es. Never
cutting these colloquies short by a minute, Chad behaved, looked and
spoke as if he were rather heavily, perhaps even a trifle gloomily, but
none the less fundamentally and comfortably free. He made no crude
profession of eagerness to yield, but he asked the most intelligent
questions, probed, at moments, abruptly, even deeper than his friend's
layer of information, justified by these touches the native estimate of
his latent stuff, and had in every way the air of trying to live,
reflectively, into the square bright picture. He walked up and down in
front of this production, sociably took Strether's arm at the points at
which he stopped, surveyed it repeatedly from the right and from the
left, inclined a critical head to either quarter, and, while he puffed
a still more critical cigarette, animadverted to his companion on this
passage and that. Strether sought relief--there were hours when he
required it--in repeating himself; it was in truth not to be blinked
that Chad had a way. The main question as yet was of what it was a way
TO. It made vulgar questions no more easy; but that was unimportant
when all questions save those of his own asking had dropped. That he
was free was answer enough, and it wasn't quite ridiculous that this
freedom should end by presenting itself as what was difficult to move.
His changed state, his lovely home, his beautiful things, his easy
talk, his very appetite for Strether, insatiable and, when all was
said, flattering--what were such marked matters all but the notes of
his freedom? He had the effect of making a sacrifice of it just in
these handsome forms to his visitor; which was mainly the reason the
visitor was privately, for the time, a little out of countenance.
Strether was at this period again and again thrown back on a felt need
to remodel somehow his plan. He fairly caught himself shooting rueful
glances, shy looks of pursuit, toward the embodied influence, the
definite adversary, who had by a stroke of her own failed him and on a
fond theory of whose palpable presence he had, under Mrs. Newsome's
inspiration, altogether proceeded. He had once or twice, in secret,
literally expressed the irritated wish that SHE would come out and find
her.

He couldn't quite yet force it upon Woollett that such a career, such a
perverted young life, showed after all a certain plausible side, DID in
the case before them flaunt something like an impunity for the social
man; but