Chad," she immediately pursued,
"doing at Cannes? Decent men don't go to Cannes with the--well, with
the kind of ladies you mean."

"Don't they?" Strether asked with an interest in decent men that
amused her.

"No, elsewhere, but not to Cannes. Cannes is different. Cannes is
better. Cannes is best. I mean it's all people you know--when you do
know them. And if HE does, why that's different too. He must have
gone alone. She can't be with him."

"I haven't," Strether confessed in his weakness, "the least idea."
There seemed much in what she said, but he was able after a little to
help her to a nearer impression. The meeting with little Bilham took
place, by easy arrangement, in the great gallery of the Louvre; and
when, standing with his fellow visitor before one of the splendid
Titians--the overwhelming portrait of the young man with the
strangely-shaped glove and the blue-grey eyes--he turned to see the
third member of their party advance from the end of the waxed and
gilded vista, he had a sense of having at last taken hold. He had
agreed with Miss Gostrey--it dated even from Chester--for a morning at
the Louvre, and he had embraced independently the same idea as thrown
out by little Bilham, whom he had already accompanied to the museum of
the Luxembourg. The fusion of these schemes presented no difficulty,
and it was to strike him again that in little Bilham's company
contrarieties in general dropped.

"Oh he's all right--he's one of US!" Miss Gostrey, after the first
exchange, soon found a chance to murmur to her companion; and Strether,
as they proceeded and paused and while a quick unanimity between the
two appeared to have phrased itself in half a dozen remarks--Strether
knew that he knew almost immediately what she meant, and took it as
still another sign that he had got his job in hand. This was the more
grateful to him that he could think of the intelligence now serving him
as an acquisition positively new. He wouldn't have known even the day
before what she meant--that is if she meant, what he assumed, that they
were intense Americans together. He had just worked round--and with a
sharper turn of the screw than any yet--to the conception of an
American intense as little Bilham was intense. The young man was his
first specimen; the specimen had profoundly perplexed him; at present
however there was light. It was by little Bilham's amazing serenity
that he had at first been affected, but he