t to gain sharpness from the impressions of this evening:
that if she SHOULD gather in her skirts, close her eyes and quit the
carriage while in motion, he would promptly enough become aware. She
would alight from her headlong course more or less directly upon him;
it would be appointed to him, unquestionably, to receive her entire
weight. Signs and portents of the experience thus in reserve for him
had as it happened, multiplied even through the dazzle of Chad's party.
It was partly under the nervous consciousness of such a prospect that,
leaving almost every one in the two other rooms, leaving those of the
guests already known to him as well as a mass of brilliant strangers of
both sexes and of several varieties of speech, he had desired five
quiet minutes with little Bilham, whom he always found soothing and
even a little inspiring, and to whom he had actually moreover something
distinct and important to say.

He had felt of old--for it already seemed long ago--rather humiliated
at discovering he could learn in talk with a personage so much his
junior the lesson of a certain moral ease; but he had now got used to
that--whether or no the mixture of the fact with other humiliations had
made it indistinct, whether or no directly from little Bilham's
example, the example of his being contentedly just the obscure and
acute little Bilham he was. It worked so for him, Strether seemed to
see; and our friend had at private hours a wan smile over the fact that
he himself, after so many more years, was still in search of something
that would work. However, as we have said, it worked just now for them
equally to have found a corner a little apart. What particularly kept
it apart was the circumstance that the music in the salon was
admirable, with two or three such singers as it was a privilege to hear
in private. Their presence gave a distinction to Chad's entertainment,
and the interest of calculating their effect on Sarah was actually so
sharp as to be almost painful. Unmistakeably, in her single person,
the motive of the composition and dressed in a splendour of crimson
which affected Strether as the sound of a fall through a skylight, she
would now be in the forefront of the listening circle and committed by
it up to her eyes. Those eyes during the wonderful dinner itself he
hadn't once met; having confessedly--perhaps a little
pusillanimously--arranged with Chad that he should be on the same side
of the table. But t