s fireside, was influenced by the high flights of
the visitors from London. The smallest things so arrested and amused him that he
repeatedly almost apologised - brought up afresh in explanation his plea of a
previous grind. He was aware at the same time that his grind had been as nothing
to Waymarsh's, and he repeatedly confessed that, to cover his frivolity, he was
doing his best for his previous virtue. Do what he might, in any case, his
previous virtue was still there, and it seemed fairly to stare at him out of the
windows of shops that were not as the shops of Woollett, fairly to make him want
things that he shouldn't know what to do with. It was by the oddest, the least
admissible of laws demoralising him now; and the way it boldly took was to make
him want more wants. These first walks in Europe were in fact a kind of finely
lurid intimation of what one might find at the end of that process. Had he come
back after long years, in something already so like the evening of life, only to
be exposed to it? It was at all events over the shop-windows that he made, with
Waymarsh, most free; though it would have been easier had not the latter most
sensibly yielded to the appeal of the merely useful trades. He pierced with his
sombre detachment the plate-glass of ironmongers and saddlers, while Strether
flaunted an affinity with the dealers in stamped letter-paper and in smart
neckties. Strether was in fact recurrently shameless in the presence of the
tailors, though it was just over the heads of the tailors that his countryman
most loftily looked. This gave Miss Gostrey a grasped opportunity to back up
Waymarsh at his expense. The weary lawyer - it was unmistakeable - had a
conception of dress; but that, in view of some of the features of the effect
produced, was just what made the danger of insistence on it. Strether wondered
if he by this time thought Miss Gostrey less fashionable or Lambert Strether
more so; and it appeared probable that most of the remarks exchanged between
this latter pair about passers, figures, faces, personal types, exemplified in
their degree the disposition to talk as society talked.
    Was what was happening to himself then, was what already had happened,
really that a woman of fashion was floating him into society and that an old
friend deserted on the brink was watching the force of the current? When the
woman of fashion permitted Strether - as she permitted him at the most - the
purchase of a pair of gloves, the terms she