ent 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 thi