 music more or less good and of talk more or less
polyglot, were on a principle not to be distinguished from that of the mornings
and the afternoons. Nothing, Strether had to recognise as he leaned back and
smoked, could well less resemble a scene of violence than even the liveliest of
these occasions. They were occasions of discussion, none the less, and Strether
had never in his life heard so many opinions on so many subjects. There were
opinions at Woollett, but only on three or four. The differences were there to
match; if they were doubtless deep, though few, they were quiet - they were, as
might be said, almost as shy as if people had been ashamed of them. People
showed little diffidence about such things, on the other hand, in the Boulevard
Malesherbes, and were so far from being ashamed of them - or indeed of anything
else - that they often seemed to have invented them to avert those agreements
that destroy the taste of talk. No one had ever done that at Woollett, though
Strether could remember times when he himself had been tempted to it without
quite knowing why. He saw why at present - he had but wanted to promote
intercourse.
    These, however, were but parenthetic memories; and the turn taken by his
affair on the whole was positively that if his nerves were on the stretch it was
because he missed violence. When he asked himself if none would then, in
connexion with it, ever come at all, he might almost have passed as wondering
how to provoke it. It would be too absurd if such a vision as that should have
to be invoked for relief; it was already marked enough as absurd that he should
actually have begun with flutters and dignities on the score of a single
accepted meal. What sort of a brute had he expected Chad to be, anyway? -
Strether had occasion to make the enquiry but was careful to make it in private.
He could himself, comparatively recent as it was - it was truly but the fact of
a few days since - focus his primal crudity; but he would on the approach of an
observer, as if handling an illicit possession, have slipped the reminiscence
out of sight. There were echoes of it still in Mrs. Newsome's letters, and there
were moments when these echoes made him exclaim on her want of tact. He blushed
of course, at once, still more for the explanation than for the ground of it: it
came to him in time to save his manners that she couldn't at the best become
tactful as quickly as
