Chapter 3

Book Third

I

Strether told Waymarsh all about it that very evening, on their
dining together at the hotel; which needn't have happened, he was
all the while aware, hadn't he chosen to sacrifice to this occasion
a rarer opportunity. The mention to his companion of the sacrifice
was moreover exactly what introduced his recital--or, as he would
have called it with more confidence in his interlocutor, his
confession. His confession was that he had been captured and that
one of the features of the affair had just failed to be his
engaging himself on the spot to dinner. As by such a freedom
Waymarsh would have lost him he had obeyed his scruple; and he had
likewise obeyed another scruple--which bore on the question of his
himself bringing a guest.

Waymarsh looked gravely ardent, over the finished soup, at this
array of scruples; Strether hadn't yet got quite used to being so
unprepared for the consequences of the impression he produced. It
was comparatively easy to explain, however, that he hadn't felt
sure his guest would please. The person was a young man whose
acquaintance he had made but that afternoon in the course of rather
a hindered enquiry for another person--an enquiry his new friend
had just prevented in fact from being vain. "Oh," said Strether,
"I've all sorts of things to tell you!"--and he put it in a way
that was a virtual hint to Waymarsh to help him to enjoy the
telling. He waited for his fish, he drank of his wine, he wiped his
long moustache, he leaned back in his chair, he took in the two
English ladies who had just creaked past them and whom he would
even have articulately greeted if they hadn't rather chilled the
impulse; so that all he could do was--by way of doing something--to
say "Merci, Francois!" out quite loud when his fish was brought.
Everything was there that he wanted, everything that could make the
moment an occasion, that would do beautifully--everything but what
Waymarsh might give. The little waxed salle-a-manger was sallow and
sociable; Francois, dancing over it, all smiles, was a man and a
brother; the high-shouldered patronne, with her high-held,
much-rubbed hands, seemed always assenting exuberantly to something
unsaid; the Paris evening in short was, for Strether, in the very
taste of the soup, in the goodness, as he was innocently pleased to
think it, of the wine, in the pleasant coarse texture of the napkin
and the crunch of the thick-crusted bread. These all were things
congruous with his confession, and his confession was that he HAD--
it would come out properly just there if Waymarsh would only take
it properly--agreed to breakfast out, at twelve literally, the next
day. He didn't quite know where; the delicacy of the case came