hall like her?" He almost looked, with his quick imagination as if he
already did, though seeing at once also the full extent of how little
it would suit his book. "But is that what I came out for?"

She had to confess indeed that it wasn't. But there was something
else. "Don't make up your mind. There are all sorts of things. You
haven't seen him all."

This on his side Strether recognised; but his acuteness none the less
showed him the danger. "Yes, but if the more I see the better he
seems?"

Well, she found something. "That may be--but his disavowal of her
isn't, all the same, pure consideration. There's a hitch." She made
it out. "It's the effort to sink her."

Strether winced at the image. "To 'sink'--?"

"Well, I mean there's a struggle, and a part of it is just what he
hides. Take time--that's the only way not to make some mistake that
you'll regret. Then you'll see. He does really want to shake her off."

Our friend had by this time so got into the vision that he almost
gasped. "After all she has done for him?"

Miss Gostrey gave him a look which broke the next moment into a
wonderful smile. "He's not so good as you think!"

They remained with him, these words, promising him, in their character
of warning, considerable help; but the support he tried to draw from
them found itself on each renewal of contact with Chad defeated by
something else. What could it be, this disconcerting force, he asked
himself, but the sense, constantly renewed, that Chad WAS--quite in
fact insisted on being--as good as he thought? It seemed somehow as if
he couldn't BUT be as good from the moment he wasn't as bad. There was
a succession of days at all events when contact with him--and in its
immediate effect, as if it could produce no other--elbowed out of
Strether's consciousness everything but itself. Little Bilham once
more pervaded the scene, but little Bilham became even in a higher
degree than he had originally been one of the numerous forms of the
inclusive relation; a consequence promoted, to our friend's sense, by
two or three incidents with which we have yet to make acquaintance.
Waymarsh himself, for the occasion, was drawn into the eddy; it
absolutely, though but temporarily, swallowed him down, and there were
days when Strether seemed to bump against him as a sinking swimmer
might brush a submarine object. The fathomless medium held
them--Chad's manner was the fathomless medium; and our fri