He pulled himself then at last together for his own progress back;not with the feeling that he had taken his walk in vain.He prolonged it a little, in the immediate neighbourhood, after he had quitted his chair; and the upshot of the whole morning for him was that his campaign had begun.He had wanted to put himself in relation, and he would be hanged if he were NOT in relation.He was that at no moment so much as while, under the old arches of the Odeon, he lingered before the charming open-air array of literature classic and casual.He found the effect of tone and tint, in the long charged tables and shelves, delicate and appetising; the impression--substituting one kind of low-priced consommation for another--might have been that of one of the pleasant cafes that overlapped, under an awning, to the pavement;but he edged along, grazing the tables, with his hands firmly behind him.He wasn't there to dip, to consume--he was there to reconstruct.He wasn't there for his own profit--not, that is, the direct; he was there on some chance of feeling the brush of the wing of the stray spirit of youth.He felt it in fact, he had it beside him; the old arcade indeed, as his inner sense listened, gave out the faint sound, as from far off, of the wild waving of wings.They were folded now over the breasts of buried generations;but a flutter or two lived again in the turned page of shock-headed slouch-hatted loiterers whose young intensity of type, in the direction of pale acuteness, deepened his vision, and even his appreciation, of racial differences, and whose manipulation of the uncut volume was too often, however, but a listening at closed doors.He reconstructed a possible groping Chad of three or four years before, a Chad who had, after all, simply--for that was the only way to see it--been too vulgar for his privilege.Surely it WAS a privilege to have been young and happy just there.Well, the best thing Strether knew of him was that he had had such a dream.
But his own actual business half an hour later was with a third floor on the Boulevard Malesherbes--so much as that was definite;and the fact of the enjoyment by the third-floor windows of a continuous balcony, to which he was helped by this knowledge, had perhaps something to do with his lingering for five minutes on the opposite side of the street.There were points as to which he had quite made up his mind, and one of these bore precisely on the wisdom of the abruptness to which events had finally committed him, a policy that he was pleased to find not at all shaken as he now looked at his watch and wondered.He HAD announced himself--six months before; had written out at least that Chad wasn't to be surprised should he see him some day turn up.Chad had thereupon, in a few words of rather carefully colourless answer, offered him a general welcome; and Strether, ruefully reflecting that he might have understood the warning as a hint to hospitality, a bid for an invitation, had fallen back upon silence as the corrective most to his own taste.He had asked Mrs.Newsome moreover not to announce him again; he had so distinct an opinion on his attacking his job, should he attack it at all, in his own way.Not the least of this lady's high merits for him was that he could absolutely rest on her word.She was the only woman he had known, even at Woollett, as to whom his conviction was positive that to lie was beyond her art.
Sarah Pocock, for instance, her own daughter, though with social ideals, as they said, in some respects different--Sarah who WAS, in her way, aesthetic, had never refused to human commerce that mitigation of rigour; there were occasions when he had distinctly seen her apply it.Since, accordingly, at all events, he had had it from Mrs.Newsome that she had, at whatever cost to her more strenuous view, conformed, in the matter of preparing Chad, wholly to his restrictions, he now looked up at the fine continuous balcony with a safe sense that if the case had been bungled the mistake was at least his property.Was there perhaps just a suspicion of that in his present pause on the edge of the Boulevard and well in the pleasant light?
Many things came over him here, and one of them was that he should doubtless presently know whether he had been shallow or sharp.