been
noted for him that he might be received as a dog among skittles, but
that was on the basis of the old quantity. He had originally thought of
lines and tones as things to be taken, but these possibilities had now
quite melted away. There was no computing at all what the young man
before him would think or feel or say on any subject whatever. This
intelligence Strether had afterwards, to account for his nervousness,
reconstituted as he might, just as he had also reconstituted the
promptness with which Chad had corrected his uncertainty. An
extraordinarily short time had been required for the correction, and
there had ceased to be anything negative in his companion's face and
air as soon as it was made. "Your engagement to my mother has become
then what they call here a fait accompli?"--it had consisted, the
determinant touch, in nothing more than that.

Well, that was enough, Strether had felt while his answer hung fire. He
had felt at the same time, however, that nothing could less become him
than that it should hang fire too long. "Yes," he said brightly, "it
was on the happy settlement of the question that I started. You see
therefore to what tune I'm in your family. Moreover," he added, "I've
been supposing you'd suppose it."

"Oh I've been supposing it for a long time, and what you tell me helps
me to understand that you should want to do something. To do
something, I mean," said Chad, "to commemorate an event so--what do
they call it?--so auspicious. I see you make out, and not
unnaturally," he continued, "that bringing me home in triumph as a sort
of wedding-present to Mother would commemorate it better than anything
else. You want to make a bonfire in fact," he laughed, "and you pitch
me on. Thank you, thank you!" he laughed again.

He was altogether easy about it, and this made Strether now see how at
bottom, and in spite of the shade of shyness that really cost him
nothing, he had from the first moment been easy about everything. The
shade of shyness was mere good taste. People with manners formed could
apparently have, as one of their best cards, the shade of shyness too.
He had leaned a little forward to speak; his elbows were on the table;
and the inscrutable new face that he had got somewhere and somehow was
brought by the movement nearer to his critics There was a fascination
for that critic in its not being, this ripe physiognomy, the face that,
under observation at least, he had origi