. The actual man's note, from the first
of our seeing it struck, is the note of discrimination, just as his drama is to
become, under stress, the drama of discrimination. It would have been his blest
imagination, we have seen, that had already helped him to discriminate; the
element that was for so much of the pleasure of my cutting thick, as I have
intimated, into his intellectual, into his moral substance. Yet here it was, at
the same time, just here, that a shade for a moment fell across the scene.
    There was the dreadful little old tradition, one of the platitudes of the
human comedy, that people's moral scheme does break down in Paris; that nothing
is more frequently observed; that hundreds of thousands of more or less
hypocritical or more or less cynical persons annually visit the place for the
sake of the probable catastrophe, and that I came late in the day to work myself
up about it. There was in fine the trivial association, one of the vulgarest in
the world; but which give me pause no longer, I think, simply because its
vulgarity is so advertised. The revolution performed by Strether under the
influence of the most interesting of great cities was to have nothing to do with
any bêtise of the imputably tempted state; he was to be thrown forward, rather,
thrown quite with violence, upon his lifelong trick of intense reflexion: which
friendly test indeed was to bring him out, through winding passages, through
alternations of darkness and light, very much in Paris, but with the surrounding
scene itself a minor matter, a mere symbol for more things than had been dreamt
of in the philosophy of Woollett. Another surrounding scene would have done as
well for our show could it have represented a place in which Strether's errand
was likely to lie and his crisis to await him. The likely place had the great
merit of sparing me preparations; there would have been too many involved - not
at all impossibilities, only rather worrying and delaying difficulties - in
positing elsewhere Chad Newsome's interesting relation, his so interesting
complexity of relations. Strether's appointed stage, in fine, could be but
Chad's most luckily selected one. The young man had gone in, as they say, for
circumjacent charm; and where he would have found it, by the turn of his mind,
most authentic, was where his earnest friend's analysis would most find him; as
well as where, for that matter, the former's whole analytic faculty would be led
such a
