"Because then I shall like her?" He almost looked, with his quick imagination as if he already did, though seeing at once also the full extent of how little it would suit his book.
"But is that what I came out for?"
She had to confess indeed that it wasn't.
But there was something else.
"Don't make up your mind.
There are all sorts of things.
You haven't seen him all."
This on his side Strether recognised; but his acuteness none the less showed him the danger.
"Yes, but if the more I see the better he seems?"
Well, she found something.
"That may be—but his disavowal of her isn't, all the same, pure consideration.
There's a hitch."
She made it out. "It's the effort to sink her."
Strether winced at the image. "To 'sink'—?"
"Well, I mean there's a struggle, and a part of it is just what he hides.
Take time—that's the only way not to make some mistake that you'll regret. Then you'll see.
He does really want to shake her off."
Our friend had by this time so got into the vision that he almost gasped.
"After all she has done for him?"
Miss Gostrey gave him a look which broke the next moment into a wonderful smile.
"He's not so good as you think!"
They remained with him, these words, promising him, in their character of warning, considerable help; but the support he tried to draw from them found itself on each renewal of contact with Chad defeated by something else.
What could it be, this disconcerting force, he asked himself, but the sense, constantly renewed, that Chad WAS—quite in fact insisted on being—as good as he thought?
It seemed somehow as if he couldn't BUT be as good from the moment he wasn't as bad.
There was a succession of days at all events when contact with him—and in its immediate effect, as if it could produce no other—elbowed out of Strether's consciousness everything but itself.
Little Bilham once more pervaded the scene, but little Bilham became even in a higher degree than he had originally been one of the numerous forms of the inclusive relation; a consequence promoted, to our friend's sense, by two or three incidents with which we have yet to make acquaintance.
Waymarsh himself, for the occasion, was drawn into the eddy; it absolutely, though but temporarily, swallowed him down, and there were days when Strether seemed to bump against him as a sinking swimmer might brush a submarine object.
The fathomless medium held them—Chad's manner was the fathomless medium; and our friend felt as if they passed each other, in their deep immersion, with the round impersonal eye of silent fish.
It was practically produced between them that Waymarsh was giving him then his chance; and the shade of discomfort that Strether drew from the allowance resembled not a little the embarrassment he had known at school, as a boy, when members of his family had been present at exhibitions.
He could perform before strangers, but relatives were fatal, and it was now as if, comparatively, Waymarsh were a relative.
He seemed to hear him say
"Strike up then!" and to enjoy a foretaste of conscientious domestic criticism.
He HAD struck up, so far as he actually could; Chad knew by this time in profusion what he wanted; and what vulgar violence did his fellow pilgrim expect of him when he had really emptied his mind?
It went somehow to and fro that what poor Waymarsh meant was
"I told you so—that you'd lose your immortal soul!" but it was also fairly explicit that Strether had his own challenge and that, since they must go to the bottom of things, he wasted no more virtue in watching Chad than Chad wasted in watching him.
His dip for duty's sake—where was it worse than Waymarsh's own?
For HE needn't have stopped resisting and refusing, needn't have parleyed, at that rate, with the foe.
The strolls over Paris to see something or call somewhere were accordingly inevitable and natural, and the late sessions in the wondrous troisieme, the lovely home, when men dropped in and the picture composed more suggestively through the haze of tobacco, of music more or less good and of talk more or less polyglot, were on a principle not to be distinguished from that of the mornings and the afternoons.
Nothing, Strether had to recognise as he leaned back and smoked, could well less resemble a scene of violence than even the liveliest of these occasions.
They were occasions of discussion, none the less, and Strether had never in his life heard so many opinions on so many subjects.
There were opinions at Woollett, but only on three or four.
The differences were there to match; if they were doubtless deep, though few, they were quiet—they were, as might be said, almost as shy as if people had been ashamed of them.
People showed little diffidence about such things, on the other hand, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, and were so far from being ashamed of them—or indeed of anything else—that they often seemed to have invented them to avert those agreements that destroy the taste of talk.
No one had ever done that at Woollett, though Strether could remember times when he himself had been tempted to it without quite knowing why.
He saw why at present—he had but wanted to promote intercourse.
These, however, were but parenthetic memories, and the turn taken by his affair on the whole was positively that if his nerves were on the stretch it was because he missed violence.
When he asked himself if none would then, in connexion with it, ever come at all, he might almost have passed as wondering how to provoke it.
It would be too absurd if such a vision as THAT should have to be invoked for relief; it was already marked enough as absurd that he should actually have begun with flutters and dignities on the score of a single accepted meal.
What sort of a brute had he expected Chad to be, anyway?—Strether had occasion to make the enquiry but was careful to make it in private.
He could himself, comparatively recent as it was—it was truly but the fact of a few days since—focus his primal crudity; but he would on the approach of an observer, as if handling an illicit possession, have slipped the reminiscence out of sight.