to strike his roots, had paved the way for initiations more direct
and more deep. It was Strether's belief that he had been comparatively innocent
before this first migration, and even that the first effects of the migration
would not have been, without some particular bad accident, to have been
deplored. There had been three months - he had sufficiently figured it out - in
which Chad had wanted to try. He had tried, though not very hard - he had had
his little hour of good faith. The weakness of this principle in him was that
almost any accident attestedly bad enough was stronger. Such had at any rate
markedly been the case for the precipitation of a special series of impressions.
They had proved, successively, these impressions - all of Musette and Francine,
but Musette and Francine vulgarised by the larger evolution of the type -
irresistibly sharp: he had taken up, by what was at the time to be shrinkingly
gathered, as it was scantly mentioned, with one ferociously interested little
person after another. Strether had read somewhere of a Latin motto, a
description of the hours, observed on a clock by a traveller in Spain; and he
had been led to apply it in thought to Chad's number one, number two, number
three. Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat - they had all morally wounded, the last
had morally killed. The last had been longest in possession - in possession,
that is, of whatever was left of the poor boy's finer mortality. And it hadn't
been she, it had been one of her early predecessors, who had determined the
second migration, the expensive return and relapse, the exchange again, as was
fairly to be presumed, of the vaunted best French for some special variety of
the worst.
    He pulled himself then at last together for his own progress back; not with
the feeling that he had taken his walk in vain. He prolonged it a little, in the
immediate neighbourhood, after he had quitted his chair; and the upshot of the
whole morning for him was that his campaign had begun. He had wanted to put
himself in relation, and he would be hanged if he were not in relation. He was
that at no moment so much as while, under the old arches of the Odéon, he
lingered before the charming open-air array of literature classic and casual. He
found the effect of tone and tint, in the long charged tables and shelves,
delicate and appetising; the impression - substituting one kind of low-priced
consommation for another - might have been that of