"Ah I make nothing.
It's not my affair."
"I beg your pardon.
It's just there that, since you've taken it up and are committed to it, it most intensely becomes yours.
You're not saving me, I take it, for your interest in myself, but for your interest in our friend.
The one's at any rate wholly dependent on the other.
You can't in honour not see me through," she wound up, "because you can't in honour not see HIM."
Strange and beautiful to him was her quiet soft acuteness. The thing that most moved him was really that she was so deeply serious.
She had none of the portentous forms of it, but he had never come in contact, it struck him, with a force brought to so fine a head.
Mrs. Newsome, goodness knew, was serious; but it was nothing to this.
He took it all in, he saw it all together.
"No," he mused, "I can't in honour not see him."
Her face affected him as with an exquisite light.
"You WILL then?"
"I will."
At this she pushed back her chair and was the next moment on her feet.
"Thank you!" she said with her hand held out to him across the table and with no less a meaning in the words than her lips had so particularly given them after Chad's dinner.
The golden nail she had then driven in pierced a good inch deeper.
Yet he reflected that he himself had only meanwhile done what he had made up his mind to on the same occasion.
So far as the essence of the matter went he had simply stood fast on the spot on which he had then planted his feet.
II
He received three days after this a communication from America, in the form of a scrap of blue paper folded and gummed, not reaching him through his bankers, but delivered at his hotel by a small boy in uniform, who, under instructions from the concierge, approached him as he slowly paced the little court.
It was the evening hour, but daylight was long now and Paris more than ever penetrating.
The scent of flowers was in the streets, he had the whiff of violets perpetually in his nose; and he had attached himself to sounds and suggestions, vibrations of the air, human and dramatic, he imagined, as they were not in other places, that came out for him more and more as the mild afternoons deepened—a far-off hum, a sharp near click on the asphalt, a voice calling, replying, somewhere and as full of tone as an actor's in a play.
He was to dine at home, as usual, with Waymarsh—they had settled to that for thrift and simplicity; and he now hung about before his friend came down.
He read his telegram in the court, standing still a long time where he had opened it and giving five minutes afterwards to the renewed study of it.
At last, quickly, he crumpled it up as if to get it out of the way; in spite of which, however, he kept it there—still kept it when, at the end of another turn, he had dropped into a chair placed near a small table.
Here, with his scrap of paper compressed in his fist and further concealed by his folding his arms tight, he sat for some time in thought, gazed before him so straight that Waymarsh appeared and approached him without catching his eye.
The latter in fact, struck with his appearance, looked at him hard for a single instant and then, as if determined to that course by some special vividness in it, dropped back into the salon de lecture without addressing him.
But the pilgrim from Milrose permitted himself still to observe the scene from behind the clear glass plate of that retreat.
Strether ended, as he sat, by a fresh scrutiny of his compressed missive, which he smoothed out carefully again as he placed it on his table.
There it remained for some minutes, until, at last looking up, he saw Waymarsh watching him from within.
It was on this that their eyes met—met for a moment during which neither moved.
But Strether then got up, folding his telegram more carefully and putting it into his waistcoat pocket.
A few minutes later the friends were seated together at dinner; but Strether had meanwhile said nothing about it, and they eventually parted, after coffee in the court, with nothing said on either side.
Our friend had moreover the consciousness that even less than usual was on this occasion said between them, so that it was almost as if each had been waiting for something from the other.
Waymarsh had always more or less the air of sitting at the door of his tent, and silence, after so many weeks, had come to play its part in their concert.
This note indeed, to Strether's sense, had lately taken a fuller tone, and it was his fancy to-night that they had never quite so drawn it out.
Yet it befell, none the less that he closed the door to confidence when his companion finally asked him if there were anything particular the matter with him.
"Nothing," he replied, "more than usual."
On the morrow, however, at an early hour, he found occasion to give an answer more in consonance with the facts.
What was the matter had continued to be so all the previous evening, the first hours of which, after dinner, in his room, he had devoted to the copious composition of a letter.
He had quitted Waymarsh for this purpose, leaving him to his own resources with less ceremony than their wont, but finally coming down again with his letter unconcluded and going forth into the streets without enquiry for his comrade.
He had taken a long vague walk, and one o'clock had struck before his return and his re-ascent to his room by the aid of the glimmering candle-end left for him on the shelf outside the porter's lodge.
He had possessed himself, on closing his door, of the numerous loose sheets of his unfinished composition, and then, without reading them over, had torn them into small pieces.
He had thereupon slept—as if it had been in some measure thanks to that sacrifice—the sleep of the just, and had prolonged his rest considerably beyond his custom.
Thus it was that when, between nine and ten, the tap of the knob of a walking-stick sounded on his door, he had not yet made himself altogether presentable.
Chad Newsome's bright deep voice determined quickly enough none the less the admission of the visitor.
The little blue paper of the evening before, plainly an object the more precious for its escape from premature destruction, now lay on the sill of the open window, smoothed out afresh and kept from blowing away by the superincumbent weight of his watch.
Chad, looking about with careless and competent criticism, as he looked wherever he went immediately espied it and permitted himself to fix it for a moment rather hard.