the
little business with Mr. Bilham should be over he would still have
shining hours to use absolutely as he liked. There was no great pulse
of haste yet in this process of saving Chad; nor was that effect a bit
more marked as he sat, half an hour later, with his legs under Chad's
mahogany, with Mr. Bilham on one side, with a friend of Mr. Bilham's on
the other, with Waymarsh stupendously opposite, and with the great hum
of Paris coming up in softness, vagueness-for Strether himself indeed
already positive sweetness--through the sunny windows toward which, the
day before, his curiosity had raised its wings from below. The feeling
strongest with him at that moment had borne fruit almost faster than he
could taste it, and Strether literally felt at the present hour that
there was a precipitation in his fate. He had known nothing and nobody
as he stood in the street; but hadn't his view now taken a bound in the
direction of every one and of every thing?

"What's he up to, what's he up to?"--something like that was at the
back of his head all the while in respect to little Bilham; but
meanwhile, till he should make out, every one and every thing were as
good as represented for him by the combination of his host and the lady
on his left. The lady on his left, the lady thus promptly and
ingeniously invited to "meet" Mr. Strether and Mr. Waymarsh--it was the
way she herself expressed her case--was a very marked person, a person
who had much to do with our friend's asking himself if the occasion
weren't in its essence the most baited, the most gilded of traps.
Baited it could properly be called when the repast was of so wise a
savour, and gilded surrounding objects seemed inevitably to need to be
when Miss Barrace--which was the lady's name--looked at them with
convex Parisian eyes and through a glass with a remarkably long
tortoise-shell handle. Why Miss Barrace, mature meagre erect and
eminently gay, highly adorned, perfectly familiar, freely
contradictions and reminding him of some last-century portrait of a
clever head without powder--why Miss Barrace should have been in
particular the note of a "trap" Strether couldn't on the spot have
explained; he blinked in the light of a conviction that he should know
later on, and know well--as it came over him, for that matter, with
force, that he should need to. He wondered what he was to think
exactly of either of his new friends; since the young man, Chad's
intimate and dep