 two friends had arrived had been that of
finding Mr. Bilham ready to conduct them to one or other of those resorts of the
earnest, the æsthetic fraternity which were shown among the sights of Paris. In
this character it would have justified them in a proper insistence on
discharging their score. Waymarsh's only proviso at the last had been that
nobody should pay for him; but he found himself, as the occasion developed, paid
for on a scale as to which Strether privately made out that he already nursed
retribution. Strether was conscious across the table of what worked in him,
conscious when they passed back to the small salon to which, the previous
evening, he himself had made so rich a reference; conscious most of all as they
stepped out to the balcony in which one would have had to be an ogre not to
recognise the perfect place for easy aftertastes. These things were enhanced for
Miss Barrace by a succession of excellent cigarettes - acknowledged, acclaimed,
as a part of the wonderful supply left behind him by Chad - in an almost equal
absorption of which Strether found himself blindly, almost wildly pushing
forward. He might perish by the sword as well as by famine, and he knew that his
having abetted the lady by an excess that was rare with him would count for
little in the sum - as Waymarsh might so easily add it up - of her licence.
Waymarsh had smoked of old, smoked hugely; but Waymarsh did nothing now, and
that gave him his advantage over people who took things up lightly just when
others had laid them heavily down. Strether had never smoked, and he felt as if
he flaunted at his friend that this had been only because of a reason. The
reason, it now began to appear even to himself, was that he had never had a lady
to smoke with.
    It was this lady's being there at all, however, that was the strange free
thing; perhaps, since she was there, her smoking was the least of her freedoms.
If Strether had been sure at each juncture of what - with Bilham in especial -
she talked about, he might have traced others and winced at them and felt
Waymarsh wince; but he was in fact so often at sea that his sense of the range
of reference was merely general and that he on several different occasions
guessed and interpreted only to doubt. He wondered what they meant, but there
were things he scarce thought they could be supposed to mean, and »Oh no - not
that!« was at the end of most of his ventures. This was the very
