ght, you
see, perfectly have waited a week; might have beaten a retreat as soon
as I got this essential knowledge. But I beat no retreat; I did the
opposite; I stayed, I dawdled, I trifled; above all I looked round. I
saw, in fine; and--I don't know what to call it--I sniffed. It's a
detail, but it's as if there were something--something very good--TO
sniff."

Waymarsh's face had shown his friend an attention apparently so remote
that the latter was slightly surprised to find it at this point abreast
with him. "Do you mean a smell? What of?"

"A charming scent. But I don't know."

Waymarsh gave an inferential grunt. "Does he live there with a woman?"

"I don't know."

Waymarsh waited an instant for more, then resumed. "Has he taken her
off with him?"

"And will he bring her back?"--Strether fell into the enquiry. But he
wound it up as before. "I don't know."

The way he wound it up, accompanied as this was with another drop back,
another degustation of the Leoville, another wipe of his moustache and
another good word for Francois, seemed to produce in his companion a
slight irritation. "Then what the devil DO you know?"

"Well," said Strether almost gaily, "I guess I don't know anything!"
His gaiety might have been a tribute to the fact that the state he had
been reduced to did for him again what had been done by his talk of the
matter with Miss Gostrey at the London theatre. It was somehow
enlarging; and the air of that amplitude was now doubtless more or
less--and all for Waymarsh to feel--in his further response. "That's
what I found out from the young man."

"But I thought you said you found out nothing."

"Nothing but that--that I don't know anything."

"And what good does that do you?"

"It's just," said Strether, "what I've come to you to help me to
discover. I mean anything about anything over here. I FELT that, up
there. It regularly rose before me in its might. The young man
moreover--Chad's friend--as good as told me so."

"As good as told you you know nothing about anything?" Waymarsh
appeared to look at some one who might have as good as told HIM. "How
old is he?"

"Well, I guess not thirty."

"Yet you had to take that from him?"

"Oh I took a good deal more--since, as I tell you, I took an invitation
to dejeuner."

"And are you GOING to that unholy meal?"

"If you'll come with me. He wants you too, you know. I told him about
you. He gave me his card," Strether p