where terrace-walls were warm, in the blue-frocked
brass-labelled officialism of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep references
of a straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a white-gaitered red-legged
soldier. He watched little brisk figures, figures whose movement was as the tick
of the great Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from point to point; the
air had a taste as of something mixed with art, something that presented nature
as a white-capped master-chef. The palace was gone, Strether remembered the
palace; and when he gazed into the irremediable void of its site the historic
sense in him might have been freely at play - the play under which in Paris
indeed it so often winces like a touched nerve. He filled out spaces with dim
symbols of scenes; he caught the gleam of white statues at the base of which,
with his letters out, he could tilt back a straw-bottomed chair. But his drift
was, for reasons, to the other side, and it floated him unspent up the Rue de
Seine and as far as the Luxembourg.
    In the Luxembourg Gardens he pulled up; here at last he found his nook, and
here, on a penny chair from which terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains, little
trees in green tubs, little women in white caps and shrill little girls at play
all sunnily composed together, he passed an hour in which the cup of his
impressions seemed truly to overflow. But a week had elapsed since he quitted
the ship, and there were more things in his mind than so few days could account
for. More than once, during the time, he had regarded himself as admonished; but
the admonition this morning was formidably sharp. It took as it hadn't done yet
the form of a question - the question of what he was doing with such an
extraordinary sense of escape. This sense was sharpest after he had read his
letters, but that was also precisely why the question pressed. Four of the
letters were from Mrs. Newsome and none of them short; she had lost no time, had
followed on his heels while he moved, so expressing herself that he now could
measure the probable frequency with which he should hear. They would arrive, it
would seem, her communications, at the rate of several a week; he should be able
to count, it might even prove, on more than one by each mail. If he had begun
yesterday with a small grievance he had therefore an opportunity to begin to-day
with its opposite. He read