had inevitably, in his
circumspection, felt it as the trail of the serpent, the corruption, as
he might conveniently have said, of Europe; whereas the promptness with
which it came up for Miss Gostrey but as a special little form of the
oldest thing they knew justified it at once to his own vision as well.
He wanted to be able to like his specimen with a clear good conscience,
and this fully permitted it. What had muddled him was precisely the
small artist-man's way--it was so complete--of being more American than
anybody. But it now for the time put Strether vastly at his ease to
have this view of a new way.

The amiable youth then looked out, as it had first struck Strether, at
a world in respect to which he hadn't a prejudice. The one our friend
most instantly missed was the usual one in favour of an occupation
accepted. Little Bilham had an occupation, but it was only an
occupation declined; and it was by his general exemption from alarm,
anxiety or remorse on this score that the impression of his serenity
was made. He had come out to Paris to paint--to fathom, that is, at
large, that mystery; but study had been fatal to him so far as anything
COULD be fatal, and his productive power faltered in proportion as his
knowledge grew. Strether had gathered from him that at the moment of
his finding him in Chad's rooms he hadn't saved from his shipwreck a
scrap of anything but his beautiful intelligence and his confirmed
habit of Paris. He referred to these things with an equal fond
familiarity, and it was sufficiently clear that, as an outfit, they
still served him. They were charming to Strether through the hour
spent at the Louvre, where indeed they figured for him as an
unseparated part of the charged iridescent air, the glamour of the
name, the splendour of the space, the colour of the masters. Yet they
were present too wherever the young man led, and the day after the
visit to the Louvre they hung, in a different walk, about the steps of
our party. He had invited his companions to cross the river with him,
offering to show them his own poor place; and his own poor place, which
was very poor, gave to his idiosyncrasies, for Strether--the small
sublime indifference and independences that had struck the latter as
fresh--an odd and engaging dignity. He lived at the end of an alley
that went out of an old short cobbled street, a street that went in
turn out of a new long smooth avenue--street and avenue and alley