d, he
had put his foot in it. He had appeared stupidly to misrepresent what
they thought at Woollett; but before he had time to rectify Chad again
was upon him. "I must say then you show a low mind!"

It so fell in, unhappily for Strether, with that reflexion of his own
prompted in him by the pleasant air of the Boulevard Malesherbes, that
its disconcerting force was rather unfairly great. It was a dig that,
administered by himself--and administered even to poor Mrs.
Newsome--was no more than salutary; but administered by Chad--and quite
logically--it came nearer drawing blood. They HADn't a low mind--nor
any approach to one; yet incontestably they had worked, and with a
certain smugness, on a basis that might be turned against them. Chad
had at any rate pulled his visitor up; he had even pulled up his
admirable mother; he had absolutely, by a turn of the wrist and a jerk
of the far-flung noose, pulled up, in a bunch, Woollett browsing in its
pride. There was no doubt Woollett HAD insisted on his coarseness; and
what he at present stood there for in the sleeping street was, by his
manner of striking the other note, to make of such insistence a
preoccupation compromising to the insisters. It was exactly as if they
had imputed to him a vulgarity that he had by a mere gesture caused to
fall from him. The devil of the case was that Strether felt it, by the
same stroke, as falling straight upon himself. He had been wondering a
minute ago if the boy weren't a Pagan, and he found himself wondering
now if he weren't by chance a gentleman. It didn't in the least, on
the spot, spring up helpfully for him that a person couldn't at the
same time be both. There was nothing at this moment in the air to
challenge the combination; there was everything to give it on the
contrary something of a flourish. It struck Strether into the bargain
as doing something to meet the most difficult of the questions; though
perhaps indeed only by substituting another. Wouldn't it be precisely
by having learned to be a gentleman that he had mastered the consequent
trick of looking so well that one could scarce speak to him straight?
But what in the world was the clue to such a prime producing cause?
There were too many clues then that Strether still lacked, and these
clues to clues were among them. What it accordingly amounted to for him
was that he had to take full in the face a fresh attribution of
ignorance. He had grown used by this tim