e they took it for
granted, they took for granted all that was in connexion with it taken
for granted at Woollett--matters as to which, verily, he had been
reduced with Mrs. Newsome to the last intensity of silence. That was
the consequence of their being too bad to be talked about, and was the
accompaniment, by the same token, of a deep conception of their
badness. It befell therefore that when poor Strether put it to himself
that their badness was ultimately, or perhaps even insolently, what
such a scene as the one before him was, so to speak, built upon, he
could scarce shirk the dilemma of reading a roundabout echo of them
into almost anything that came up. This, he was well aware, was a
dreadful necessity; but such was the stern logic, he could only gather,
of a relation to the irregular life.

It was the way the irregular life sat upon Bilham and Miss Barrace that
was the insidious, the delicate marvel. He was eager to concede that
their relation to it was all indirect, for anything else in him would
have shown the grossness of bad manners; but the indirectness was none
the less consonant--THAT was striking-with a grateful enjoyment of
everything that was Chad's. They spoke of him repeatedly, invoking his
good name and good nature, and the worst confusion of mind for Strether
was that all their mention of him was of a kind to do him honour. They
commended his munificence and approved his taste, and in doing so sat
down, as it seemed to Strether, in the very soil out of which these
things flowered. Our friend's final predicament was that he himself
was sitting down, for the time, WITH them, and there was a supreme
moment at which, compared with his collapse, Waymarsh's erectness
affected him as really high. One thing was certain--he saw he must
make up his mind. He must approach Chad, must wait for him, deal with
him, master him, but he mustn't dispossess himself of the faculty of
seeing things as they were. He must bring him to HIM--not go himself,
as it were, so much of the way. He must at any rate be clearer as to
what--should he continue to do that for convenience--he was still
condoning. It was on the detail of this quantity--and what could the
fact be but mystifying?-that Bilham and Miss Barrace threw so little
light. So there they were.

II

When Miss Gostrey arrived, at the end of a week, she made him a sign;
he went immediately to see her, and it wasn't till then that he could
again c