est comfort--that it had been "given" him, as they said at
Woollett, to reply with some presence of mind: "I haven't the least
idea." He was really for a while to like thinking he had been
positively hard. On the point of conceding that Chad had improved in
appearance, but that to the question of appearance the remark must be
confined, he checked even that compromise and left his reservation
bare. Not only his moral, but also, as it were, his aesthetic sense
had a little to pay for this, Chad being unmistakeably--and wasn't it a
matter of the confounded grey hair again?--handsomer than he had ever
promised. That however fell in perfectly with what Strether had said.
They had no desire to keep down his proper expansion, and he wouldn't
be less to their purpose for not looking, as he had too often done of
old, only bold and wild. There was indeed a signal particular in which
he would distinctly be more so. Strether didn't, as he talked,
absolutely follow himself; he only knew he was clutching his thread and
that he held it from moment to moment a little tighter; his mere
uninterruptedness during the few minutes helped him to do that. He had
frequently for a month, turned over what he should say on this very
occasion, and he seemed at last to have said nothing he had thought
of--everything was so totally different.

But in spite of all he had put the flag at the window. This was what
he had done, and there was a minute during which he affected himself as
having shaken it hard, flapped it with a mighty flutter, straight in
front of his companion's nose. It gave him really almost the sense of
having already acted his part. The momentary relief--as if from the
knowledge that nothing of THAT at least could be undone--sprang from a
particular cause, the cause that had flashed into operation, in Miss
Gostrey's box, with direct apprehension, with amazed recognition, and
that had been concerned since then in every throb of his consciousness.
What it came to was that with an absolutely new quantity to deal with
one simply couldn't know. The new quantity was represented by the fact
that Chad had been made over. That was all; whatever it was it was
everything. Strether had never seen the thing so done before--it was
perhaps a speciality of Paris. If one had been present at the process
one might little by little have mastered the result; but he was face to
face, as matters stood, with the finished business. It had freely