ccupied our friend in the watches of the
night we should have to mend our pen; but an instance or two may mark
for us the vividness with which he could remember. He remembered the
two absurdities that, if his presence of mind HAD failed, were the
things that had had most to do with it. He had never in his life seen
a young man come into a box at ten o'clock at night, and would, if
challenged on the question in advance, have scarce been ready to
pronounce as to different ways of doing so. But it was in spite of
this definite to him that Chad had had a way that was wonderful: a
fact carrying with it an implication that, as one might imagine it, he
knew, he had learned, how.

Here already then were abounding results; he had on the spot and
without the least trouble of intention taught Strether that even in so
small a thing as that there were different ways. He had done in the
same line still more than this; had by a mere shake or two of the head
made his old friend observe that the change in him was perhaps more
than anything else, for the eye, a matter of the marked streaks of
grey, extraordinary at his age, in his thick black hair; as well as
that this new feature was curiously becoming to him, did something for
him, as characterisation, also even--of all things in the world--as
refinement, that had been a good deal wanted. Strether felt, however,
he would have had to confess, that it wouldn't have been easy just now,
on this and other counts, in the presence of what had been supplied, to
be quite clear as to what had been missed. A reflexion a candid critic
might have made of old, for instance, was that it would have been
happier for the son to look more like the mother; but this was a
reflexion that at present would never occur. The ground had quite
fallen away from it, yet no resemblance whatever to the mother had
supervened. It would have been hard for a young man's face and air to
disconnect themselves more completely than Chad's at this juncture from
any discerned, from any imaginable aspect of a New England female
parent. That of course was no more than had been on the cards; but it
produced in Strether none the less one of those frequent phenomena of
mental reference with which all judgement in him was actually beset.

Again and again as the days passed he had had a sense of the pertinence
of communicating quickly with Woollett--communicating with a quickness
with which telegraphy alone would rhyme; th