ere was indeed a
great deal of critical silence, every way, between the companions, even
till they gained the Place de l'Opera, as to the character of their
nocturnal progress.

This morning there WERE letters--letters which had reached London,
apparently all together, the day of Strether's journey, and had taken
their time to follow him; so that, after a controlled impulse to go
into them in the reception-room of the bank, which, reminding him of
the post-office at Woollett, affected him as the abutment of some
transatlantic bridge, he slipped them into the pocket of his loose grey
overcoat with a sense of the felicity of carrying them off. Waymarsh,
who had had letters yesterday, had had them again to-day, and Waymarsh
suggested in this particular no controlled impulses. The last one he
was at all events likely to be observed to struggle with was clearly
that of bringing to a premature close any visit to the Rue Scribe.
Strether had left him there yesterday; he wanted to see the papers, and
he had spent, by what his friend could make out, a succession of hours
with the papers. He spoke of the establishment, with emphasis, as a
post of superior observation; just as he spoke generally of his actual
damnable doom as a device for hiding from him what was going on. Europe
was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for
dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge,
and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations
of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs. Strether,
on his side, set himself to walk again--he had his relief in his
pocket; and indeed, much as he had desired his budget, the growth of
restlessness might have been marked in him from the moment he had
assured himself of the superscription of most of the missives it
contained. This restlessness became therefore his temporary law; he
knew he should recognise as soon as see it the best place of all for
settling down with his chief correspondent. He had for the next hour
an accidental air of looking for it in the windows of shops; he came
down the Rue de la Paix in the sun and, passing across the Tuileries
and the river, indulged more than once--as if on finding himself
determined--in a sudden pause before the book-stalls of the opposite
quay. In the garden of the Tuileries he had lingered, on two or three
spots, to look; it was as if the wonderful Paris spring had stayed him
as he roam