end felt as
if they passed each other, in their deep immersion, with the round
impersonal eye of silent fish. It was practically produced between
them that Waymarsh was giving him then his chance; and the shade of
discomfort that Strether drew from the allowance resembled not a little
the embarrassment he had known at school, as a boy, when members of his
family had been present at exhibitions. He could perform before
strangers, but relatives were fatal, and it was now as if,
comparatively, Waymarsh were a relative. He seemed to hear him say
"Strike up then!" and to enjoy a foretaste of conscientious domestic
criticism. He HAD struck up, so far as he actually could; Chad knew by
this time in profusion what he wanted; and what vulgar violence did his
fellow pilgrim expect of him when he had really emptied his mind? It
went somehow to and fro that what poor Waymarsh meant was "I told you
so--that you'd lose your immortal soul!" but it was also fairly
explicit that Strether had his own challenge and that, since they must
go to the bottom of things, he wasted no more virtue in watching Chad
than Chad wasted in watching him. His dip for duty's sake--where was
it worse than Waymarsh's own? For HE needn't have stopped resisting
and refusing, needn't have parleyed, at that rate, with the foe.

The strolls over Paris to see something or call somewhere were
accordingly inevitable and natural, and the late sessions in the
wondrous troisieme, the lovely home, when men dropped in and the
picture composed more suggestively through the haze of tobacco, of
music more or less good and of talk more or less polyglot, were on a
principle not to be distinguished from that of the mornings and the
afternoons. Nothing, Strether had to recognise as he leaned back and
smoked, could well less resemble a scene of violence than even the
liveliest of these occasions. They were occasions of discussion, none
the less, and Strether had never in his life heard so many opinions on
so many subjects. There were opinions at Woollett, but only on three
or four. The differences were there to match; if they were doubtless
deep, though few, they were quiet--they were, as might be said, almost
as shy as if people had been ashamed of them. People showed little
diffidence about such things, on the other hand, in the Boulevard
Malesherbes, and were so far from being ashamed of them--or indeed of
anything else--that they often seemed to have invented the