: implements that symbolised for Strether's too interpretative innocence
something more acute in manners, more sinister in morals, more fierce in the
national life. After he had put in his paper he had ranged himself, he was
really amused to think, on the side of the fierce, the sinister, the acute. He
was carrying on a correspondence, across the great city, quite in the key of the
Postes et Télégraphes in general; and it was fairly as if the acceptance of that
fact had come from something in his state that sorted with the occupation of his
neighbours. He was mixed up with the typical tale of Paris, and so were they,
poor things - how could they all together help being? They were no worse than
he, in short, and he no worse than they - if, queerly enough, no better; and at
all events he had settled his hash, so that he went out to begin, from that
moment, his day of waiting. The great settlement was, as he felt, in his
preference for seeing his correspondent in her own best conditions. That was
part of the typical tale, the part most significant in respect to himself. He
liked the place she lived in, the picture that each time squared itself, large
and high and clear, around her: every occasion of seeing it was a pleasure of a
different shade. Yet what precisely was he doing with shades of pleasure now,
and why hadn't he properly and logically compelled her to commit herself to
whatever of disadvantage and penalty the situation might throw up? He might have
proposed, as for Sarah Pocock, the cold hospitality of his own salon de lecture,
in which the chill of Sarah's visit seemed still to abide and shades of pleasure
were dim; he might have suggested a stone bench in the dusty Tuileries or a
penny chair at the back part of the Champs Elysées. These things would have been
a trifle stern, and sternness alone now wouldn't be sinister. An instinct in him
cast about for some form of discipline in which they might meet - some
awkwardness they would suffer from, some danger, or at least some grave
inconvenience, they would incur. This would give a sense - which the spirit
required, rather ached and sighed in the absence of - that somebody was paying
something somewhere and somehow, that they were at least not all floating
together on the silver stream of impunity. Just instead of that to go and see
her late in the evening, as if, for all the world - well, as if he were