第33章

This suggested the question of whether he could properly have taken him to such a play, and what effect--it was a point that suddenly rose--his peculiar responsibility might be held in general to have on his choice of entertainment.It had literally been present to him at the Gymnase--where one was held moreover comparatively safe--that having his young friend at his side would have been an odd feature of the work of redemption; and this quite in spite of the fact that the picture presented might well, confronted with Chad's own private stage, have seemed the pattern of propriety.He clearly hadn't come out in the name of propriety but to visit unattended equivocal performances; yet still less had he done so to undermine his authority by sharing them with the graceless youth.Was he to renounce all amusement for the sweet sake of that authority? and WOULD such renouncement give him for Chad a moral glamour? The little problem bristled the more by reason of poor Strether's fairly open sense of the irony of things.Were there then sides on which his predicament threatened to look rather droll to him? Should he have to pretend to believe--either to himself or the wretched boy--that there was anything that could make the latter worse? Wasn't some such pretence on the other hand involved in the assumption of possible processes that would make him better? His greatest uneasiness seemed to peep at him out of the imminent impression that almost any acceptance of Paris might give one's authority away.It hung before him this morning, the vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked.It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next.It was a place of which, unmistakeably, Chad was fond; wherefore if he, Strether, should like it too much, what on earth, with such a bond, would become of either of them? It all depended of course--which was a gleam of light--on how the "too much" was measured; though indeed our friend fairly felt, while he prolonged the meditation I describe, that for himself even already a certain measure had been reached.

It will have been sufficiently seen that he was not a man to neglect any good chance for reflexion.Was it at all possible for instance to like Paris enough without liking it too much? He luckily however hadn't promised Mrs.Newsome not to like it at all.He was ready to recognise at this stage that such an engagement WOULD have tied his hands.The Luxembourg Gardens were incontestably just so adorable at this hour by reason--in addition to their intrinsic charm--of his not having taken it.The only engagement he had taken, when he looked the thing in the face, was to do what he reasonably could.