ay, be without the
memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or
too intelligent to have it, and now I'm a case of reaction against the
mistake. Do what you like so long as you don't make it. For it WAS a
mistake. Live, live!" Such is the gist of Strether's appeal to the
impressed youth, whom he likes and whom he desires to befriend; the
word "mistake" occurs several times, it will be seen, in the course of
his remarks--which gives the measure of the signal warning he feels
attached to his case. He has accordingly missed too much, though
perhaps after all constitutionally qualified for a better part, and he
wakes up to it in conditions that press the spring of a terrible
question. WOULD there yet perhaps be time for reparation?--reparation,
that is, for the injury done his character; for the affront, he is
quite ready to say, so stupidly put upon it and in which he has even
himself had so clumsy a hand? The answer to which is that he now at
all events SEES; so that the business of my tale and the march of my
action, not to say the precious moral of everything, is just my
demonstration of this process of vision.

Nothing can exceed the closeness with which the whole fits again into
its germ. That had been given me bodily, as usual, by the spoken word,
for I was to take the image over exactly as I happened to have met it.
A friend had repeated to me, with great appreciation, a thing or two
said to him by a man of distinction, much his senior, and to which a
sense akin to that of Strether's melancholy eloquence might be
imputed--said as chance would have, and so easily might, in Paris, and
in a charming old garden attached to a house of art, and on a Sunday
afternoon of summer, many persons of great interest being present. The
observation there listened to and gathered up had contained part of the
"note" that I was to recognise on the spot as to my purpose--had
contained in fact the greater part; the rest was in the place and the
time and the scene they sketched: these constituents clustered and
combined to give me further support, to give me what I may call the
note absolute. There it stands, accordingly, full in the tideway;
driven in, with hard taps, like some strong stake for the noose of a
cable, the swirl of the current roundabout it. What amplified the hint
to more than the bulk of hints in general was the gift with it of the
old Paris garden, for in that token were sealed up value