at 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