 beginning with
him of a condition as to which, later on, it will be seen, he found cause to
pull himself up; and he was to remember the moment duly as the first step in a
process. The central fact of the place was neither more nor less, when analysed
- and a pressure superficial sufficed - than the fundamental impropriety of
Chad's situation, round about which they thus seemed cynically clustered.
Accordingly, since they took it for granted, they took for granted all that was
in connexion with it taken for granted at Woollett - matters as to which,
verily, he had been reduced with Mrs. Newsome to the last intensity of silence.
That was the consequence of their being too bad to be talked about, and was the
accompaniment, by the same token, of a deep conception of their badness. It
befell therefore that when poor Strether put it to himself that their badness
was ultimately, or perhaps even insolently, what such a scene as the one before
him was, so to speak, built upon, he could scarce shirk the dilemma of reading a
roundabout echo of them into almost anything that came up. This, he was well
aware, was a dreadful necessity; but such was the stem logic, he could only
gather, of a relation to the irregular life.
    It was the way the irregular life sat upon Bilham and Miss Barrace that was
the insidious, the delicate marvel. He was eager to concede that their relation
to it was all indirect, for anything else in him would have shown the grossness
of bad manners; but the indirectness was none the less consonant - that was
striking - with a grateful enjoyment of everything that was Chad's. They spoke
of him repeatedly, invoking his good name and good nature, and the worst
confusion of mind for Strether was that all their mention of him was of a kind
to do him honour. They commended his munificence and approved his taste, and in
doing so sat down, as it seemed to Strether, in the very soil out of which these
things flowered. Our friend's final predicament was that he himself was sitting
down, for the time, with them, and there was a supreme moment at which, compared
with his collapse, Waymarsh's erectness affected him as really high. One thing
was certain - he saw he must make up his mind. He must approach Chad, must wait
for him, deal with him, master him, but he mustn't dispossess himself of the
faculty of seeing things as they were. He must bring him to him -
