m to avert
those agreements that destroy the taste of talk. No one had ever done
that at Woollett, though Strether could remember times when he himself
had been tempted to it without quite knowing why. He saw why at
present--he had but wanted to promote intercourse.

These, however, were but parenthetic memories, and the turn taken by
his affair on the whole was positively that if his nerves were on the
stretch it was because he missed violence. When he asked himself if
none would then, in connexion with it, ever come at all, he might
almost have passed as wondering how to provoke it. It would be too
absurd if such a vision as THAT should have to be invoked for relief;
it was already marked enough as absurd that he should actually have
begun with flutters and dignities on the score of a single accepted
meal. What sort of a brute had he expected Chad to be,
anyway?--Strether had occasion to make the enquiry but was careful to
make it in private. He could himself, comparatively recent as it
was--it was truly but the fact of a few days since--focus his primal
crudity; but he would on the approach of an observer, as if handling an
illicit possession, have slipped the reminiscence out of sight. There
were echoes of it still in Mrs. Newsome's letters, and there were
moments when these echoes made him exclaim on her want of tact. He
blushed of course, at once, still more for the explanation than for the
ground of it: it came to him in time to save his manners that she
couldn't at the best become tactful as quickly as he. Her tact had to
reckon with the Atlantic Ocean, the General Post-Office and the
extravagant curve of the globe. Chad had one day offered tea at the
Boulevard Malesherbes to a chosen few, a group again including the
unobscured Miss Barrace; and Strether had on coming out walked away
with the acquaintance whom in his letters to Mrs. Newsome he always
spoke of as the little artist-man. He had had full occasion to mention
him as the other party, so oddly, to the only close personal alliance
observation had as yet detected in Chad's existence. Little Bilham's
way this afternoon was not Strether's, but he had none the less kindly
come with him, and it was somehow a part of his kindness that as it had
sadly begun to rain they suddenly found themselves seated for
conversation at a cafe in which they had taken refuge. He had passed
no more crowded hour in Chad's society than the one just ended; he had
tal