u'll marry--you personally--more money. She's already rich, as I
understand you, but she'll be richer still if the business can be made
to boom on certain lines that you've laid down."

"I haven't laid them down," Strether promptly returned. "Mr.
Newsome--who knew extraordinarily well what he was about--laid them
down ten years ago."

Oh well, Waymarsh seemed to indicate with a shake of his mane, THAT
didn't matter! "You're fierce for the boom anyway."

His friend weighed a moment in silence the justice of the charge. "I
can scarcely be called fierce, I think, when I so freely take my chance
of the possibility, the danger, of being influenced in a sense counter
to Mrs. Newsome's own feelings."

Waymarsh gave this proposition a long hard look. "I see. You're
afraid yourself of being squared. But you're a humbug," he added, "all
the same."

"Oh!" Strether quickly protested.

"Yes, you ask me for protection--which makes you very interesting; and
then you won't take it. You say you want to be squashed--"

"Ah but not so easily! Don't you see," Strether demanded "where my
interest, as already shown you, lies? It lies in my not being squared.
If I'm squared where's my marriage? If I miss my errand I miss that;
and if I miss that I miss everything--I'm nowhere."

Waymarsh--but all relentlessly--took this in. "What do I care where
you are if you're spoiled?"

Their eyes met on it an instant. "Thank you awfully," Strether at last
said. "But don't you think HER judgement of that--?"

"Ought to content me? No."

It kept them again face to face, and the end of this was that Strether
again laughed. "You do her injustice. You really MUST know her.
Good-night."

He breakfasted with Mr. Bilham on the morrow, and, as inconsequently
befell, with Waymarsh massively of the party. The latter announced, at
the eleventh hour and much to his friend's surprise, that, damn it, he
would as soon join him as do anything else; on which they proceeded
together, strolling in a state of detachment practically luxurious for
them to the Boulevard Malesherbes, a couple engaged that day with the
sharp spell of Paris as confessedly, it might have been seen, as any
couple among the daily thousands so compromised. They walked,
wandered, wondered and, a little, lost themselves; Strether hadn't had
for years so rich a consciousness of time--a bag of gold into which he
constantly dipped for a handful. It was present to him that when