 he had gone with her down to her carriage.
 

                                   Book Ninth

                                       I

»The difficulty is,« Strether said to Madame de Vionnet a couple of days later,
»that I can't surprise them into the smallest sign of his not being the same old
Chad they've been for the last three years glowering at across the sea. They
simply won't give any, and as a policy, you know - what you call a parti pris, a
deep game - that's positively remarkable.«
    It was so remarkable that our friend had pulled up before his hostess with
the vision of it; he had risen from his chair at the end of ten minutes and
begun, as a help not to worry, to move about before her quite as he moved before
Maria. He had kept his appointment with her to the minute and had been intensely
impatient, though divided in truth between the sense of having everything to
tell her and the sense of having nothing at all. The short interval had, in the
face of their complication, multiplied his impressions - it being meanwhile to
be noted, moreover, that he already frankly, already almost publicly, viewed the
complication as common to them. If Madame de Vionnet, under Sarah's eyes, had
pulled him into her boat, there was by this time no doubt whatever that he had
remained in it and that what he had really most been conscious of for many hours
together was the movement of the vessel itself. They were in it together this
moment as they hadn't yet been, and he hadn't at present uttered the least of
the words of alarm or remonstrance that had died on his lips at the hotel. He
had other things to say to her than that she had put him in a position; so
quickly had his position grown to affect him as quite excitingly, altogether
richly, inevitable. That the outlook, however - given the point of exposure -
hadn't cleared up half so much as he had reckoned was the first warning she
received from him on his arrival. She had replied with indulgence that he was in
too great a hurry, and had remarked soothingly that if she knew how to be
patient surely he might be. He felt her presence, on the spot, he felt her tone
and everything about her, as an aid to that effort; and it was perhaps one of
the proofs of her success with him that he seemed so much to take his ease while
they talked. By the time he had explained to her why his impressions, though
multiplied, still baffled
