tn'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

I

Strether told Waymarsh all about it that very evening, on their dining
together at the hotel; which needn't have happened, he was all the
while aware, hadn't he chosen to sacrifice to this occasion a rarer
opportunity. The mention to his companion of the sacrifice was
moreover exactly what introduced his recital--or, as he would have
called it with more confidence in his interlocutor, his confession. His
confession was that he had been captured and that one of the features
of the affair had just failed to be his engaging himself on the spot to
dinner. As by such a freedom Waymarsh would have lost him he had
obeyed his scruple; and he had likewise obeyed another scruple--which
bore on the question of his himself bringing a guest.

Waymarsh looked gravely ardent, over the finished soup, at this array
of scruples; Strether hadn't yet got quite used to being so unprepared
for the consequences of the impression he produced. It was
comparatively easy to explain, however, that he hadn't felt sure his
guest would please. The person was a young man whose acquaintance he
had made but that afternoon in the course of rather a hindered enquiry
for another person--an enquiry his new friend had just prevented in
fact from being vain. "Oh," said Strether, "I've all sorts of things
to tell you!"--and he put it in a way that was a virtual hint to
Waymarsh to help him to enjoy the telling. He waited for his fish, he
drank of his wine, he wiped his long moustache, he leaned back in his
chair, he took in the two English ladi