es played a little, it
must be confessed, into his predicament.

He had introduced Chad, in the first minutes, under his breath, and
there was never the primness in her of the person unacquainted; but she
had none the less betrayed at first no vision but of the stage, where
she occasionally found a pretext for an appreciative moment that she
invited Waymarsh to share. The latter's faculty of participation had
never had, all round, such an assault to meet; the pressure on him
being the sharper for this chosen attitude in her, as Strether judged
it, of isolating, for their natural intercourse, Chad and himself. This
intercourse was meanwhile restricted to a frank friendly look from the
young man, something markedly like a smile, but falling far short of a
grin, and to the vivacity of Strether's private speculation as to
whether HE carried himself like a fool. He didn't quite see how he
could so feel as one without somehow showing as one. The worst of that
question moreover was that he knew it as a symptom the sense of which
annoyed him. "If I'm going to be odiously conscious of how I may
strike the fellow," he reflected, "it was so little what I came out for
that I may as well stop before I begin." This sage consideration too,
distinctly, seemed to leave untouched the fact that he WAS going to be
conscious. He was conscious of everything but of what would have
served him.

He was to know afterwards, in the watches of the night, that nothing
would have been more open to him than after a minute or two to propose
to Chad to seek with him the refuge of the lobby. He hadn't only not
proposed it, but had lacked even the presence of mind to see it as
possible. He had stuck there like a schoolboy wishing not to miss a
minute of the show; though for that portion of the show then presented
he hadn't had an instant's real attention. He couldn't when the
curtain fell have given the slightest account of what had happened. He
had therefore, further, not at that moment acknowledged the amenity
added by this acceptance of his awkwardness to Chad's general patience.
Hadn't he none the less known at the very time--known it stupidly and
without reaction--that the boy was accepting something? He was
modestly benevolent, the boy--that was at least what he had been
capable of the superiority of making out his chance to be; and one had
one's self literally not had the gumption to get in ahead of him. If
we should go into all that o