Those occasions on which Strether was, in association with the exile
from Milrose, to see the sacred rage glimmer through would doubtless
have their due periodicity; but our friend had meanwhile to find names
for many other matters.  On no evening of his life perhaps, as he
reflected, had he had to supply so many as on the third of his short
stay in London; an evening spent by Miss Gostrey's side at one of the
theatres, to which he had found himself transported, without his own
hand raised, on the mere expression of a conscientious wonder.  She
knew her theatre, she knew her play, as she had triumphantly known,
three days running, everything else, and the moment filled to the brim,
for her companion, that apprehension of the interesting which, whether
or no the interesting happened to filter through his guide, strained
now to its limits his brief opportunity.  Waymarsh hadn't come with
them; he had seen plays enough, he signified, before Strether had
joined him--an affirmation that had its full force when his friend
ascertained by questions that he had seen two and a circus. Questions
as to what he had seen had on him indeed an effect only less favourable
than questions as to what he hadn't.  He liked the former to be
discriminated; but how could it be done, Strether asked of their
constant counsellor, without discriminating the latter?

Miss Gostrey had dined with him at his hotel, face to face over a small
table on which the lighted candles had rose-coloured shades; and the
rose-coloured shades and the small table and the soft fragrance of the
lady--had anything to his mere sense ever been so soft?--were so many
touches in he scarce knew what positive high picture.  He had been to
the theatre, even to the opera, in Boston, with Mrs. Newsome, more than
once acting as her only escort; but there had been no little confronted
dinner, no pink lights, no whiff of vague sweetness, as a preliminary:
one of the results of which was that at present, mildly rueful, though
with a sharpish accent, he actually asked himself WHY there hadn't.
There was much the same difference in his impression of the noticed
state of his companion, whose dress was "cut down," as he believed the
term to be, in respect to shoulders and bosom, in a manner quite other
than Mrs. Newsome's, and who wore round her throat a broad red velvet
band with an antique jewel--he was rather complacently sure it was
antique--attached to it in front.  Mrs. Newsome's dress was never in
any degree "cut down," and she never wore round her throat a broad red
velvet band:  if she had, moreover, would it ever have served so to
carry on and complicate, as he now almost felt, his vision?

It would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the effect
of the ribbon from which Miss Gostrey's trinket depended, had he not
for the hour, at the best, been so given over to uncontrolled
perceptions.  What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his
friend's velvet band somehow added, in her appearance, to the value of
every other item--to that of her smile and of the way she carried her
head, to that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her
hair?  What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man's work in the
world to do with red velvet bands? He wouldn't for anything have so
exposed himself as to tell Miss Gostrey how much he liked hers, yet he
HAD none the less not only caught himself in the act--frivolous, no
doubt, idiotic, and above all unexpected--of liking it:  he had in
addition taken it as a starting-point for fresh backward, fresh
forward, fresh lateral flights.  The manner in which Mrs. Newsome's
throat WAS encircled suddenly represented for him, in an alien order,
almost as many things as the manner in which Miss Gostrey's was.  Mrs.
Newsome wore, at operatic hours, a black silk dress--very handsome, he
knew it was "handsome"--and an ornament that his memory was able
further to identify as a ruche.  He had his association indeed with the
ruche, but it was rather imperfectly romantic.  He had once said to the
wearer--and it was as "free" a remark as he had ever made to her--that
she looked, with her ruff and other matters, like Queen Elizabeth; and
it had after this in truth been his fancy that, as a consequence of
that tenderness and an acceptance of the idea, the form of this special
tribute to the "frill" had grown slightly more marked.  The connexion,
as he sat there and let his imagination roam, was to strike him as
vaguely pathetic; but there it all was, and pathetic was doubtless in
the conditions the best thing it could possibly be.  It had assuredly
existed at any rate; for it seemed now to come over him that no
gentleman of his age at Woollett could ever, to a lady of Mrs.
Newsome's, which was not much less than his, have embarked on such a
simile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I see.  And HE--?"

"Chad, wretched boy?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Extraordinarily."

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

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

"Very handsome, you mean?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"About everything."

"But YOU admire her?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You mean she's an American invalid?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is there a business?"

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

"A great shop?"

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

"It's a place in itself?"

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

"And what IS the article produced?"

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

"It's a false note?"

"Sadly.  It's vulgar."

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

"Why for--comparatively--divine!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And what source was it?"

Strether cast about.  "Well--practices."

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

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

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

"Well, what about him?"

"Was he like the grandfather?"

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

Miss Gostrey kept it up.  "Better?"

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

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

"His shame?  What shame?"

"What shame?  Comment donc?  THE shame."

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

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

"Ah I can't speak for HER!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And you also?"

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

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

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

"Only everything else?"

"Well, yes--some things."

"As for instance--?"

Strether obligingly thought.  "Well, the Review."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Before you lose your chance."

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

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

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

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

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

"And how far DO you dare?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He laughed out.  "Beautifully!"

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

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

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

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

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

"I've sinned enough," said Strether.

"Enough for whom?  Enough for what?"

"Well, to be where I am."

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

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

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

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

"Of course I see you in it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Feel he CAN do it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then how do they distinguish YOU?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not for the world."

"Then I shall walk."

"In the rain?"

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

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

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

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

"Ah, dear lady!" he kindly breathed.

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

Strether, Maria, and Waymarsh spend three days in London. On the third evening, Strether and Maria have dinner before attending the theatre; Waymarsh has decided not to accompany them. At dinner, Strether compares Maria with Mrs. Newsome. Maria's dress is cut low around her shoulders and she wears a broad velvet band about her throat; he recalls Mrs. Newsome's rather austere attire in similar circumstances. Strether is also struck by the fact that, since the "grey middle desert" of his life when his wife and son died, he has never taken anyone to dinner before this evening. The characters in the play they attend make Strether think of Chad Newsome, the young man who is the object of his embassy from Woollett. Maria guesses that Strether has in fact come on a mission to rescue "a young man a wicked woman has got hold of" and asks, "Are you quite sure she's very bad for him?" Strether characterizes the woman, whom he has yet to meet, as without doubt "base, venal, out of the streets" and Chad as an "obstinate" boy. He also reveals that he has undertaken his mission on behalf of Mrs. Newsome, Chad's mother, whom he describes as "delicate, sensitive, high strung." Mrs. Newsome is wealthy, he explains, and wants Chad to return to Woollett to manage the family business, "a great production, a great industry" engaged in the manufacture of a common domestic article, the exact nature of which Strether never reveals. He does reveal, however, that Mrs. Newsome pays for the publication of the Review, a magazine which he edits and which, he confesses, provides his "one presentable little scrap of identity" from among the "wreck of hopes and ambitions . . . disappointments and failures." Returning to the subject of Strether's mission, Maria suggests that either of two quite distinct things may have happened to Chad as a result of his European involvements: "One is that he may have got brutalised. The other is that he may have got refined." Strether finds the latter possibility doubtful and contends that Chad needs to be "protected" from life. Maria correctly interprets this to mean that Chad is to be married off, and Strether admits that their intention is to marry Chad to Mamie Pocock . As they wait for a cab after the play, Maria asks Strether what he expects to gain from his mission, and he replies, "Nothing." "What do you stand to lose?" she asks, and in a burst of candor, Strether confesses, "Everything."

The comparisons Strether makes regarding Maria and Mrs. Newsome are revealing; for example, Strether at one point recalls that Mrs. Newsome, dressed for the opera in her black silk dress and lace, looked like Queen Elizabeth; he also observes that Maria looks like Mary Stuart.  Strether and Mrs. Newsome have never enjoyed a romantic, candle-lit dinner such as this one. Strether now asks himself why not. The "wicked woman" of Strether and Maria's conversation is Madame de Vionnet. The irony of Strether's attitude at this point will become evident when he later meets Madame de Vionnet. Strether's allusion to "the very secret of the prison-house" is drawn from the Ghost's speech in the first act of Hamlet and refers to the mysteries of the spirit world.


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

Strether, accompanied by Waymarsh, has been in Paris for two days when he calls on his banker to pick up any letters that have arrived for him. The bank reminds him of the post office at Woollett. He finds several letters, forwarded from London, but does not open them until he reaches a park alongside the River Seine. There are four letters, newsy and detailed, from Mrs. Newsome, the tone of which, Strether muses, fills the air with "the hum of vain things." Again, he feels a heightened "sense of escape" and ponders "the strange logic of his finding himself so free." This leads Strether to further reflections on his past: his failures at various endeavors; his little son , who had died at school of diphtheria; his previous trip to Paris -- -a reckless "pilgrimage" -- after the Civil War; and the rebirth of youthful aspirations and dreams which the present visit had occasioned in so short a time. Although conscious of his responsibility in regard to Chad, Strether sees Paris as a brilliant jewel, and "what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next." Continuing his walk through the streets, Strether enters the boulevard on which he knows Chad resides; the house strikes him as "admirably built," with a fine, continuous balcony. A young man appears on the balcony of Chad's apartment, becomes aware that he is being observed, and returns Strether's glance. It is not Chad, Strether realizes, but a friend of Chad's. Crossing the street, Strether passes through the gateway into the courtyard of the house.

The young man on the balcony is Little Bilham and is, as Strether has sensed, a close friend of Chad's. Strether's allusion to "Melancholy Murger" is to Henry Murger, the author of Scenes of Bohemian Life , in which the characters Francine, Musette, and Rodolphe appear. The Luxembourg Gardens is a park on the left bank of the Seine in the Latin Quarter; the Odeon is a French theatre near the Gardens.