Chapter 10

Book Tenth

I

Strether occupied beside little Bilham, three evenings after his
interview with Mamie Pocock, the same deep divan they had enjoyed
together on the first occasion of our friend's meeting Madame de
Vionnet and her daughter in the apartment of the Boulevard
Malesherbes, where his position affirmed itself again as ministering
to an easy exchange of impressions. The present evening had a
different stamp; if the company was much more numerous, so,
inevitably, were the ideas set in motion. It was on the other
hand, however, now strongly marked that the talkers moved,
in respect to such matters, round an inner, a protected circle.
They knew at any rate what really concerned them to-night, and
Strether had begun by keeping his companion close to it.
Only a few of Chad's guests had dined--that is fifteen or twenty,
a few compared with the large concourse offered to sight by eleven
o'clock; but number and mass, quantity and quality, light,
fragrance, sound, the overflow of hospitality meeting the high tide
of response, had all from the first pressed upon Strether's
consciousness, and he felt himself somehow part and parcel of the
most festive scene, as the term was, in which he had ever in his
life been engaged. He had perhaps seen, on Fourths of July and on
dear old domestic Commencements, more people assembled, but he had
never seen so many in proportion to the space, or had at all events
never known so great a promiscuity to show so markedly as picked.
Numerous as was the company, it had still been made so by
selection, and what was above all rare for Strether was that, by no
fault of his own, he was in the secret of the principle that had
worked. He hadn't enquired, he had averted his head, but Chad had
put him a pair of questions that themselves smoothed the ground.
He hadn't answered the questions, he had replied that they were
the young man's own affair; and he had then seen perfectly that the
latter's direction was already settled.

Chad had applied for counsel only by way of intimating that he knew
what to do; and he had clearly never known it better than in now
presenting to his sister the whole circle of his society. This was
all in the sense and the spirit of the note struck by him on that
lady's arrival; he had taken at the station itself a line that led
him without a break, and that enabled him to lead the Pococks--
though dazed a little, no doubt, breathless, no doubt, and
bewildered--to the uttermost end of the passage accepted by them
perforce as pleasant. He had made it for them violently pleasant
and mercilessly full; the upshot of which was, to Strether's
vision, that they had come all the way without discovering it to be
really no passage at all. It