 any subject whatever. This
intelligence Strether had afterwards, to account for his nervousness,
reconstituted as he might, just as he had also reconstituted the promptness with
which Chad had corrected his uncertainty. An extraordinarily short time had been
required for the correction, and there had ceased to be anything negative in his
companion's face and air as soon as it was made. »Your engagement to my mother
has become then what they call here a fait accompli?« - it had consisted, the
determinant touch, in nothing more than that.
    Well, that was enough, Strether had felt while his answer hung fire. He had
felt at the same time, however, that nothing could less become him than that it
should hang fire too long. »Yes,« he said brightly, »it was on the happy
settlement of the question that I started. You see therefore to what tune I'm in
your family. Moreover,« he added, »I've been supposing you'd suppose it.«
    »Oh I've been supposing it for a long time, and what you tell me helps me to
understand that you should want to do something. To do something, I mean,« said
Chad, »to commemorate an event so - what do they call it? - so auspicious. I see
you make out, and not unnaturally,« he continued, »that bringing me home in
triumph as a sort of wedding-present to Mother would commemorate it better than
anything else. You want to make a bonfire in fact,« he laughed, »and you pitch
me on. Thank you, thank you!« he laughed again.
    He was altogether easy about it, and this made Strether now see how at
bottom, and in spite of the shade of shyness that really cost him nothing, he
had from the first moment been easy about everything. The shade of shyness was
mere good taste. People with manners formed could apparently have, as one of
their best cards, the shade of shyness too. He had leaned a little forward to
speak; his elbows were on the table; and the inscrutable new face that he had
got somewhere and somehow was brought by the movement nearer to his critic's.
There was a fascination for that critic in its not being, this ripe physiognomy,
the face that, under observation at least, he had originally carried away from
Woollett. Strether found a certain freedom on his own side in defining it as
that of a man of the world - a formula that indeed seemed to come now in
