the way for initiations more
direct and more deep. It was Strether's belief that he had been
comparatively innocent before this first migration, and even that the
first effects of the migration would not have been, without some
particular bad accident, to have been deplored. There had been three
months--he had sufficiently figured it out--in which Chad had wanted to
try. He HAD tried, though not very hard--he had had his little hour of
good faith. The weakness of this principle in him was that almost any
accident attestedly bad enough was stronger. Such had at any rate
markedly been the case for the precipitation of a special series of
impressions. They had proved, successively, these impressions--all of
Musette and Francine, but Musette and Francine vulgarised by the larger
evolution of the type--irresistibly sharp: he had "taken up," by what
was at the time to be shrinkingly gathered, as it was scantly
mentioned, with one ferociously "interested" little person after
another. Strether had read somewhere of a Latin motto, a description
of the hours, observed on a clock by a traveller in Spain; and he had
been led to apply it in thought to Chad's number one, number two,
number three. Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat--they had all morally
wounded, the last had morally killed. The last had been longest in
possession--in possession, that is, of whatever was left of the poor
boy's finer mortality. And it hadn't been she, it had been one of her
early predecessors, who had determined the second migration, the
expensive return and relapse, the exchange again, as was fairly to be
presumed, of the vaunted best French for some special variety of the
worst.

He pulled himself then at last together for his own progress back; not
with the feeling that he had taken his walk in vain. He prolonged it a
little, in the immediate neighbourhood, after he had quitted his chair;
and the upshot of the whole morning for him was that his campaign had
begun. He had wanted to put himself in relation, and he would be
hanged if he were NOT in relation. He was that at no moment so much as
while, under the old arches of the Odeon, he lingered before the
charming open-air array of literature classic and casual. He found the
effect of tone and tint, in the long charged tables and shelves,
delicate and appetising; the impression--substituting one kind of
low-priced consommation for another--might have been that of one of the
pleasant cafes th