eath on each
landing--the lift, at that hour, having ceased to work--before the
implications of the fact. He had been for a week intensely away, away
to a distance and alone; but he was more back than ever, and the
attitude in which Strether had surprised him was something more than a
return--it was clearly a conscious surrender. He had arrived but an
hour before, from London, from Lucerne, from Homburg, from no matter
where--though the visitor's fancy, on the staircase, liked to fill it
out; and after a bath, a talk with Baptiste and a supper of light cold
clever French things, which one could see the remains of there in the
circle of the lamp, pretty and ultra-Parisian, he had come into the air
again for a smoke, was occupied at the moment of Strether's approach in
what might have been called taking up his life afresh. His life, his
life!--Strether paused anew, on the last flight, at this final rather
breathless sense of what Chad's life was doing with Chad's mother's
emissary. It was dragging him, at strange hours, up the staircases of
the rich; it was keeping him out of bed at the end of long hot days; it
was transforming beyond recognition the simple, subtle, conveniently
uniform thing that had anciently passed with him for a life of his own.
Why should it concern him that Chad was to be fortified in the pleasant
practice of smoking on balconies, of supping on salads, of feeling his
special conditions agreeably reaffirm themselves, of finding
reassurance in comparisons and contrasts? There was no answer to such
a question but that he was still practically committed--he had perhaps
never yet so much known it. It made him feel old, and he would buy his
railway-ticket--feeling, no doubt, older--the next day; but he had
meanwhile come up four flights, counting the entresol, at midnight and
without a lift, for Chad's life. The young man, hearing him by this
time, and with Baptiste sent to rest, was already at the door; so that
Strether had before him in full visibility the cause in which he was
labouring and even, with the troisieme fairly gained, panting a little.

Chad offered him, as always, a welcome in which the cordial and the
formal--so far as the formal was the respectful--handsomely met; and
after he had expressed a hope that he would let him put him up for the
night Strether was in full possession of the key, as it might have been
called, to what had lately happened. If he had just thought of himself
as