This
occasion moreover had been determined promptly by a new circumstance--a
circumstance he was the last man to leave her for a day in ignorance
of. "When I said to him last night," he immediately began, "that
without some definite word from him now that will enable me to speak to
them over there of our sailing--or at least of mine, giving them some
sort of date--my responsibility becomes uncomfortable and my situation
awkward; when I said that to him what do you think was his reply?" And
then as she this time gave it up: "Why that he has two particular
friends, two ladies, mother and daughter, about to arrive in
Paris--coming back from an absence; and that he wants me so furiously
to meet them, know them and like them, that I shall oblige him by
kindly not bringing our business to a crisis till he has had a chance
to see them again himself. Is that," Strether enquired, "the way he's
going to try to get off? These are the people," he explained, "that he
must have gone down to see before I arrived. They're the best friends
he has in the world, and they take more interest than any one else in
what concerns him. As I'm his next best he sees a thousand reasons why
we should comfortably meet. He hasn't broached the question sooner
because their return was uncertain--seemed in fact for the present
impossible. But he more than intimates that--if you can believe
it--their desire to make my acquaintance has had to do with their
surmounting difficulties."

"They're dying to see you?" Miss Gostrey asked.

"Dying. Of course," said Strether, "they're the virtuous attachment."
He had already told her about that--had seen her the day after his talk
with little Bilham; and they had then threshed out together the bearing
of the revelation. She had helped him to put into it the logic in
which little Bilham had left it slightly deficient Strether hadn't
pressed him as to the object of the preference so unexpectedly
described; feeling in the presence of it, with one of his irrepressible
scruples, a delicacy from which he had in the quest of the quite other
article worked himself sufficiently free. He had held off, as on a
small principle of pride, from permitting his young friend to mention a
name; wishing to make with this the great point that Chad's virtuous
attachments were none of his business. He had wanted from the first
not to think too much of his dignity, but that was no reason for not
allowing it any little benefi