ccasion
developed, paid for on a scale as to which Strether privately made out
that he already nursed retribution. Strether was conscious across the
table of what worked in him, conscious when they passed back to the
small salon to which, the previous evening, he himself had made so rich
a reference; conscious most of all as they stepped out to the balcony
in which one would have had to be an ogre not to recognise the perfect
place for easy aftertastes. These things were enhanced for Miss
Barrace by a succession of excellent cigarettes--acknowledged,
acclaimed, as a part of the wonderful supply left behind him by
Chad--in an almost equal absorption of which Strether found himself
blindly, almost wildly pushing forward. He might perish by the sword
as well as by famine, and he knew that his having abetted the lady by
an excess that was rare with him would count for little in the sum--as
Waymarsh might so easily add it up--of her licence. Waymarsh had
smoked of old, smoked hugely; but Waymarsh did nothing now, and that
gave him his advantage over people who took things up lightly just when
others had laid them heavily down. Strether had never smoked, and he
felt as if he flaunted at his friend that this had been only because of
a reason. The reason, it now began to appear even to himself, was that
he had never had a lady to smoke with.

It was this lady's being there at all, however, that was the strange
free thing; perhaps, since she WAS there, her smoking was the least of
her freedoms. If Strether had been sure at each juncture of what--with
Bilham in especial--she talked about, he might have traced others and
winced at them and felt Waymarsh wince; but he was in fact so often at
sea that his sense of the range of reference was merely general and
that he on several different occasions guessed and interpreted only to
doubt. He wondered what they meant, but there were things he scarce
thought they could be supposed to mean, and "Oh no--not THAT!" was at
the end of most of his ventures. This was the very beginning with him
of a condition as to which, later on, it will be seen, he found cause
to pull himself up; and he was to remember the moment duly as the first
step in a process. The central fact of the place was neither more nor
less, when analysed--and a pressure superficial sufficed--than the
fundamental impropriety of Chad's situation, round about which they
thus seemed cynically clustered. Accordingly, sinc