had muddled him was precisely the small
artist-man's way - it was so complete - of being more American than anybody. But
it now for the time put Strether vastly at his ease to have this view of a new
way.
    The amiable youth then looked out, as it had first struck Strether, at a
world in respect to which he hadn't a prejudice. The one our friend most
instantly missed was the usual one in favour of an occupation accepted. Little
Bilham had an occupation, but it was only an occupation declined; and it was by
his general exemption from alarm, anxiety or remorse on this score that the
impression of his serenity was made. He had come out to Paris to paint - to
fathom, that is, at large, that mystery; but study had been fatal to him so far
as anything could be fatal, and his productive power faltered in proportion as
his knowledge grew. Strether had gathered from him that at the moment of his
finding him in Chad's rooms he hadn't saved from his shipwreck a scrap of
anything but his beautiful intelligence and his confirmed habit of Paris. He
referred to these things with an equal fond familiarity, and it was sufficiently
clear that, as an outfit, they still served him. They were charming to Strether
through the hour spent at the Louvre, where indeed they figured for him as an
unseparated part of the charged iridescent air, the glamour of the name, the
splendour of the space, the colour of the masters. Yet they were present too
wherever the young man led, and the day after the visit to the Louvre they hung,
in a different walk, about the steps of our party. He had invited his companions
to cross the river with him, offering to show them his own poor place; and his
own poor place, which was very poor, gave to his idiosyncrasies, for Strether -
the small sublime indifferences and independences that had struck the latter as
fresh - an odd and engaging dignity. He lived at the end of an alley that went
out of an old short cobbled street, a street that went in turn out of a new long
smooth avenue - street and avenue and alley having, however, in common a sort of
social shabbiness; and he introduced them to the rather cold and blank little
studio which he had lent to a comrade for the term of his elegant absence. The
comrade was another ingenuous compatriot, to whom he had wired that tea was to
await them regardless, and this reckless repast, and the second ingenuous
compatriot, and the faraway