ls. It
was an evening, it was a world of types, and this was a connexion above
all in which the figures and faces in the stalls were interchangeable
with those on the stage.

He felt as if the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow of
his neighbour, a great stripped handsome red-haired lady who conversed
with a gentleman on her other side in stray dissyllables which had for
his ear, in the oddest way in the world, so much sound that he wondered
they hadn't more sense; and he recognised by the same law, beyond the
footlights, what he was pleased to take for the very flush of English
life. He had distracted drops in which he couldn't have said if it
were actors or auditors who were most true, and the upshot of which,
each time, was the consciousness of new contacts. However he viewed
his job it was "types" he should have to tackle. Those before him and
around him were not as the types of Woollett, where, for that matter,
it had begun to seem to him that there must only have been the male and
the female. These made two exactly, even with the individual varieties.
Here, on the other hand, apart from the personal and the sexual
range--which might be greater or less--a series of strong stamps had
been applied, as it were, from without; stamps that his observation
played with as, before a glass case on a table, it might have passed
from medal to medal and from copper to gold. It befell that in the
drama precisely there was a bad woman in a yellow frock who made a
pleasant weak good-looking young man in perpetual evening dress do the
most dreadful things. Strether felt himself on the whole not afraid of
the yellow frock, but he was vaguely anxious over a certain kindness
into which he found himself drifting for its victim. He hadn't come
out, he reminded himself, to be too kind, or indeed to be kind at all,
to Chadwick Newsome. Would Chad also be in perpetual evening dress?
He somehow rather hoped it--it seemed so to add to THIS young man's
general amenability; though he wondered too if, to fight him with his
own weapons, he himself (a thought almost startling) would have
likewise to be. This young man furthermore would have been much more
easy to handle--at least for HIM--than appeared probable in respect to
Chad.

It came up for him with Miss Gostrey that there were things of which
she would really perhaps after all have heard, and she admitted when a
little pressed that she was never quite sure of what she