allowed
for--the chance of being seen in time from the balcony--had become a
fact. Two or three of the windows stood open to the violet air; and,
before Strether had cut the knot by crossing, a young man had come out
and looked about him, had lighted a cigarette and tossed the match
over, and then, resting on the rail, had given himself up to watching
the life below while he smoked. His arrival contributed, in its order,
to keeping Strether in position; the result of which in turn was that
Strether soon felt himself noticed. The young man began to look at him
as in acknowledgement of his being himself in observation.

This was interesting so far as it went, but the interest was affected
by the young man's not being Chad. Strether wondered at first if he
were perhaps Chad altered, and then saw that this was asking too much
of alteration. The young man was light bright and alert--with an air
too pleasant to have been arrived at by patching. Strether had
conceived Chad as patched, but not beyond recognition. He was in
presence, he felt, of amendments enough as they stood; it was a
sufficient amendment that the gentleman up there should be Chad's
friend. He was young too then, the gentleman up there--he was very
young; young enough apparently to be amused at an elderly watcher, to
be curious even to see what the elderly watcher would do on finding
himself watched. There was youth in that, there was youth in the
surrender to the balcony, there was youth for Strether at this moment
in everything but his own business; and Chad's thus pronounced
association with youth had given the next instant an extraordinary
quick lift to the issue. The balcony, the distinguished front,
testified suddenly, for Strether's fancy, to something that was up and
up; they placed the whole case materially, and as by an admirable
image, on a level that he found himself at the end of another moment
rejoicing to think he might reach. The young man looked at him still,
he looked at the young man; and the issue, by a rapid process, was that
this knowledge of a perched privacy appeared to him the last of
luxuries. To him too the perched privacy was open, and he saw it now
but in one light--that of the only domicile, the only fireside, in the
great ironic city, on which he had the shadow of a claim. Miss Gostrey
had a fireside; she had told him of it, and it was something that
doubtless awaited him; but Miss Gostrey hadn't yet arrived--she
migh