Chapter 4 - Page 2

the more, I seem to make out, to our purpose."

"Do I strike you as improved?" Strether was to recall that Chad
had at this point enquired.

He was likewise to recall--and it had to count for some time as
his greatest comfort--that it had been "given" him, as they said
at Woollett, to reply with some presence of mind: "I haven't the
least idea." He was really for a while to like thinking he had
been positively hard. On the point of conceding that Chad had
improved in appearance, but that to the question of appearance the
remark must be confined, he checked even that compromise and left
his reservation bare. Not only his moral, but also, as it were,
his aesthetic sense had a little to pay for this, Chad being
unmistakeably--and wasn't it a matter of the confounded grey hair
again?--handsomer than he had ever promised. That however fell in
perfectly with what Strether had said. They had no desire to keep
down his proper expansion, and he wouldn't be less to their
purpose for not looking, as he had too often done of old, only
bold and wild. There was indeed a signal particular in which he
would distinctly be more so. Strether didn't, as he talked,
absolutely follow himself; he only knew he was clutching his
thread and that he held it from moment to moment a little tighter;
his mere uninterruptedness during the few minutes helped him to do
that. He had frequently for a month, turned over what he should
say on this very occasion, and he seemed at last to have said
nothing he had thought of--everything was so totally different.

But in spite of all he had put the flag at the window. This was
what he had done, and there was a minute during which he affected
himself as having shaken it hard, flapped it with a mighty
flutter, straight in front of his companion's nose. It gave him
really almost the sense of having already acted his part. The
momentary relief--as if from the knowledge that nothing of THAT
at least could be undone--sprang from a particular cause, the
cause that had flashed into operation, in Miss Gostrey's box, with
direct apprehension, with amazed recognition, and that had been
concerned since then in every throb of his consciousness. What it
came to was that with an absolutely new quantity to deal with one
simply couldn't know. The new quantity was represented by the fact
that Chad had been made over. That was all; whatever it was it was
everything. Strether had never seen the thing so done before--it
was perhaps a speciality of Paris. If one had been present at the
process one might little by little have mastered the result; but
he was face to face, as matters stood, with the finished business.
It had freely been noted for him that he might be received as a
dog among