第39章

"I can scarcely be called fierce, I think, when I so freely take my chance of the possibility, the danger, of being influenced in a sense counter to Mrs.Newsome's own feelings."Waymarsh gave this proposition a long hard look."I see.You're afraid yourself of being squared.But you're a humbug," he added, all the same.""Oh!" Strether quickly protested.

"Yes, you ask me for protection--which makes you very interesting;and then you won't take it.You say you want to be squashed--""Ah but not so easily! Don't you see," Strether demanded "where my interest, as already shown you, lies? It lies in my not being squared.If I'm squared where's my marriage? If I miss my errand Imiss that; and if I miss that I miss everything--I'm nowhere."Waymarsh--but all relentlessly--took this in."What do I care where you are if you're spoiled?"Their eyes met on it an instant."Thank you awfully," Strether at last said."But don't you think HER judgement of that--?""Ought to content me? No."

It kept them again face to face, and the end of this was that Strether again laughed."You do her injustice.You really MUST know her.Good-night."He breakfasted with Mr.Bilham on the morrow, and, as inconsequently befell, with Waymarsh massively of the party.The latter announced, at the eleventh hour and much to his friend's surprise, that, damn it, he would as soon join him as do anything else; on which they proceeded together, strolling in a state of detachment practically luxurious for them to the Boulevard Malesherbes, a couple engaged that day with the sharp spell of Paris as confessedly, it might have been seen, as any couple among the daily thousands so compromised.They walked, wandered, wondered and, a little, lost themselves; Strether hadn't had for years so rich a consciousness of time--a bag of gold into which he constantly dipped for a handful.It was present to him that when the little business with Mr.Bilham should be over he would still have shining hours to use absolutely as he liked.There was no great pulse of haste yet in this process of saving Chad; nor was that effect a bit more marked as he sat, half an hour later, with his legs under Chad's mahogany, with Mr.Bilham on one side, with a friend of Mr.Bilham's on the other, with Waymarsh stupendously opposite, and with the great hum of Paris coming up in softness, vagueness-for Strether himself indeed already positive sweetness--through the sunny windows toward which, the day before, his curiosity had raised its wings from below.The feeling strongest with him at that moment had borne fruit almost faster than he could taste it, and Strether literally felt at the present hour that there was a precipitation in his fate.He had known nothing and nobody as he stood in the street; but hadn't his view now taken a bound in the direction of every one and of every thing?

"What's he up to, what's he up to?"--something like that was at the back of his head all the while in respect to little Bilham;but meanwhile, till he should make out, every one and every thing were as good as represented for him by the combination of his host and the lady on his left.The lady on his left, the lady thus promptly and ingeniously invited to "meet" Mr.Strether and Mr.Waymarsh--it was the way she herself expressed her case--was a very marked person, a person who had much to do with our friend's asking himself if the occasion weren't in its essence the most baited, the most gilded of traps.Baited it could properly be called when the repast was of so wise a savour, and gilded surrounding objects seemed inevitably to need to be when Miss Barrace--which was the lady's name--looked at them with convex Parisian eyes and through a glass with a remarkably long tortoise-shell handle.Why Miss Barrace, mature meagre erect and eminently gay, highly adorned, perfectly familiar, freely contradictions and reminding him of some last-century portrait of a clever head without powder--why Miss Barrace should have been in particular the note of a "trap" Strether couldn't on the spot have explained; he blinked in the light of a conviction that he should know later on, and know well--as it came over him, for that matter, with force, that he should need to.He wondered what he was to think exactly of either of his new friends; since the young man, Chad's intimate and deputy, had, in thus constituting the scene, practised so much more subtly than he had been prepared for, and since in especial Miss Barrace, surrounded clearly by every consideration, hadn't scrupled to figure as a familiar object.It was interesting to him to feel that he was in the presence of new measures, other standards, a different scale of relations, and that evidently here were a happy pair who didn't think of things at all as he and Waymarsh thought.Nothing was less to have been calculated in the business than that it should now be for him as if he and Waymarsh were comparatively quite at one.