ed. The prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes--in a
soft breeze and a sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the
garden-floor, of bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong
boxes, in the type of ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where
terrace-walls were warm, in the blue-frocked brass-labelled officialism
of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep references of a
straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a white-gaitered red-legged
soldier. He watched little brisk figures, figures whose movement was
as the tick of the great Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from
point to point; the air had a taste as of something mixed with art,
something that presented nature as a white-capped master-chef. The
palace was gone, Strether remembered the palace; and when he gazed into
the irremediable void of its site the historic sense in him might have
been freely at play--the play under which in Paris indeed it so often
winces like a touched nerve. He filled out spaces with dim symbols of
scenes; he caught the gleam of white statues at the base of which, with
his letters out, he could tilt back a straw-bottomed chair. But his
drift was, for reasons, to the other side, and it floated him unspent
up the Rue de Seine and as far as the Luxembourg. In the Luxembourg
Gardens he pulled up; here at last he found his nook, and here, on a
penny chair from which terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains, little
trees in green tubs, little women in white caps and shrill little girls
at play all sunnily "composed" together, he passed an hour in which the
cup of his impressions seemed truly to overflow. But a week had elapsed
since he quitted the ship, and there were more things in his mind than
so few days could account for. More than once, during the time, he had
regarded himself as admonished; but the admonition this morning was
formidably sharp. It took as it hadn't done yet the form of a
question--the question of what he was doing with such an extraordinary
sense of escape. This sense was sharpest after he had read his
letters, but that was also precisely why the question pressed. Four of
the letters were from Mrs. Newsome and none of them short; she had lost
no time, had followed on his heels while he moved, so expressing
herself that he now could measure the probable frequency with which he
should hear. They would arrive, it would seem, her communications, at
the rate of several a week; he should be able to c