 case. He has accordingly missed too much, though perhaps
after all constitutionally qualified for a better part, and he wakes up to it in
conditions that press the spring of a terrible question. Would there yet perhaps
be time for reparation? - reparation, that is, for the injury done his
character; for the affront, he is quite ready to say, so stupidly put upon it
and in which he has even himself had so clumsy a hand? The answer to which is
that he now at all events sees; so that the business of my tale and the march of
my action, not to say the precious moral of everything, is just my demonstration
of this process of vision.
    Nothing can exceed the closeness with which the whole fits again into its
germ. That had been given me bodily, as usual, by the spoken word, for I was to
take the image over exactly as I happened to have met it. A friend had repeated
to me, with great appreciation, a thing or two said to him by a man of
distinction, much his senior, and to which a sense akin to that of Strether's
melancholy eloquence might be imputed - said as chance would have, and so easily
might, in Paris, and in a charming old garden attached to a house of art, and on
a Sunday afternoon of summer, many persons of great interest being present. The
observation there listened to and gathered up had contained part of the note
that I was to recognise on the spot as to my purpose - had contained in fact the
greater part; the rest was in the place and the time and the scene they
sketched: these constituents clustered and combined to give me further support,
to give me what I may call the note absolute. There it stands, accordingly, full
in the tideway; driven in, with hard taps, like some strong stake for the noose
of a cable, the swirl of the current roundabout it. What amplified the hint to
more than the bulk of hints in general was the gift with it of the old Paris
garden, for in that token were sealed up values infinitely precious. There was
of course the seal to break and each item of the packet to count over and handle
and estimate; but somehow, in the light of the hint, all the elements of a
situation of the sort most to my taste were there. I could even remember no
occasion on which, so confronted, I had found it of a livelier interest to take
stock, in this fashion, of suggested wealth. For I think, verily,
