 a place of
which, unmistakeably, Chad was fond; wherefore if he, Strether, should like it
too much, what on earth, with such a bond, would become of either of them? It
all depended of course - which was a gleam of light - on how the too much was
measured; though indeed our friend fairly felt, while he prolonged the
meditation I describe, that for himself even already a certain measure had been
reached. It will have been sufficiently seen that he was not a man to neglect
any good chance for reflexion. Was it at all possible for instance to like Paris
enough without liking it too much? He luckily however hadn't promised Mrs.
Newsome not to like it at all. He was ready to recognise at this stage that such
an engagement would have tied his hands. The Luxembourg Gardens were
incontestably just so adorable at this hour by reason - in addition to their
intrinsic charm - of his not having taken it. The only engagement he had taken,
when he looked the thing in the face, was to do what he reasonably could.
    It upset him a little none the less and after a while to find himself at
last remembering on what current of association he had been floated so far. Old
imaginations of the Latin Quarter had played their part for him, and he had duly
recalled its having been with this scene of rather ominous legend that, like so
many young men in fiction as well as in fact, Chad had begun. He was now quite
out of it, with his home, as Strether figured the place, in the Boulevard
Malesherbes; which was perhaps why, repairing, not to fail of justice either, to
the elder neighbourhood, our friend had felt he could allow for the element of
the usual, the immemorial, without courting perturbation. He was not at least in
danger of seeing the youth and the particular Person flaunt by together; and yet
he was in the very air of which - just to feel what the early natural note must
have been - he wished most to take counsel. It became at once vivid to him that
he had originally had, for a few days, an almost envious vision of the boy's
romantic privilege. Melancholy Mürger, with Francine and Musette and Rodolphe,
at home, in the company of the tattered, one - if he not in his single self two
or three - of the unbound, the paper-covered dozen on the shelf; and when Chad
had written, five years ago, after a sojourn then already prolonged to six
months, that he had decided
