,
clasping his large empty hands and swinging his large restless foot, clearly
looked to another quarter for justice.
    This made for independence on Strether's part, and he had in truth at no
moment of his stay been so free to go and come. The early summer brushed the
picture over and blurred everything but the near; it made a vast warm fragrant
medium in which the elements floated together on the best of terms, in which
rewards were immediate and reckonings postponed. Chad was out of town again, for
the first time since his visitor's first view of him; he had explained this
necessity - without detail, yet also without embarrassment; the circumstance was
one of those which, in the young man's life, testified to the variety of his
ties. Strether wasn't otherwise concerned with it than for its so testifying - a
pleasant multitudinous image in which he took comfort. He took comfort, by the
same stroke, in the swing of Chad's pendulum back from that other swing, the
sharp jerk towards Woollett, so stayed by his own hand. He had the entertainment
of thinking that if he had for that moment stopped the clock it was to promote
the next minute this still livelier motion. He himself did what he hadn't done
before; he took two or three times whole days off - irrespective of others, of
two or three taken with Miss Gostrey, two or three taken with little Bilham: he
went to Chartres and cultivated, before the front of the cathedral, a general
easy beatitude; he went to Fontainebleau and imagined himself on the way to
Italy; he went to Rouen with a little handbag and inordinately spent the night.
    One afternoon he did something quite different; finding himself in the
neighbourhood of a fine old house across the river, he passed under the great
arch of its doorway and asked at the porter's lodge for Madame de Vionnet. He
had already hovered more than once about that possibility, been aware of it, in
the course of ostensible strolls, as lurking but round the corner. Only it had
perversely happened, after his morning at Notre Dame, that his consistency, as
he considered and intended it, had come back to him; whereby he had reflected
that the encounter in question had been none of his making; clinging again
intensely to the strength of his position, which was precisely that there was
nothing in it for himself. From the moment he actively pursued the charming
associate of his adventure, from that moment his position weakened, for he was
then acting in an interested way. It