 race with it. That agency would each day have testified for him to
something that was not what Woollett had argued. He was not at this moment
absolutely sure that the effect of the morrow's - or rather of the night's -
appreciation of the crisis wouldn't be to determine some brief missive. »Have at
last seen him, but oh dear!« - some temporary relief of that sort seemed to
hover before him. It hovered somehow as preparing them all - yet preparing them
for what? If he might do so more luminously and cheaply he would tick out in
four words: »Awfully old - grey hair.« To this particular item in Chad's
appearance he constantly, during their mute half-hour, reverted; as if so very
much more than he could have said had been involved in it. The most he could
have said would have been: »If he's going to make me feel young -!« which
indeed, however, carried with it quite enough. If Strether was to feel young,
that is, it would be because Chad was to feel old; and an aged and hoary sinner
had been no part of the scheme.
    The question of Chadwick's true time of life was, doubtless, what came up
quickest after the adjournment of the two, when the play was over, to a café in
the Avenue de l'Opéra. Miss Gostrey had in due course been perfect for such a
step; she had known exactly what they wanted - to go straight somewhere and
talk; and Strether had even felt she had known what he wished to say and that he
was arranging immediately to begin. She hadn't pretended this, as she had
pretended on the other hand, to have divined Waymarsh's wish to extend to her an
independent protection homeward; but Strether nevertheless found how, after he
had Chad opposite to him at a small table in the brilliant halls that his
companion straightway selected, sharply and easily discriminated from others, it
was quite, to his mind, as if she heard him speak; as if, sitting up, a mile
away, in the little apartment he knew, she would listen hard enough to catch. He
found too that he liked that idea, and he wished that, by the same token, Mrs.
Newsome might have caught as well. For what had above all been determined in him
as a necessity of the first order was not to lose another hour, nor a fraction
of one; was to advance, to overwhelm, with a rush. This
