that in the absence of a
further need of anything by Monsieur he would betake himself to bed.
The night was hot and heavy and the single lamp sufficient; the great
flare of the lighted city, rising high, spending itself afar, played up
from the Boulevard and, through the vague vista of the successive
rooms, brought objects into view and added to their dignity. Strether
found himself in possession as he never yet had been; he had been there
alone, had turned over books and prints, had invoked, in Chad's
absence, the spirit of the place, but never at the witching hour and
never with a relish quite so like a pang.

He spent a long time on the balcony; he hung over it as he had seen
little Bilham hang the day of his first approach, as he had seen Mamie
hang over her own the day little Bilham himself might have seen her
from below; he passed back into the rooms, the three that occupied the
front and that communicated by wide doors; and, while he circulated and
rested, tried to recover the impression that they had made on him three
months before, to catch again the voice in which they had seemed then
to speak to him. That voice, he had to note, failed audibly to sound;
which he took as the proof of all the change in himself. He had heard,
of old, only what he COULD then hear; what he could do now was to think
of three months ago as a point in the far past. All voices had grown
thicker and meant more things; they crowded on him as he moved
about--it was the way they sounded together that wouldn't let him be
still. He felt, strangely, as sad as if he had come for some wrong,
and yet as excited as if he had come for some freedom. But the freedom
was what was most in the place and the hour, it was the freedom that
most brought him round again to the youth of his own that he had long
ago missed. He could have explained little enough to-day either why he
had missed it or why, after years and years, he should care that he
had; the main truth of the actual appeal of everything was none the
less that everything represented the substance of his loss put it
within reach, within touch, made it, to a degree it had never been, an
affair of the senses. That was what it became for him at this singular
time, the youth he had long ago missed--a queer concrete presence, full
of mystery, yet full of reality, which he could handle, taste, smell,
the deep breathing of which he could positively hear. It was in the
outside air as well as wit