all good confidence. The curtain had just again arisen, and, in the
hush of the general attention, Strether's challenge was tacit, as was
also the greeting, with a quickly deprecating hand and smile, of the
unannounced visitor. He discreetly signed that he would wait, would
stand, and these things and his face, one look from which she had
caught, had suddenly worked for Miss Gostrey. She fitted to them all
an answer for Strether's last question. The solid stranger was simply
the answer--as she now, turning to her friend, indicated. She brought
it straight out for him--it presented the intruder. "Why, through this
gentleman!" The gentleman indeed, at the same time, though sounding
for Strether a very short name, did practically as much to explain.
Strether gasped the name back--then only had he seen Miss Gostrey had
said more than she knew. They were in presence of Chad himself.

Our friend was to go over it afterwards again and again--he was going
over it much of the time that they were together, and they were
together constantly for three or four days: the note had been so
strongly struck during that first half-hour that everything happening
since was comparatively a minor development. The fact was that his
perception of the young man's identity--so absolutely checked for a
minute--had been quite one of the sensations that count in life; he
certainly had never known one that had acted, as he might have said,
with more of a crowded rush. And the rush though both vague and
multitudinous, had lasted a long time, protected, as it were, yet at
the same time aggravated, by the circumstance of its coinciding with a
stretch of decorous silence. They couldn't talk without disturbing the
spectators in the part of the balcony just below them; and it, for that
matter, came to Strether--being a thing of the sort that did come to
him--that these were the accidents of a high civilisation; the imposed
tribute to propriety, the frequent exposure to conditions, usually
brilliant, in which relief has to await its time. Relief was never
quite near at hand for kings, queens, comedians and other such people,
and though you might be yourself not exactly one of those, you could
yet, in leading the life of high pressure, guess a little how they
sometimes felt. It was truly the life of high pressure that Strether
had seemed to feel himself lead while he sat there, close to Chad,
during the long tension of the act. He was in presenc