posit his missive it
was perhaps because the pressure of the place had an effect.

There was none other, however, than the common and constant pressure,
familiar to our friend under the rubric of Postes et Telegraphes--the
something in the air of these establishments; the vibration of the vast
strange life of the town, the influence of the types, the performers
concocting their messages; the little prompt Paris women, arranging,
pretexting goodness knew what, driving the dreadful needle-pointed
public pen at the dreadful sand-strewn public table: implements that
symbolised for Strether's too interpretative innocence something more
acute in manners, more sinister in morals, more fierce in the national
life. After he had put in his paper he had ranged himself, he was
really amused to think, on the side of the fierce, the sinister, the
acute. He was carrying on a correspondence, across the great city,
quite in the key of the Postes et Telegraphes in general; and it was
fairly as if the acceptance of that fact had come from something in his
state that sorted with the occupation of his neighbours. He was mixed
up with the typical tale of Paris, and so were they, poor things--how
could they all together help being? They were no worse than he, in
short, and he no worse than they--if, queerly enough, no better; and at
all events he had settled his hash, so that he went out to begin, from
that moment, his day of waiting. The great settlement was, as he felt,
in his preference for seeing his correspondent in her own best
conditions. THAT was part of the typical tale, the part most
significant in respect to himself. He liked the place she lived in,
the picture that each time squared itself, large and high and clear,
around her: every occasion of seeing it was a pleasure of a different
shade. Yet what precisely was he doing with shades of pleasure now,
and why hadn't he properly and logically compelled her to commit
herself to whatever of disadvantage and penalty the situation might
throw up? He might have proposed, as for Sarah Pocock, the cold
hospitality of his own salon de lecture, in which the chill of Sarah's
visit seemed still to abide and shades of pleasure were dim; he might
have suggested a stone bench in the dusty Tuileries or a penny chair at
the back part of the Champs Elysees. These things would have been a
trifle stern, and sternness alone now wouldn't be sinister. An
instinct in him cast about for some fo