fears confirmed. There were "movements" he was too late for: weren't
they, with the fun of them, already spent? There were sequences he had
missed and great gaps in the procession: he might have been watching
it all recede in a golden cloud of dust. If the playhouse wasn't
closed his seat had at least fallen to somebody else. He had had an
uneasy feeling the night before that if he was at the theatre at
all--though he indeed justified the theatre, in the specific sense, and
with a grotesqueness to which his imagination did all honour, as
something he owed poor Waymarsh--he should have been there with, and as
might have been said, FOR Chad.

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 mom