Strether told Waymarsh all about it that very evening, on their dining together at the hotel; which needn't have happened, he was all the while aware, hadn't he chosen to sacrifice to this occasion a rarer opportunity.The mention to his companion of the sacrifice was moreover exactly what introduced his recital--or, as he would have called it with more confidence in his interlocutor, his confession.His confession was that he had been captured and that one of the features of the affair had just failed to be his engaging himself on the spot to dinner.As by such a ******* Waymarsh would have lost him he had obeyed his scruple; and he had likewise obeyed another scruple--which bore on the question of his himself bringing a guest.
Waymarsh looked gravely ardent, over the finished soup, at this array of scruples; Strether hadn't yet got quite used to being so unprepared for the consequences of the impression he produced.It was comparatively easy to explain, however, that he hadn't felt sure his guest would please.The person was a young man whose acquaintance he had made but that afternoon in the course of rather a hindered enquiry for another person--an enquiry his new friend had just prevented in fact from being vain."Oh," said Strether, "I've all sorts of things to tell you!"--and he put it in a way that was a virtual hint to Waymarsh to help him to enjoy the telling.He waited for his fish, he drank of his wine, he wiped his long moustache, he leaned back in his chair, he took in the two English ladies who had just creaked past them and whom he would even have articulately greeted if they hadn't rather chilled the impulse; so that all he could do was--by way of doing something--to say "Merci, Francois!" out quite loud when his fish was brought.
Everything was there that he wanted, everything that could make the moment an occasion, that would do beautifully--everything but what Waymarsh might give.The little waxed salle-a-manger was sallow and sociable; Francois, dancing over it, all smiles, was a man and a brother; the high-shouldered patronne, with her high-held, much-rubbed hands, seemed always assenting exuberantly to something unsaid; the Paris evening in short was, for Strether, in the very taste of the soup, in the goodness, as he was innocently pleased to think it, of the wine, in the pleasant coarse texture of the napkin and the crunch of the thick-crusted bread.These all were things congruous with his confession, and his confession was that he HAD--it would come out properly just there if Waymarsh would only take it properly--agreed to breakfast out, at twelve literally, the next day.He didn't quite know where; the delicacy of the case came straight up in the remembrance of his new friend's "We'll see; I'll take you somewhere!"--for it had required little more than that, after all, to let him right in.He was affected after a minute, face to face with his actual comrade, by the impulse to overcolour.
There had already been things in respect to which he knew himself tempted by this perversity.If Waymarsh thought them bad he should at least have his reason for his discomfort; so Strether showed them as worse.Still, he was now, in his way, sincerely perplexed.
Chad had been absent from the Boulevard Malesherbes--was absent from Paris altogether; he had learned that from the concierge, but had nevertheless gone up, and gone up--there were no two ways about it--from an uncontrollable, a really, if one would, depraved curiosity.The concierge had mentioned to him that a friend of the tenant of the troisieme was for the time in possession; and this had been Strether's pretext for a further enquiry, an experiment carried on, under Chad's roof, without his knowledge."I found his friend in fact there keeping the place warm, as he called it, for him; Chad himself being, as appears, in the south.He went a month ago to Cannes and though his return begins to be looked for it can't be for some days.I might, you see, perfectly have waited a week; might have beaten a retreat as soon as I got this essential knowledge.But I beat no retreat; I did the opposite; I stayed, Idawdled, I trifled; above all I looked round.I saw, in fine; and--I don't know what to call it--I sniffed.It's a detail, but it's as if there were something--something very good--TO sniff."Waymarsh's face had shown his friend an attention apparently so remote that the latter was slightly surprised to find it at this point abreast with him."Do you mean a smell? What of?""A charming scent.But I don't know."
Waymarsh gave an inferential grunt."Does he live there with a woman?""I don't know."
Waymarsh waited an instant for more, then resumed."Has he taken her off with him?""And will he bring her back?"--Strether fell into the enquiry.But he wound it up as before."I don't know."The way he wound it up, accompanied as this was with another drop back, another degustation of the Leoville, another wipe of his moustache and another good word for Francois, seemed to produce in his companion a slight irritation."Then what the devil DO you know?""Well," said Strether almost gaily, "I guess I don't know anything!"His gaiety might have been a tribute to the fact that the state he had been reduced to did for him again what had been done by his talk of the matter with Miss Gostrey at the London theatre.It was somehow enlarging; and the air of that amplitude was now doubtless more or less--and all for Waymarsh to feel--in his further response."That's what I found out from the young man.""But I thought you said you found out nothing.""Nothing but that--that I don't know anything.""And what good does that do you?"