ping her till to-morrow; so that by evening his irresponsibility,
his impunity, his luxury, had become--there was no other word for
them--immense.

Between nine and ten, at last, in the high clear picture--he was moving
in these days, as in a gallery, from clever canvas to clever canvas--he
drew a long breath: it was so presented to him from the first that the
spell of his luxury wouldn't be broken. He wouldn't have, that is, to
become responsible--this was admirably in the air: she had sent for him
precisely to let him feel it, so that he might go on with the comfort
(comfort already established, hadn't it been?) of regarding his ordeal,
the ordeal of the weeks of Sarah's stay and of their climax, as safely
traversed and left behind him. Didn't she just wish to assure him that
SHE now took it all and so kept it; that he was absolutely not to worry
any more, was only to rest on his laurels and continue generously to
help her? The light in her beautiful formal room was dim, though it
would do, as everything would always do; the hot night had kept out
lamps, but there was a pair of clusters of candles that glimmered over
the chimney-piece like the tall tapers of an altar. The windows were
all open, their redundant hangings swaying a little, and he heard once
more, from the empty court, the small plash of the fountain. From
beyond this, and as from a great distance--beyond the court, beyond the
corps de logis forming the front--came, as if excited and exciting, the
vague voice of Paris. Strether had all along been subject to sudden
gusts of fancy in connexion with such matters as these--odd starts of
the historic sense, suppositions and divinations with no warrant but
their intensity. Thus and so, on the eve of the great recorded dates,
the days and nights of revolution, the sounds had come in, the omens,
the beginnings broken out. They were the smell of revolution, the
smell of the public temper--or perhaps simply the smell of blood.

It was at present queer beyond words, "subtle," he would have risked
saying, that such suggestions should keep crossing the scene; but it
was doubtless the effect of the thunder in the air, which had hung
about all day without release. His hostess was dressed as for
thunderous times, and it fell in with the kind of imagination we have
just attributed to him that she should be in simplest coolest white, of
a character so old-fashioned, if he were not mistaken, that Madame
Roland must