simpler."

"Perhaps," she admitted. "But won't this be pleasanter?"

"Ah you know," he promptly replied, "I didn't come out--wasn't that
just what you originally reproached me with?--for the pleasant."

"Precisely. Therefore I say again what I said at first. You must take
things as they come. Besides," Miss Gostrey added, "I'm not afraid for
myself."

"For yourself--?"

"Of your seeing her. I trust her. There's nothing she'll say about
me. In fact there's nothing she CAN."

Strether wondered--little as he had thought of this. Then he broke
out. "Oh you women!"

There was something in it at which she flushed. "Yes--there we are.
We're abysses." At last she smiled. "But I risk her!"

He gave himself a shake. "Well then so do I!" But he added as they
passed into the house that he would see Chad the first thing in the
morning.

This was the next day the more easily effected that the young man, as
it happened, even before he was down, turned up at his hotel. Strether
took his coffee, by habit, in the public room; but on his descending
for this purpose Chad instantly proposed an adjournment to what he
called greater privacy. He had himself as yet had nothing--they would
sit down somewhere together; and when after a few steps and a turn into
the Boulevard they had, for their greater privacy, sat down among
twenty others, our friend saw in his companion's move a fear of the
advent of Waymarsh. It was the first time Chad had to that extent
given this personage "away"; and Strether found himself wondering of
what it was symptomatic. He made out in a moment that the youth was in
earnest as he hadn't yet seen him; which in its turn threw a ray
perhaps a trifle startling on what they had each up to that time been
treating as earnestness. It was sufficiently flattering however that
the real thing--if this WAS at last the real thing--should have been
determined, as appeared, precisely by an accretion of Strether's
importance. For this was what it quickly enough came to--that Chad,
rising with the lark, had rushed down to let him know while his morning
consciousness was yet young that he had literally made the afternoon
before a tremendous impression. Madame de Vionnet wouldn't, couldn't
rest till she should have some assurance from him that he WOULD consent
again to see her. The announcement was made, across their
marble-topped table, while the foam of the hot milk was in their cups
and its plash still