, experience was what Chad did play on him, if he didn't play any
grossness of defiance. Of course experience was in a manner defiance;
but it wasn't, at any rate--rather indeed quite the
contrary!--grossness; which was so much gained. He fairly grew older,
Strether thought, while he himself so reasoned. Then with his mature
pat of his visitor's arm he also got up; and there had been enough of
it all by this time to make the visitor feel that something WAS
settled. Wasn't it settled that he had at least the testimony of
Chad's own belief in a settlement? Strether found himself treating
Chad's profession that they would get on as a sufficient basis for
going to bed. He hadn't nevertheless after this gone to bed directly;
for when they had again passed out together into the mild bright night
a check had virtually sprung from nothing more than a small
circumstance which might have acted only as confirming quiescence.
There were people, expressive sound, projected light, still abroad, and
after they had taken in for a moment, through everything, the great
clear architectural street, they turned off in tacit union to the
quarter of Strether's hotel. "Of course," Chad here abruptly began,
"of course Mother's making things out with you about me has been
natural--and of course also you've had a good deal to go upon. Still,
you must have filled out."

He had stopped, leaving his friend to wonder a little what point he
wished to make; and this it was that enabled Strether meanwhile to make
one. "Oh we've never pretended to go into detail. We weren't in the
least bound to THAT. It was 'filling out' enough to miss you as we
did."

But Chad rather oddly insisted, though under the high lamp at their
corner, where they paused, he had at first looked as if touched by
Strether's allusion to the long sense, at home, of his absence. "What
I mean is you must have imagined."

"Imagined what?"

"Well--horrors."

It affected Strether: horrors were so little--superficially at
least--in this robust and reasoning image. But he was none the less
there to be veracious. "Yes, I dare say we HAVE imagined horrors. But
where's the harm if we haven't been wrong?"

Chad raised his face to the lamp, and it was one of the moments at
which he had, in his extraordinary way, most his air of designedly
showing himself. It was as if at these instants he just presented
himself, his identity so rounded off, his palpable presence and his