
would have seen catalogued, on the spot, in the vision of the other
party to Strether's appointment.  She waited for him in the garden, the
other party, drawing on a pair of singularly fresh soft and elastic
light gloves and presenting herself with a superficial readiness which,
as he approached her over the small smooth lawn and in the watery
English sunshine, he might, with his rougher preparation, have marked
as the model for such an occasion.  She had, this lady, a perfect plain
propriety, an expensive subdued suitability, that her companion was not
free to analyse, but that struck him, so that his consciousness of it
was instantly acute, as a quality quite new to him.  Before reaching
her he stopped on the grass and went through the form of feeling for
something, possibly forgotten, in the light overcoat he carried on his
arm; yet the essence of the act was no more than the impulse to gain
time.  Nothing could have been odder than Strether's sense of himself
as at that moment launched in something of which the sense would be
quite disconnected from the sense of his past and which was literally
beginning there and then. It had begun in fact already upstairs and
before the dressing glass that struck him as blocking further, so
strangely, the dimness of the window of his dull bedroom; begun with a
sharper survey of the elements of Appearance than he had for a long
time been moved to make.  He had during those moments felt these
elements to be not so much to his hand as he should have liked, and
then had fallen back on the thought that they were precisely a matter
as to which help was supposed to come from what he was about to do.  He
was about to go up to London, so that hat and necktie might wait.  What
had come as straight to him as a ball in a well-played game--and caught
moreover not less neatly--was just the air, in the person of his
friend, of having seen and chosen, the air of achieved possession of
those vague qualities and quantities that collectively figured to him
as the advantage snatched from lucky chances.  Without pomp or
circumstance, certainly, as her original address to him, equally with
his own response, had been, he would have sketched to himself his
impression of her as:  "Well, she's more thoroughly civilized--!" If
"More thoroughly than WHOM?" would not have been for him a sequel to
this remark, that was just by reason of his deep consciousness of the
bearing of his comparison.

The amusement, at all events, of a civilisation intenser was
what--familiar compatriot as she was, with the full tone of the
compatriot and the rattling link not with mystery but only with dear
dyspeptic Waymarsh--she appeared distinctly to promise.  His pause
while he felt in his overcoat was positively the pause of confidence,
and it enabled his eyes to make out as much of a case for her, in
proportion, as her own made out for himself.  She affected him as
almost insolently young; but an easily carried five-and-thirty could
still do that.  She was, however, like himself marked and wan; only it
naturally couldn't have been known to him how much a spectator looking
from one to the other might have discerned that they had in common.  It
wouldn't for such a spectator have been altogether insupposable that,
each so finely brown and so sharply spare, each confessing so to dents
of surface and aids to sight, to a disproportionate nose and a head
delicately or grossly grizzled, they might have been brother and
sister.  On this ground indeed there would have been a residuum of
difference; such a sister having surely known in respect to such a
brother the extremity of separation, and such a brother now feeling in
respect to such a sister the extremity of surprise.  Surprise, it was
true, was not on the other hand what the eyes of Strether's friend most
showed him while she gave him, stroking her gloves smoother, the time
he appreciated.  They had taken hold of him straightway measuring him
up and down as if they knew how; as if he were human material they had
already in some sort handled.  Their possessor was in truth, it may be
communicated, the mistress of a hundred cases or categories,
receptacles of the mind, subdivisions for convenience, in which, from a
full experience, she pigeon-holed her fellow mortals with a hand as
free as that of a compositor scattering type.  She was as equipped in
this particular as Strether was the reverse, and it made an opposition
between them which he might well have shrunk from submitting to if he
had fully suspected it.  So far as he did suspect it he was on the
contrary, after a short shake of his consciousness, as pleasantly
passive as might be.  He really had a sort of sense of what she knew.
He had quite the sense that she knew things he didn't, and though this
was a concession that in general he found not easy to make to women, he
made it now as good-humouredly as if it lifted a burden.  His eyes were
so quiet behind his eternal nippers that they might almost have been
absent without changing his face, which took its expression mainly, and
not least its stamp of sensibility, from other sources, surface and
grain and form.  He joined his guide in an instant, and then felt she
had profited still better than he by his having been for the moments
just mentioned, so at the disposal of her intelligence.  She knew even
intimate things about him that he hadn't yet told her and perhaps never
would.  He wasn't unaware that he had told her rather remarkably many
for the time, but these were not the real ones.  Some of the real ones,
however, precisely, were what she knew.

They were to pass again through the hall of the inn to get into the
street, and it was here she presently checked him with a question.
"Have you looked up my name?"

He could only stop with a laugh.  "Have you looked up mine?"

"Oh dear, yes--as soon as you left me.  I went to the office and asked.
Hadn't YOU better do the same?"

He wondered.  "Find out who you are?--after the uplifted young woman
there has seen us thus scrape acquaintance!"

She laughed on her side now at the shade of alarm in his amusement.
"Isn't it a reason the more?  If what you're afraid of is the injury
for me--my being seen to walk off with a gentleman who has to ask who I
am--I assure you I don't in the least mind.  Here, however," she
continued, "is my card, and as I find there's something else again I
have to say at the office, you can just study it during the moment I
leave you."

She left him after he had taken from her the small pasteboard she had
extracted from her pocket-book, and he had extracted another from his
own, to exchange with it, before she came back.  He read thus the
simple designation "Maria Gostrey," to which was attached, in a corner
of the card, with a number, the name of a street, presumably in Paris,
without other appreciable identity than its foreignness.  He put the
card into his waistcoat pocket, keeping his own meanwhile in evidence;
and as he leaned against the door-post he met with the smile of a
straying thought what the expanse before the hotel offered to his view.
It was positively droll to him that he should already have Maria
Gostrey, whoever she was--of which he hadn't really the least idea--in
a place of safe keeping.  He had somehow an assurance that he should
carefully preserve the little token he had just tucked in.  He gazed
with unseeing lingering eyes as he followed some of the implications of
his act, asking himself if he really felt admonished to qualify it as
disloyal.  It was prompt, it was possibly even premature, and there was
little doubt of the expression of face the sight of it would have
produced in a certain person.  But if it was "wrong"--why then he had
better not have come out at all.  At this, poor man, had he
already--and even before meeting Waymarsh--arrived.  He had believed he
had a limit, but the limit had been transcended within thirty-six
hours.  By how long a space on the plane of manners or even of morals,
moreover, he felt still more sharply after Maria Gostrey had come back
to him and with a gay decisive "So now--!" led him forth into the
world. This counted, it struck him as he walked beside her with his
overcoat on an arm, his umbrella under another and his personal
pasteboard a little stiffly retained between forefinger and thumb, this
struck him as really, in comparison his introduction to things.  It
hadn't been "Europe" at Liverpool no--not even in the dreadful
delightful impressive streets the night before--to the extent his
present companion made it so.  She hadn't yet done that so much as
when, after their walk had lasted a few minutes and he had had time to
wonder if a couple of sidelong glances from her meant that he had best
have put on gloves she almost pulled him up with an amused challenge.
"But why--fondly as it's so easy to imagine your clinging to it--don't
you put it away?  Or if it's an inconvenience to you to carry it, one's
often glad to have one's card back.  The fortune one spends in them!"

Then he saw both that his way of marching with his own prepared tribute
had affected her as a deviation in one of those directions he couldn't
yet measure, and that she supposed this emblem to be still the one he
had received from her.  He accordingly handed her the card as if in
restitution, but as soon as she had it she felt the difference and,
with her eyes on it, stopped short for apology. "I like," she observed,
"your name."

"Oh," he answered, "you won't have heard of it!" Yet he had his reasons
for not being sure but that she perhaps might.

Ah it was but too visible!  She read it over again as one who had never
seen it.  "'Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether'"--she sounded it almost as
freely as for any stranger.  She repeated however that she liked
it--"particularly the Lewis Lambert.  It's the name of a novel of
Balzac's."

"Oh I know that!" said Strether.

"But the novel's an awfully bad one."

"I know that too," Strether smiled.  To which he added with an
irrelevance that was only superficial:  "I come from Woollett
Massachusetts."  It made her for some reason--the irrelevance or
whatever--laugh.  Balzac had described many cities, but hadn't
described Woollett Massachusetts.  "You say that," she returned, "as if
you wanted one immediately to know the worst."

"Oh I think it's a thing," he said, "that you must already have made
out.  I feel it so that I certainly must look it, speak it, and, as
people say there, 'act' it.  It sticks out of me, and you knew surely
for yourself as soon as you looked at me."

"The worst, you mean?"

"Well, the fact of where I come from.  There at any rate it IS; so that
you won't be able, if anything happens, to say I've not been straight
with you."

"I see"--and Miss Gostrey looked really interested in the point he had
made.  "But what do you think of as happening?"

Though he wasn't shy--which was rather anomalous--Strether gazed about
without meeting her eyes; a motion that was frequent with him in talk,
yet of which his words often seemed not at all the effect. "Why that
you should find me too hopeless."  With which they walked on again
together while she answered, as they went, that the most "hopeless" of
her countryfolk were in general precisely those she liked best.  All
sorts of other pleasant small things-small things that were yet large
for him--flowered in the air of the occasion, but the bearing of the
occasion itself on matters still remote concerns us too closely to
permit us to multiply our illustrations. Two or three, however, in
truth, we should perhaps regret to lose. The tortuous wall--girdle,
long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by
careful civic hands--wanders in narrow file between parapets smoothed
by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate
or a bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer
twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows
of gables, views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled
English town and ordered English country.  Too deep almost for words
was the delight of these things to Strether; yet as deeply mixed with
it were certain images of his inward picture.  He had trod this walks
in the far-off time, at twenty-five; but that, instead of spoiling it,
only enriched it for present feeling and marked his renewal as a thing
substantial enough to share.  It was with Waymarsh he should have
shared it, and he was now accordingly taking from him something that
was his due.  He looked repeatedly at his watch, and when he had done
so for the fifth time Miss Gostrey took him up.

"You're doing something that you think not right."

It so touched the place that he quite changed colour and his laugh grew
almost awkward.  "Am I enjoying it as much as THAT?"

"You're not enjoying it, I think, so much as you ought."

"I see"--he appeared thoughtfully to agree.  "Great is my privilege."

"Oh it's not your privilege!  It has nothing to do with me.  It has to
do with yourself.  Your failure's general."

"Ah there you are!" he laughed.  "It's the failure of Woollett. THAT'S
general."

"The failure to enjoy," Miss Gostrey explained, "is what I mean."

"Precisely.  Woollett isn't sure it ought to enjoy.  If it were it
would.  But it hasn't, poor thing," Strether continued, "any one to
show it how.  It's not like me.  I have somebody."

They had stopped, in the afternoon sunshine--constantly pausing, in
their stroll, for the sharper sense of what they saw--and Strether
rested on one of the high sides of the old stony groove of the little
rampart.  He leaned back on this support with his face to the tower of
the cathedral, now admirably commanded by their station, the high
red-brown mass, square and subordinately spired and crocketed,
retouched and restored, but charming to his long-sealed eyes and with
the first swallows of the year weaving their flight all round it.  Miss
Gostrey lingered near him, full of an air, to which she more and more
justified her right, of understanding the effect of things.  She quite
concurred.  "You've indeed somebody." And she added:  "I wish you WOULD
let me show you how!"

"Oh I'm afraid of you!" he cheerfully pleaded.

She kept on him a moment, through her glasses and through his own, a
certain pleasant pointedness.  "Ah no, you're not! You're not in the
least, thank goodness!  If you had been we shouldn't so soon have found
ourselves here together.  I think," she comfortably concluded, "you
trust me."

"I think I do!--but that's exactly what I'm afraid of.  I shouldn't
mind if I didn't.  It's falling thus in twenty minutes so utterly into
your hands.  I dare say," Strether continued, "it's a sort of thing
you're thoroughly familiar with; but nothing more extraordinary has
ever happened to me."

She watched him with all her kindness.  "That means simply that you've
recognised me--which IS rather beautiful and rare.  You see what I am."
As on this, however, he protested, with a good-humoured headshake, a
resignation of any such claim, she had a moment of explanation.  "If
you'll only come on further as you HAVE come you'll at any rate make
out.  My own fate has been too many for me, and I've succumbed to it.
I'm a general guide--to 'Europe,' don't you know?  I wait for people--I
put them through.  I pick them up--I set them down.  I'm a sort of
superior 'courier-maid.' I'm a companion at large.  I take people, as
I've told you, about.  I never sought it--it has come to me.  It has
been my fate, and one's fate one accepts.  It's a dreadful thing to
have to say, in so wicked a world, but I verily believe that, such as
you see me, there's nothing I don't know.  I know all the shops and the
prices--but I know worse things still.  I bear on my back the huge load
of our national consciousness, or, in other words--for it comes to
that--of our nation itself.  Of what is our nation composed but of the
men and women individually on my shoulders?  I don't do it, you know,
for any particular advantage.  I don't do it, for instance--some people
do, you know--for money."

Strether could only listen and wonder and weigh his chance.  "And yet,
affected as you are then to so many of your clients, you can scarcely
be said to do it for love."  He waited a moment.  "How do we reward
you?"

She had her own hesitation, but "You don't!" she finally returned,
setting him again in motion.  They went on, but in a few minutes,
though while still thinking over what she had said, he once more took
out his watch; mechanically, unconsciously and as if made nervous by
the mere exhilaration of what struck him as her strange and cynical
wit.  He looked at the hour without seeing it, and then, on something
again said by his companion, had another pause. "You're really in
terror of him."

He smiled a smile that he almost felt to be sickly.  "Now you can see
why I'm afraid of you."

"Because I've such illuminations?  Why they're all for your help! It's
what I told you," she added, "just now.  You feel as if this were
wrong."

He fell back once more, settling himself against the parapet as if to
hear more about it.  "Then get me out!"

Her face fairly brightened for the joy of the appeal, but, as if it
were a question of immediate action, she visibly considered.  "Out of
waiting for him?--of seeing him at all?"

"Oh no--not that," said poor Strether, looking grave.  "I've got to
wait for him--and I want very much to see him.  But out of the terror.
You did put your finger on it a few minutes ago.  It's general, but it
avails itself of particular occasions.  That's what it's doing for me
now.  I'm always considering something else; something else, I mean,
than the thing of the moment.  The obsession of the other thing is the
terror.  I'm considering at present for instance something else than
YOU."

She listened with charming earnestness.  "Oh you oughtn't to do that!"

"It's what I admit.  Make it then impossible."

She continued to think.  "Is it really an 'order' from you?--that I
shall take the job?  WILL you give yourself up?"

Poor Strether heaved his sigh.  "If I only could! But that's the deuce
of it--that I never can.  No--I can't."

She wasn't, however, discouraged.  "But you want to at least?"

"Oh unspeakably!"

"Ah then, if you'll try!"--and she took over the job, as she had called
it, on the spot.  "Trust me!" she exclaimed, and the action of this, as
they retraced their steps, was presently to make him pass his hand into
her arm in the manner of a benign dependent paternal old person who
wishes to be "nice" to a younger one.  If he drew it out again indeed
as they approached the inn this may have been because, after more talk
had passed between them, the relation of age, or at least of
experience--which, for that matter, had already played to and fro with
some freedom--affected him as incurring a readjustment.  It was at all
events perhaps lucky that they arrived in sufficiently separate fashion
within range of the hotel-door.  The young lady they had left in the
glass cage watched as if she had come to await them on the threshold.
At her side stood a person equally interested, by his attitude, in
their return, and the effect of the sight of whom was instantly to
determine for Strether another of those responsive arrests that we have
had so repeatedly to note.  He left it to Miss Gostrey to name, with
the fine full bravado as it almost struck him, of her "Mr. Waymarsh!"
what was to have been, what--he more than ever felt as his short stare
of suspended welcome took things in--would have been, but for herself,
his doom.  It was already upon him even at that distance--Mr. Waymarsh
was for HIS part joyless.

Lambert Strether, an American widower of fifty-five, arrives at his hotel in Chester, England, where he is to meet his old friend, Waymarsh. Strether, a "lean . . . slightly loose figure of a man" with glasses, full but graying hair, and a thick, dark moustache "of characteristically American cut," is somewhat relieved at finding his friend has not yet arrived: "there was little fear that . . . they shouldn't see enough of each other." Inquiring at the desk about Waymarsh, he is overheard by a woman who strikes up a conversation with him, saying that she is acquainted with Waymarsh. They talk, "having accepted each other with an absence of preliminaries," and she quickly puts Strether at ease. As they stroll in the garden of the hotel, Strether feels himself launched in something "quite disconnected from the sense of his past." The woman's name is Maria Gostrey; she is thirty-five, her features "not freshly young, not markedly fine, but on happy terms with each other." She appears, however, "marked and wan" like Strether himself. Maria, an American living in Paris, describes herself as a "companion at large" for traveling Americans, something she does not for money but because "it has come to me. It has been my fate." As they continue their walk into the streets of the old city, Maria catches Strether looking at his watch and tells him, "You're doing something that you think not right. . . . You're not enjoying it." Strether confesses that he can never enjoy the present without preoccupation: "I'm always considering something else; something else, I mean, than the thing of the moment." Maria offers to take him in hand, to serve as his guide and confidante. Strether indicates his willingness, and they walk back to the hotel arm in arm. As they approach the hotel, Strether and Maria see that in the doorway, awaiting their return, is Waymarsh.

Strether's relief on finding Waymarsh not yet at the hotel tells us something of their opposite natures, Notice that Waymarsh is also characterized as "dyspeptic" and "joyless." Maria and Strether's conversation about "the failure to enjoy" introduces one of the major themes of the novel; it will be developed considerably as the narrative progresses. Strether's great sense of "personal freedom" on his arrival in Europe, for example, will be intensified during the course of his experiences in the "Old World." Notice that even at this early point, Strether's values have begun to change. Maria laughs at the thought of the woman in the hotel office who has seen them "thus scrape acquaintance," but Strether is a shade alarmed at this idea. Aware of what Woollett's view of the matter would be, he decides that if their casual introduction and planned excursion are "wrong . . . he had better not have come out at all." And so he goes off to see the town with her. James' style is often troublesome to the reader approaching his works for the first time. An awareness of some of his techniques and the way they function in his style is helpful. One such technique is the use of point of view, by which James tells the story through the angle of vision of one of his characters; this enables the reader to identify closely with the character yet know only as much as he happens to know at any given time: The Ambassadors is essentially the record of Strether's inner life, his thoughts and responses, and his changing attitudes. Another technique involves James' character descriptions: Characters very often reveal themselves by the way in which they describe other characters. Notice particularly in this chapter how this operates in relation to Strether. Finally, James' sentence structure may at first seem unnecessarily complex, but careful reading will reveal its precision; the last paragraph of this chapter contains several good examples. The first chapter lays the foundation for later meetings between Strether and Maria  in London and Paris, in which Strether discusses his problems and analyzes the complications of his situation. Strether's full name is Lewis Lambert Strether, which, as Maria notes, is "the name of a novel of Balzac's." Honore de Balzac's Louis Lambert  is about a mystical thinker who falls in love with a Mademoiselle de Villenois but, just before his marriage to her, suffers a sudden fit and subsequently loses touch with reality. As you read further, keep in mind the similarities of name and circumstance. Chester is located about fifteen miles from Liverpool, the main seaport in central England.


He had none the less to confess to this friend that evening that he
knew almost nothing about her, and it was a deficiency that Waymarsh,
even with his memory refreshed by contact, by her own prompt and lucid
allusions and enquiries, by their having publicly partaken of dinner in
her company, and by another stroll, to which she was not a stranger,
out into the town to look at the cathedral by moonlight--it was a blank
that the resident of Milrose, though admitting acquaintance with the
Munsters, professed himself unable to fill.  He had no recollection of
Miss Gostrey, and two or three questions that she put to him about
those members of his circle had, to Strether's observation, the same
effect he himself had already more directly felt--the effect of
appearing to place all knowledge, for the time, on this original
woman's side.  It interested him indeed to mark the limits of any such
relation for her with his friend as there could possibly be a question
of, and it particularly struck him that they were to be marked
altogether in Waymarsh's quarter.  This added to his own sense of
having gone far with her-gave him an early illustration of a much
shorter course.  There was a certitude he immediately grasped--a
conviction that Waymarsh would quite fail, as it were, and on whatever
degree of acquaintances to profit by her.

There had been after the first interchange among the three a talk of
some five minutes in the hall, and then the two men had adjourned to
the garden, Miss Gostrey for the time disappearing. Strether in due
course accompanied his friend to the room he had bespoken and had,
before going out, scrupulously visited; where at the end of another
half-hour he had no less discreetly left him. On leaving him he
repaired straight to his own room, but with the prompt effect of
feeling the compass of that chamber resented by his condition.  There
he enjoyed at once the first consequence of their reunion.  A place was
too small for him after it that had seemed large enough before.  He had
awaited it with something he would have been sorry, have been almost
ashamed not to recognise as emotion, yet with a tacit assumption at the
same time that emotion would in the event find itself relieved.  The
actual oddity was that he was only more excited; and his excitement-to
which indeed he would have found it difficult instantly to give a
name--brought him once more downstairs and caused him for some minutes
vaguely to wander.  He went once more to the garden; he looked into the
public room, found Miss Gostrey writing letters and backed out; he
roamed, fidgeted and wasted time; but he was to have his more intimate
session with his friend before the evening closed.

It was late--not till Strether had spent an hour upstairs with
him--that this subject consented to betake himself to doubtful rest.
Dinner and the subsequent stroll by moonlight--a dream, on Strether's
part, of romantic effects rather prosaically merged in a mere missing
of thicker coats--had measurably intervened, and this midnight
conference was the result of Waymarsh's having (when they were free, as
he put it, of their fashionable friend) found the smoking-room not
quite what he wanted, and yet bed what he wanted less.  His most
frequent form of words was that he knew himself, and they were applied
on this occasion to his certainty of not sleeping.  He knew himself
well enough to know that he should have a night of prowling unless he
should succeed, as a preliminary, in getting prodigiously tired.  If
the effort directed to this end involved till a late hour the presence
of Strether--consisted, that is, in the detention of the latter for
full discourse--there was yet an impression of minor discipline
involved for our friend in the picture Waymarsh made as he sat in
trousers and shirt on the edge of his couch.  With his long legs
extended and his large back much bent, he nursed alternately, for an
almost incredible time, his elbows and his beard.  He struck his
visitor as extremely, as almost wilfully uncomfortable; yet what had
this been for Strether, from that first glimpse of him disconcerted in
the porch of the hotel, but the predominant notes.  The discomfort was
in a manner contagious, as well as also in a manner inconsequent and
unfounded; the visitor felt that unless he should get used to it--or
unless Waymarsh himself should--it would constitute a menace for his
own prepared, his own already confirmed, consciousness of the
agreeable.  On their first going up together to the room Strether had
selected for him Waymarsh had looked it over in silence and with a sigh
that represented for his companion, if not the habit of disapprobation,
at least the despair of felicity; and this look had recurred to
Strether as the key of much he had since observed. "Europe," he had
begun to gather from these things, had up to now rather failed of its
message to him; he hadn't got into tune with it and had at the end of
three months almost renounced any such expectation.

He really appeared at present to insist on that by just perching there
with the gas in his eyes.  This of itself somehow conveyed the futility
of single rectifications in a multiform failure.  He had a large
handsome head and a large sallow seamed face--a striking significant
physiognomic total, the upper range of which, the great political brow,
the thick loose hair, the dark fuliginous eyes, recalled even to a
generation whose standard had dreadfully deviated the impressive image,
familiar by engravings and busts, of some great national worthy of the
earlier part of the mid-century. He was of the personal type--and it
was an element in the power and promise that in their early time
Strether had found in him--of the American statesman, the statesman
trained in "Congressional halls," of an elder day.  The legend had been
in later years that as the lower part of his face, which was weak, and
slightly crooked, spoiled the likeness, this was the real reason for
the growth of his beard, which might have seemed to spoil it for those
not in the secret.  He shook his mane; he fixed, with his admirable
eyes, his auditor or his observer; he wore no glasses and had a way,
partly formidable, yet also partly encouraging, as from a
representative to a constituent, of looking very hard at those who
approached him. He met you as if you had knocked and he had bidden you
enter. Strether, who hadn't seen him for so long an interval,
apprehended him now with a freshness of taste, and had perhaps never
done him such ideal justice.  The head was bigger, the eyes finer, than
they need have been for the career; but that only meant, after all,
that the career was itself expressive.  What it expressed at midnight
in the gas-glaring bedroom at Chester was that the subject of it had,
at the end of years, barely escaped, by flight in time, a general
nervous collapse.  But this very proof of the full life, as the full
life was understood at Milrose, would have made to Strether's
imagination an element in which Waymarsh could have floated easily had
he only consented to float.  Alas nothing so little resembled floating
as the rigour with which, on the edge of his bed, he hugged his posture
of prolonged impermanence.  It suggested to his comrade something that
always, when kept up, worried him--a person established in a
railway-coach with a forward inclination.  It represented the angle at
which poor Waymarsh was to sit through the ordeal of Europe.

Thanks to the stress of occupation, the strain of professions, the
absorption and embarrassment of each, they had not, at home, during
years before this sudden brief and almost bewildering reign of
comparative ease, found so much as a day for a meeting; a fact that was
in some degree an explanation of the sharpness with which most of his
friend's features stood out to Strether.  Those he had lost sight of
since the early time came back to him; others that it was never
possible to forget struck him now as sitting, clustered and expectant,
like a somewhat defiant family-group, on the doorstep of their
residence.  The room was narrow for its length, and the occupant of the
bed thrust so far a pair of slippered feet that the visitor had almost
to step over them in his recurrent rebounds from his chair to fidget
back and forth.  There were marks the friends made on things to talk
about, and on things not to, and one of the latter in particular fell
like the tap of chalk on the blackboard. Married at thirty, Waymarsh
had not lived with his wife for fifteen years, and it came up vividly
between them in the glare of the gas that Strether wasn't to ask about
her.  He knew they were still separate and that she lived at hotels,
travelled in Europe, painted her face and wrote her husband abusive
letters, of not one of which, to a certainty, that sufferer spared
himself the perusal; but he respected without difficulty the cold
twilight that had settled on this side of his companion's life.  It was
a province in which mystery reigned and as to which Waymarsh had never
spoken the informing word.  Strether, who wanted to do him the highest
justice wherever he COULD do it, singularly admired him for the dignity
of this reserve, and even counted it as one of the grounds--grounds all
handled and numbered--for ranking him, in the range of their
acquaintance, as a success.  He WAS a success, Waymarsh, in spite of
overwork, or prostration, of sensible shrinkage, of his wife's letters
and of his not liking Europe.  Strether would have reckoned his own
career less futile had he been able to put into it anything so handsome
as so much fine silence.  One might one's self easily have left Mrs.
Waymarsh; and one would assuredly have paid one's tribute to the ideal
in covering with that attitude the derision of having been left by her.
Her husband had held his tongue and had made a large income; and these
were in especial the achievements as to which Strether envied him.  Our
friend had had indeed on his side too a subject for silence, which he
fully appreciated; but it was a matter of a different sort, and the
figure of the income he had arrived at had never been high enough to
look any one in the face.

"I don't know as I quite see what you require it for.  You don't appear
sick to speak of."  It was of Europe Waymarsh thus finally spoke.

"Well," said Strether, who fell as much as possible into step, "I guess
I don't FEEL sick now that I've started.  But I had pretty well run
down before I did start."

Waymarsh raised his melancholy look.  "Ain't you about up to your usual
average?"

It was not quite pointedly sceptical, but it seemed somehow a plea for
the purest veracity, and it thereby affected our friend as the very
voice of Milrose.  He had long since made a mental distinction--though
never in truth daring to betray it--between the voice of Milrose and
the voice even of Woollett.  It was the former he felt, that was most
in the real tradition.  There had been occasions in his past when the
sound of it had reduced him to temporary confusion, and the present,
for some reason, suddenly became such another.  It was nevertheless no
light matter that the very effect of his confusion should be to make
him again prevaricate.  "That description hardly does justice to a man
to whom it has done such a lot of good to see YOU."

Waymarsh fixed on his washing-stand the silent detached stare with
which Milrose in person, as it were, might have marked the
unexpectedness of a compliment from Woollett, and Strether for his
part, felt once more like Woollett in person.  "I mean," his friend
presently continued, "that your appearance isn't as bad as I've seen
it:  it compares favourably with what it was when I last noticed it."
On this appearance Waymarsh's eyes yet failed to rest; it was almost as
if they obeyed an instinct of propriety, and the effect was still
stronger when, always considering the basin and jug, he added:  "You've
filled out some since then."

"I'm afraid I have," Strether laughed:  "one does fill out some with
all one takes in, and I've taken in, I dare say, more than I've natural
room for.  I was dog-tired when I sailed."  It had the oddest sound of
cheerfulness.

"I was dog-tired," his companion returned, "when I arrived, and it's
this wild hunt for rest that takes all the life out of me.  The fact
is, Strether--and it's a comfort to have you here at last to say it to;
though I don't know, after all, that I've really waited; I've told it
to people I've met in the cars--the fact is, such a country as this
ain't my KIND of country anyway.  There ain't a country I've seen over
here that DOES seem my kind.  Oh I don't say but what there are plenty
of pretty places and remarkable old things; but the trouble is that I
don't seem to feel anywhere in tune.  That's one of the reasons why I
suppose I've gained so little.  I haven't had the first sign of that
lift I was led to expect."  With this he broke out more earnestly.
"Look here--I want to go back."

His eyes were all attached to Strether's now, for he was one of the men
who fully face you when they talk of themselves.  This enabled his
friend to look at him hard and immediately to appear to the highest
advantage in his eyes by doing so.  "That's a genial thing to say to a
fellow who has come out on purpose to meet you!"

Nothing could have been finer, on this, than Waymarsh's sombre glow.
"HAVE you come out on purpose?"

"Well--very largely."

"I thought from the way you wrote there was something back of it."

Strether hesitated.  "Back of my desire to be with you?"

"Back of your prostration."

Strether, with a smile made more dim by a certain consciousness, shook
his head.  "There are all the causes of it!"

"And no particular cause that seemed most to drive you?"

Our friend could at last conscientiously answer.  "Yes.  One.  There IS
a matter that has had much to do with my coming out."

Waymarsh waited a little.  "Too private to mention?"

"No, not too private--for YOU.  Only rather complicated."

"Well," said Waymarsh, who had waited again, "I MAY lose my mind over
here, but I don't know as I've done so yet."

"Oh you shall have the whole thing.  But not tonight."

Waymarsh seemed to sit stiffer and to hold his elbows tighter.  "Why
not--if I can't sleep?"

"Because, my dear man, I CAN!"

"Then where's your prostration?"

"Just in that--that I can put in eight hours."  And Strether brought it
out that if Waymarsh didn't "gain" it was because he didn't go to bed:
the result of which was, in its order, that, to do the latter justice,
he permitted his friend to insist on his really getting settled.
Strether, with a kind coercive hand for it, assisted him to this
consummation, and again found his own part in their relation
auspiciously enlarged by the smaller touches of lowering the lamp and
seeing to a sufficiency of blanket.  It somehow ministered for him to
indulgence to feel Waymarsh, who looked unnaturally big and black in
bed, as much tucked in as a patient in a hospital and, with his
covering up to his chin, as much simplified by it He hovered in vague
pity, to be brief, while his companion challenged him out of the
bedclothes.  "Is she really after you?  Is that what's behind?"

Strether felt an uneasiness at the direction taken by his companion's
insight, but he played a little at uncertainty.  "Behind my coming out?"

"Behind your prostration or whatever.  It's generally felt, you know,
that she follows you up pretty close."

Strether's candour was never very far off.  "Oh it has occurred to you
that I'm literally running away from Mrs. Newsome?"

"Well, I haven't KNOWN but what you are.  You're a very attractive man,
Strether.  You've seen for yourself," said Waymarsh "what that lady
downstairs makes of it.  Unless indeed," he rambled on with an effect
between the ironic and the anxious, "it's you who are after HER.  IS
Mrs. Newsome OVER here?"  He spoke as with a droll dread of her.

It made his friend--though rather dimly--smile.  "Dear no she's safe,
thank goodness--as I think I more and more feel--at home.  She thought
of coming, but she gave it up.  I've come in a manner instead of her;
and come to that extent--for you're right in your inference--on her
business.  So you see there IS plenty of connexion."

Waymarsh continued to see at least all there was.  "Involving
accordingly the particular one I've referred to?"

Strether took another turn about the room, giving a twitch to his
companion's blanket and finally gaining the door.  His feeling was that
of a nurse who had earned personal rest by having made everything
straight.  "Involving more things than I can think of breaking ground
on now.  But don't be afraid--you shall have them from me:  you'll
probably find yourself having quite as much of them as you can do with.
I shall--if we keep together--very much depend on your impression of
some of them."

Waymarsh's acknowledgement of this tribute was characteristically
indirect.  "You mean to say you don't believe we WILL keep together?"

"I only glance at the danger," Strether paternally said, "because when
I hear you wail to go back I seem to see you open up such possibilities
of folly."

Waymarsh took it--silent a little--like a large snubbed child "What are
you going to do with me?"

It was the very question Strether himself had put to Miss Gostrey, and
he wondered if he had sounded like that.  But HE at least could be more
definite.  "I'm going to take you right down to London."

"Oh I've been down to London!" Waymarsh more softly moaned.  "I've no
use, Strether, for anything down there."

"Well," said Strether, good-humouredly, "I guess you've some use for
me."

"So I've got to go?"

"Oh you've got to go further yet."

"Well," Waymarsh sighed, "do your damnedest! Only you WILL tell me
before you lead me on all the way--?"

Our friend had again so lost himself, both for amusement and for
contrition, in the wonder of whether he had made, in his own challenge
that afternoon, such another figure, that he for an instant missed the
thread.  "Tell you--?"

"Why what you've got on hand."

Strether hesitated.  "Why it's such a matter as that even if I
positively wanted I shouldn't be able to keep it from you."

Waymarsh gloomily gazed.  "What does that mean then but that your trip
is just FOR her?"

"For Mrs. Newsome?  Oh it certainly is, as I say.  Very much."

"Then why do you also say it's for me?"

Strether, in impatience, violently played with his latch.  "It's simple
enough.  It's for both of you."

Waymarsh at last turned over with a groan.  "Well, I won't marry you!"

"Neither, when it comes to that--!" But the visitor had already laughed
and escaped.

Strether, Maria, and Waymarsh dine together that evening, and Strether decides "that Waymarsh would quite fail . . . on whatever degree of acquaintance, to profit by her." After the trio takes a stroll through the moonlight, the two men go to their rooms, but Strether is restless and wanders about the grounds until a late hour. Waymarsh cannot sleep either, and the two meet at midnight to speak at length. Waymarsh is of striking appearance with a "large handsome head and a large sallow seamed face," thick loose hair, and dark sooty eyes. He is bearded. The overall impression is that of "some great national worthy of the earlier part of the mid-century." Despite this, however, Waymarsh appears melancholic and depressed; he has been in Europe for three months for his health, to escape a "general nervous collapse." Waymarsh is disappointed in his travels, and he complains to Strether that, despite the "pretty places and remarkable old things," he does not feel "in tune" with Europe: He wants to "go back." They speak next of Strether's reasons for coming to Europe, and Strether hints that he has come on behalf of Mrs. Newsome-"on her business" -- but will say no more about it, promising that he will explain everything later. Waymarsh reluctantly agrees to accompany Strether to London.

Notice that Waymarsh is presented to the reader largely as Strether sees him, through Strether's "angle of vision" or point of view. Waymarsh and Maria will take opposing views of Strether's actions later in the narrative; the basis for this opposition is being developed in the early chapters, particularly through the attitudes of Waymarsh and Maria in connection with the European experience. Strether jokingly asks Waymarsh if it has occurred to him that he, Strether, might be running away from Mrs. Newsome; ironically, as the reader will later see, Strether is in fact trying to escape the values that Mrs. Newsome and Woollett stand for. Though Mrs. Newsome never appears in the novel, she is an important motivating factor in the story because of what she is as a character and what she represents.


He had told Miss Gostrey he should probably take, for departure with
Waymarsh, some afternoon train, and it thereupon in the morning
appeared that this lady had made her own plan for an earlier one.  She
had breakfasted when Strether came into the coffee-room; but, Waymarsh
not having yet emerged, he was in time to recall her to the terms of
their understanding and to pronounce her discretion overdone.  She was
surely not to break away at the very moment she had created a want.  He
had met her as she rose from her little table in a window, where, with
the morning papers beside her, she reminded him, as he let her know, of
Major Pendennis breakfasting at his club--a compliment of which she
professed a deep appreciation; and he detained her as pleadingly as if
he had already--and notably under pressure of the visions of the
night--learned to be unable to do without her.  She must teach him at
all events, before she went, to order breakfast as breakfast was
ordered in Europe, and she must especially sustain him in the problem
of ordering for Waymarsh.  The latter had laid upon his friend, by
desperate sounds through the door of his room, dreadful divined
responsibilities in respect to beefsteak and oranges--responsibilities
which Miss Gostrey took over with an alertness of action that matched
her quick intelligence.  She had before this weaned the expatriated
from traditions compared with which the matutinal beefsteak was but the
creature of an hour, and it was not for her, with some of her memories,
to falter in the path though she freely enough declared, on reflexion,
that there was always in such cases a choice of opposed policies.
"There are times when to give them their head, you know--!"

They had gone to wait together in the garden for the dressing of the
meal, and Strether found her more suggestive than ever "Well, what?"

"Is to bring about for them such a complexity of relations-unless
indeed we call it a simplicity!--that the situation HAS to wind itself
up.  They want to go back."

"And you want them to go!" Strether gaily concluded.

"I always want them to go, and I send them as fast as I can.'

"Oh I know--you take them to Liverpool."

"Any port will serve in a storm.  I'm--with all my other functions--an
agent for repatriation.  I want to re-people our stricken country. What
will become of it else?  I want to discourage others."

The ordered English garden, in the freshness of the day,  was
delightful to Strether, who liked the sound, under his feet, of the
tight fine gravel, packed with the chronic damp, and who had the idlest
eye for the deep smoothness of turf and the clean curves of paths.
"Other people?"

"Other countries.  Other people--yes.  I want to encourage our own."

Strether wondered.  "Not to come?  Why then do you 'meet'  them--since
it doesn't appear to be to stop them?"

"Oh that they shouldn't come is as yet too much to ask.  What I attend
to is that they come quickly and return still more so.  I meet them to
help it to be over as soon as possible,  and though I don't stop them
I've my way of putting them through.  That's my little system; and, if
you want to know,"  said Maria Gostrey, "it's my real secret, my
innermost mission and use.  I only seem, you see, to beguile and
approve; but I've thought it all out and I'm working all the while
underground.  I can't perhaps quite give you my formula, but I think
that practically I succeed.  I send you back spent.  So you stay back.
Passed through my hands--"

"We don't turn up again?"  The further she went the further he always
saw himself able to follow.  "I don't want your formula--I feel quite
enough, as I hinted yesterday, your abysses.  Spent!" he echoed.  "If
that's how you're arranging so subtly to send me I thank you for the
warning."

For a minute, amid the pleasantness--poetry in tariffed items, but all
the more, for guests already convicted, a challenge to consumption--they
smiled at each other in confirmed fellowship.  "Do you call it subtly?
It's a plain poor tale.  Besides, you're a special case."

"Oh special cases--that's weak!" She was weak enough, further still, to
defer her journey and agree to accompany the gentlemen on their own,
might a separate carriage mark her independence; though it was in spite
of this to befall after luncheon that she went off alone and that, with
a tryst taken for a day of her company in London, they lingered another
night.  She had, during the morning--spent in a way that he was to
remember later on as the very climax of his foretaste, as warm with
presentiments, with what he would have called collapses--had all sorts
of things out with Strether; and among them the fact that though there
was never a moment of her life when she wasn't "due" somewhere, there
was yet scarce a perfidy to others of which she wasn't capable for his
sake.  She explained moreover that wherever she happened to be she
found a dropped thread to pick up, a ragged edge to repair, some
familiar appetite in ambush, jumping out as she approached, yet
appeasable with a temporary biscuit.  It became, on her taking the risk
of the deviation imposed on him by her insidious arrangement of his
morning meal, a point of honour for her not to fail with Waymarsh of
the larger success too; and her subsequent boast to Strether was that
she had made their friend fare--and quite without his knowing what was
the matter--as Major Pendennis would have fared at the Megatherium. She
had made him breakfast like a gentleman, and it was nothing, she
forcibly asserted, to what she would yet make him do.  She made him
participate in the slow reiterated ramble with which, for Strether, the
new day amply filled itself; and it was by her art that he somehow had
the air, on the ramparts and in the Rows, of carrying a point of his
own.

The three strolled and stared and gossiped, or at least the two did;
the case really yielding for their comrade, if analysed, but the
element of stricken silence.  This element indeed affected Strether as
charged with audible rumblings, but he was conscious of the care of
taking it explicitly as a sign of pleasant peace.  He wouldn't appeal
too much, for that provoked stiffness; yet he wouldn't be too freely
tacit, for that suggested giving up. Waymarsh himself adhered to an
ambiguous dumbness that might have represented either the growth of a
perception or the despair of one; and at times and in places--where the
low-browed galleries were darkest, the opposite gables queerest, the
solicitations of every kind densest--the others caught him fixing hard
some object of minor interest, fixing even at moments nothing
discernible, as if he were indulging it with a truce.  When he met
Strether's eye on such occasions he looked guilty and furtive, fell the
next minute into some attitude of retractation.  Our friend couldn't
show him the right things for fear of provoking some total
renouncement, and was tempted even to show him the wrong in order to
make him differ with triumph.  There were moments when he himself felt
shy of professing the full sweetness of the taste of leisure, and there
were others when he found himself feeling as if his passages of
interchange with the lady at his side might fall upon the third member
of their party very much as Mr. Burchell, at Dr. Primrose's fireside,
was influenced by the high flights of the visitors from London.  The
smallest things so arrested and amused him that he repeatedly almost
apologised--brought up afresh in explanation his plea of a previous
grind.  He was aware at the same time that his grind had been as
nothing to Waymarsh's, and he repeatedly confessed that, to cover his
frivolity, he was doing his best for his previous virtue.  Do what he
might, in any case, his previous virtue was still there, and it seemed
fairly to stare at him out of the windows of shops that were not as the
shops of Woollett, fairly to make him want things that he shouldn't
know what to do with.  It was by the oddest, the least admissible of
laws demoralising him now; and the way it boldly took was to make him
want more wants. These first walks in Europe were in fact a kind of
finely lurid intimation of what one might find at the end of that
process.  Had he come back after long years, in something already so
like the evening of life, only to be exposed to it?  It was at all
events over the shop-windows that he made, with Waymarsh, most free;
though it would have been easier had not the latter most sensibly
yielded to the appeal of the merely useful trades.  He pierced with his
sombre detachment the plate-glass of ironmongers and saddlers, while
Strether flaunted an affinity with the dealers in stamped letter-paper
and in smart neckties.  Strether was in fact recurrently shameless in
the presence of the tailors, though it was just over the heads of the
tailors that his countryman most loftily looked.  This gave Miss
Gostrey a grasped opportunity to back up Waymarsh at his expense.  The
weary lawyer--it was unmistakeable--had a conception of dress; but
that, in view of some of the features of the effect produced, was just
what made the danger of insistence on it.  Strether wondered if he by
this time thought Miss Gostrey less fashionable or Lambert Strether
more so; and it appeared probable that most of the remarks exchanged
between this latter pair about passers, figures, faces, personal types,
exemplified in their degree the disposition to talk as "society" talked.

Was what was happening to himself then, was what already HAD happened,
really that a woman of fashion was floating him into society and that
an old friend deserted on the brink was watching the force of the
current?  When the woman of fashion permitted Strether--as she
permitted him at the most--the purchase of a pair of gloves, the terms
she made about it, the prohibition of neckties and other items till she
should be able to guide him through the Burlington Arcade, were such as
to fall upon a sensitive ear as a challenge to just imputations.  Miss
Gostrey was such a woman of fashion as could make without a symptom of
vulgar blinking an appointment for the Burlington Arcade.  Mere
discriminations about a pair of gloves could thus at any rate
represent--always for such sensitive ears as were in
question--possibilities of something that Strether could make a mark
against only as the peril of apparent wantonness.  He had quite the
consciousness of his new friend, for their companion, that he might
have had of a Jesuit in petticoats, a representative of the recruiting
interests of the Catholic Church.  The Catholic Church, for
Waymarsh-that was to say the enemy, the monster of bulging eyes and
far-reaching quivering groping tentacles--was exactly society, exactly
the multiplication of shibboleths, exactly the discrimination of types
and tones, exactly the wicked old Rows of Chester, rank with feudalism;
exactly in short Europe.

There was light for observation, however, in an incident that occurred
just before they turned back to luncheon.  Waymarsh had been for a
quarter of an hour exceptionally mute and distant, and something, or
other--Strether was never to make out exactly what--proved, as it were,
too much for him after his comrades had stood for three minutes taking
in, while they leaned on an old balustrade that guarded the edge of the
Row, a particularly crooked and huddled street-view.  "He thinks us
sophisticated, he thinks us worldly, he thinks us wicked, he thinks us
all sorts of queer things," Strether reflected; for wondrous were the
vague quantities our friend had within a couple of short days acquired
the habit of conveniently and conclusively lumping together. There
seemed moreover a direct connexion between some such inference and a
sudden grim dash taken by Waymarsh to the opposite side.  This movement
was startlingly sudden, and his companions at first supposed him to
have espied, to be pursuing, the glimpse of an acquaintance. They next
made out, however, that an open door had instantly received him, and
they then recognised him as engulfed in the establishment of a
jeweller, behind whose glittering front he was lost to view.  The fact
had somehow the note of a demonstration, and it left each of the others
to show a face almost of fear.  But Miss Gostrey broke into a laugh.
"What's the matter with him?"

"Well," said Strether, "he can't stand it."

"But can't stand what?"

"Anything.  Europe."

"Then how will that jeweller help him?"

Strether seemed to make it out, from their position, between the
interstices of arrayed watches, of close-hung dangling gewgaws. "You'll
see."

"Ah that's just what--if he buys anything--I'm afraid of:  that I shall
see something rather dreadful."

Strether studied the finer appearances.  "He may buy everything."

"Then don't you think we ought to follow him?"

"Not for worlds.  Besides we can't.  We're paralysed.  We exchange a
long scared look, we publicly tremble.  The thing is, you see, we
'realise.' He has struck for freedom."

She wondered but she laughed.  "Ah what a price to pay! And I was
preparing some for him so cheap."

"No, no," Strether went on, frankly amused now; "don't call it that:
the kind of freedom you deal in is dear."  Then as to justify himself:
"Am I not in MY way trying it?  It's this."

"Being here, you mean, with me?"

"Yes, and talking to you as I do.  I've known you a few hours, and I've
known HIM all my life; so that if the ease I thus take with you about
him isn't magnificent"--and the thought of it held him a moment--"why
it's rather base."

"It's magnificent!" said Miss Gostrey to make an end of it.  "And you
should hear," she added, "the ease I take--and I above all intend to
take--with Mr. Waymarsh."

Strether thought.  "About ME?  Ah that's no equivalent. The equivalent
would be Waymarsh's himself serving me up--his remorseless analysis of
me.  And he'll never do that"--he was sadly clear.  "He'll never
remorselessly analyse me." He quite held her with the authority of
this.  "He'll never say a word to you about me."

She took it in; she did it justice; yet after an instant her reason,
her restless irony, disposed of it.  "Of course he won't. For what do
you take people, that they're able to say words about anything, able
remorselessly to analyse?  There are not many like you and me.  It will
be only because he's too stupid."

It stirred in her friend a sceptical echo which was at the same time
the protest of the faith of years.  "Waymarsh stupid?"

"Compared with you."

Strether had still his eyes on the jeweller's front, and he waited a
moment to answer.  "He's a success of a kind that I haven't approached."

"Do you mean he has made money?"

"He makes it--to my belief.  And I," said Strether, "though with a back
quite as bent, have never made anything.  I'm a perfectly equipped
failure."

He feared an instant she'd ask him if he meant he was poor; and he was
glad she didn't, for he really didn't know to what the truth on this
unpleasant point mightn't have prompted her.  She only, however,
confirmed his assertion.  "Thank goodness you're a failure--it's why I
so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous.  Look about
you--look at the successes.  Would you BE one, on your honour?  Look,
moreover," she continued, "at me."

For a little accordingly their eyes met.  "I see," Strether returned.
"You too are out of it."

"The superiority you discern in me," she concurred, "announces my
futility.  If you knew," she sighed, "the dreams of my youth! But our
realities are what has brought us together.  We're beaten brothers in
arms."

He smiled at her kindly enough, but he shook his head.  "It doesn't
alter the fact that you're expensive.  You've cost me already--!"

But he had hung fire.  "Cost you what?"

"Well, my past--in one great lump.  But no matter," he laughed: "I'll
pay with my last penny."

Her attention had unfortunately now been engaged by their comrade's
return, for Waymarsh met their view as he came out of his shop.  "I
hope he hasn't paid," she said, "with HIS last; though I'm convinced he
has been splendid, and has been so for you."

"Ah no--not that!"

"Then for me?"

"Quite as little."  Waymarsh was by this time near enough to show signs
his friend could read, though he seemed to look almost carefully at
nothing in particular.

"Then for himself?"

"For nobody.  For nothing.  For freedom."

"But what has freedom to do with it?"

Strether's answer was indirect.  "To be as good as you and me.  But
different."

She had had time to take in their companion's face; and with it, as
such things were easy for her, she took in all.  "Different--yes. But
better!"

If Waymarsh was sombre he was also indeed almost sublime.  He told them
nothing, left his absence unexplained, and though they were convinced
he had made some extraordinary purchase they were never to learn its
nature.  He only glowered grandly at the tops of the old gables.  "It's
the sacred rage," Strether had had further time to say; and this sacred
rage was to become between them, for convenient comprehension, the
description of one of his periodical necessities.  It was Strether who
eventually contended that it did make him better than they.  But by
that time Miss Gostrey was convinced that she didn't want to be better
than Strether.

Book Second

Strether and Waymarsh have arranged to take an afternoon train to London, but Strether learns that Maria intends to leave earlier. They meet in the coffee-room of the hotel and then remove to the garden, where Maria tells Strether more about herself. She says that she thinks of herself as "an agent of repatriation" for American travelers to Europe: "What I attend to is that they come quickly and return still more so. . . . I send you back spent. So you stay back." When Strether smilingly protests, she confesses that he is, however, a "special case." Maria agrees to delay her journey in order to accompany Strether and Waymarsh to London. The three then begin a stroll through the streets of the town, pausing now and then to window-shop. Strether is in good spirits, but Waymarsh maintains a "stricken silence" and appears to Strether to look "guilty and furtive." Strether reflects that "a woman of fashion floating him into society and that an old friend deserted on the brink was watching the force of the current." Just before the trio turns back to the hotel, Waymarsh, suddenly and without a word, dashes across the street and disappears into a jewelry shop. Startled, Strether begins to comment on Waymarsh's odd behavior, and this leads to a brief conversation in which Strether refers to Waymarsh's financial success and, in turn, describes himself as "a perfectly equipped failure." "If you knew," Maria sighs, "the dreams of my youth! . . . We're beaten brothers in arms." As Waymarsh returns from the shop, Strether remarks to Maria that she has already cost him his "past -- in one great lump." Waymarsh rejoins them, making no offer to explain his absence or reveal what he has purchased, and the three continue their walk.

This chapter ends the first "book" of the novel; Book I has served to introduce Lambert Strether, who the reader now knows is in some way an "ambassador" for Mrs. Newsome; Maria Gostrey, a "guide" who will initiate Strether into an appreciation of Europe; and Waymarsh, a counterpoint to both Strether and Maria.