 had, as usual, let her
have her way. Chad was always letting people have their way when he felt that it
would somehow turn his wheel for him; it somehow always did turn his wheel.
Strether felt, oddly enough, before these facts, freshly and consentingly
passive; they again so rubbed it into him that the couple thus fixing his
attention were intimate, that his intervention had absolutely aided and
intensified their intimacy, and that in fine he must accept the consequence of
that. He had absolutely become, himself, with his perceptions and his mistakes,
his concessions and his reserves, the droll mixture, as it must seem to them, of
his braveries and his fears, the general spectacle of his art and his innocence,
almost an added link and certainly a common priceless ground for them to meet
upon. It was as if he had been hearing their very tone when she brought out a
reference that was comparatively straight. »The last twice that you've been
here, you know, I never asked you,« she said with an abrupt transition - they
had been pretending before this to talk simply of the charm of yesterday and of
the interest of the country they had seen. The effort was confessedly vain; not
for such talk had she invited him; and her impatient reminder was of their
having done for it all the needful on his coming to her after Sarah's flight.
What she hadn't asked him then was to state to her where and how he stood for
her; she had been resting on Chad's report of their midnight hour together in
the Boulevard Malesherbes. The thing therefore she at present desired was
ushered in by this recall of the two occasions on which, disinterested and
merciful, she hadn't worried him. To-night truly she would worry him, and this
was her appeal to him to let her risk it. He wasn't to mind if she bored him a
little: she had behaved, after all - hadn't she? - so awfully, awfully well.

                                       II

 
»Oh, you're all right, you're all right,« he almost impatiently declared; his
impatience being moreover not for her pressure, but for her scruple. More and
more distinct to him was the tune to which she would have had the matter out
with Chad; more and more vivid for him the idea that she had been nervous as to
what he might be able to stand. Yes, it had been a question if he had stood what
the scene on the river had given him, and
