n particular could let her
know he left it to her. He habitually left things to others, as
Strether was so well aware, and it in fact came over our friend in
these meditations that there had been as yet no such vivid illustration
of his famous knowing how to live. It was as if he had humoured her to
the extent of letting her lie without correction--almost as if, really,
he would be coming round in the morning to set the matter, as between
Strether and himself, right. Of course he couldn't quite come; it was
a case in which a man was obliged to accept the woman's version, even
when fantastic; if she had, with more flurry than she cared to show,
elected, as the phrase was, to represent that they had left Paris that
morning, and with no design but of getting back within the day--if she
had so sized-up, in the Woollett phrase, their necessity, she knew best
her own measure. There were things, all the same, it was impossible to
blink and which made this measure an odd one--the too evident fact for
instance that she hadn't started out for the day dressed and hatted and
shod, and even, for that matter, pink parasol'd, as she had been in the
boat. From what did the drop in her assurance proceed as the tension
increased--from what did this slightly baffled ingenuity spring but
from her consciousness of not presenting, as night closed in, with not
so much as a shawl to wrap her round, an appearance that matched her
story? She admitted that she was cold, but only to blame her
imprudence which Chad suffered her to give such account of as she
might. Her shawl and Chad's overcoat and her other garments, and his,
those they had each worn the day before, were at the place, best known
to themselves--a quiet retreat enough, no doubt--at which they had been
spending the twenty-four hours, to which they had fully meant to return
that evening, from which they had so remarkably swum into Strether's
ken, and the tacit repudiation of which had been thus the essence of
her comedy. Strether saw how she had perceived in a flash that they
couldn't quite look to going back there under his nose; though,
honestly, as he gouged deeper into the matter, he was somewhat
surprised, as Chad likewise had perhaps been, at the uprising of this
scruple. He seemed even to divine that she had entertained it rather
for Chad than for herself, and that, as the young man had lacked the
chance to enlighten her, she had had to go on with it, he meanwhile
mistakin