e to reminders, especially
from his own lips, of what he didn't know; but he had borne them
because in the first place they were private and because in the second
they practically conveyed a tribute. He didn't know what was bad,
and--as others didn't know how little he knew it--he could put up with
his state. But if he didn't know, in so important a particular, what
was good, Chad at least was now aware he didn't; and that, for some
reason, affected our friend as curiously public. It was in fact an
exposed condition that the young man left him in long enough for him to
feel its chill--till he saw fit, in a word, generously again to cover
him. This last was in truth what Chad quite gracefully did. But he
did it as with a simple thought that met the whole of the case. "Oh
I'm all right!" It was what Strether had rather bewilderedly to go to
bed on.

II

It really looked true moreover from the way Chad was to behave after
this. He was full of attentions to his mother's ambassador; in spite
of which, all the while, the latter's other relations rather remarkably
contrived to assert themselves. Strether's sittings pen in hand with
Mrs. Newsome up in his own room were broken, yet they were richer; and
they were more than ever interspersed with the hours in which he
reported himself, in a different fashion, but with scarce less
earnestness and fulness, to Maria Gostrey. Now that, as he would have
expressed it, he had really something to talk about he found himself,
in respect to any oddity that might reside for him in the double
connexion, at once more aware and more indifferent. He had been fine
to Mrs. Newsome about his useful friend, but it had begun to haunt his
imagination that Chad, taking up again for her benefit a pen too long
disused, might possibly be finer. It wouldn't at all do, he saw, that
anything should come up for him at Chad's hand but what specifically
was to have come; the greatest divergence from which would be precisely
the element of any lubrication of their intercourse by levity It was
accordingly to forestall such an accident that he frankly put before
the young man the several facts, just as they had occurred, of his
funny alliance. He spoke of these facts, pleasantly and obligingly, as
"the whole story," and felt that he might qualify the alliance as funny
if he remained sufficiently grave about it. He flattered himself that
he even exaggerated the wild freedom of his original enc