
its pride. There was no doubt Woollett had insisted on his coarseness; and what
he at present stood there for in the sleeping street was, by his manner of
striking the other note, to make of such insistence a preoccupation compromising
to the insisters. It was exactly as if they had imputed to him a vulgarity that
he had by a mere gesture caused to fall from him. The devil of the case was that
Strether felt it, by the same stroke, as falling straight upon himself. He had
been wondering a minute ago if the boy weren't a Pagan, and he found himself
wondering now if he weren't by chance a gentleman. It didn't in the least, on
the spot, spring up helpfully for him that a person couldn't at the same time be
both. There was nothing at this moment in the air to challenge the combination;
there was everything to give it on the contrary something of a flourish. It
struck Strether into the bargain as doing something to meet the most difficult
of the questions; though perhaps indeed only by substituting another. Wouldn't
it be precisely by having learned to be a gentleman that he had mastered the
consequent trick of looking so well that one could scarce speak to him straight?
But what in the world was the clue to such a prime producing cause? There were
too many clues then that Strether still lacked, and these clues to clues were
among them. What it accordingly amounted to for him was that he had to take full
in the face a fresh attribution of ignorance. He had grown used by this time to
reminders, especially from his own lips, of what he didn't know; but he had
borne them because in the first place they were private and because in the
second they practically conveyed a tribute. He didn't know what was bad, and -
as others didn't know how little he knew it - he could put up with his state.
But if he didn't know, in so important a particular, what was good, Chad at
least was now aware he didn't; and that, for some reason, affected our friend as
curiously public. It was in fact an exposed condition that the young man left
him in long enough for him to feel its chill - till he saw fit, in a word,
generously again to cover him. This last was in truth what Chad quite gracefully
did. But he did it as with a simple thought that met the whole of the case. »Oh
I'm all right!«
