t otherwise at present be
feeling so many fears confirmed. There were movements he was too late for:
weren't they, with the fun of them, already spent? There were sequences he had
missed and great gaps in the procession: he might have been watching it all
recede in a golden cloud of dust. If the playhouse wasn't closed his seat had at
least fallen to somebody else. He had had an uneasy feeling the night before
that if he was at the theatre at all - though he indeed justified the theatre,
in the specific sense, and with a grotesqueness to which his imagination did all
honour, as something he owed poor Waymarsh - he should have been there with, and
as might have been said, for Chad.
    This suggested the question of whether he could properly have taken him to
such a play, and what effect - it was a point that suddenly rose - his peculiar
responsibility might be held in general to have on his choice of entertainment.
It had literally been present to him at the Gymnase - where one was held
moreover comparatively safe - that having his young friend at his side would
have been an odd feature of the work of redemption; and this quite in spite of
the fact that the picture presented might well, confronted with Chad's own
private stage, have seemed the pattern of propriety. He clearly hadn't come out
in the name of propriety but to visit unattended equivocal performances; yet
still less had he done so to undermine his authority by sharing them with the
graceless youth. Was he to renounce all amusement for the sweet sake of that
authority? and would such renouncement give him for Chad a moral glamour? The
little problem bristled the more by reason of poor Strether's fairly open sense
of the irony of things. Were there then sides on which his predicament
threatened to look rather droll to him? Should he have to pretend to believe -
either to himself or the wretched boy - that there was anything that could make
the latter worse? Wasn't some such pretence on the other hand involved in the
assumption of possible processes that would make him better? His greatest
uneasiness seemed to peep at him out of the imminent impression that almost any
acceptance of Paris might give one's authority away. It hung before him this
morning, the vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel
brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences
comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what
seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next. It was