pretended this, as she HAD pretended
on the other hand, to have divined Waymarsh's wish to extend to her an
independent protection homeward; but Strether nevertheless found how,
after he had Chad opposite to him at a small table in the brilliant
halls that his companion straightway selected, sharply and easily
discriminated from others, it was quite, to his mind, as if she heard
him speak; as if, sitting up, a mile away, in the little apartment he
knew, she would listen hard enough to catch. He found too that he
liked that idea, and he wished that, by the same token, Mrs. Newsome
might have caught as well. For what had above all been determined in
him as a necessity of the first order was not to lose another hour, nor
a fraction of one; was to advance, to overwhelm, with a rush. This was
how he would anticipate--by a night-attack, as might be--any forced
maturity that a crammed consciousness of Paris was likely to take upon
itself to assert on behalf of the boy. He knew to the full, on what he
had just extracted from Miss Gostrey, Chad's marks of alertness; but
they were a reason the more for not dawdling. If he was himself
moreover to be treated as young he wouldn't at all events be so treated
before he should have struck out at least once. His arms might be
pinioned afterwards, but it would have been left on record that he was
fifty. The importance of this he had indeed begun to feel before they
left the theatre; it had become a wild unrest, urging him to seize his
chance. He could scarcely wait for it as they went; he was on the
verge of the indecency of bringing up the question in the street; he
fairly caught himself going on--so he afterwards invidiously named
it--as if there would be for him no second chance should the present be
lost. Not till, on the purple divan before the perfunctory bock, he
had brought out the words themselves, was he sure, for that matter,
that the present would be saved.

Book Fourth

I

"I've come, you know, to make you break with everything, neither more
nor less, and take you straight home; so you'll be so good as
immediately and favourably to consider it!"--Strether, face to face
with Chad after the play, had sounded these words almost breathlessly,
and with an effect at first positively disconcerting to himself alone.
For Chad's receptive attitude was that of a person who had been
gracefully quiet while the messenger at last reaching him has run a
mile thr