Chapter 11

Book Eleventh

I

He went late that evening to the Boulevard Malesherbes, having his
impression that it would be vain to go early, and having also, more
than once in the course of the day, made enquiries of the concierge.
Chad hadn't come in and had left no intimation; he had affairs,
apparently, at this juncture--as it occurred to Strether he so well
might have--that kept him long abroad. Our friend asked once for
him at the hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, but the only contribution
offered there was the fact that every one was out. It was with
the idea that he would have to come home to sleep that Strether
went up to his rooms, from which however he was still absent, though,
from the balcony, a few moments later, his visitor heard eleven
o'clock strike. Chad's servant had by this time answered for his
reappearance; he HAD, the visitor learned, come quickly in to dress
for dinner and vanish again. Strether spent an hour in waiting
for him--an hour full of strange suggestions, persuasions, recognitions;
one of those that he was to recall, at the end of his adventure, as
the particular handful that most had counted. The mellowest lamplight
and the easiest chair had been placed at his disposal by Baptiste,
subtlest of servants; the novel half-uncut, the novel lemon-coloured
and tender, with the ivory knife athwart it like the dagger in a
contadina's hair, had been pushed within the soft circle--a circle
which, for some reason, affected Strether as softer still after
the same Baptiste had remarked that in the absence of a further need
of anything by Monsieur he would betake himself to bed. The night
was hot and heavy and the single lamp sufficient; the great flare
of the lighted city, rising high, spending itself afar, played up
from the Boulevard and, through the vague vista of the successive
rooms, brought objects into view and added to their dignity.
Strether found himself in possession as he never yet had been;
he had been there alone, had turned over books and prints,
had invoked, in Chad's absence, the spirit of the place,
but never at the witching hour and never with a relish quite
so like a pang.

He spent a long time on the balcony; he hung over it as he had seen
little Bilham hang the day of his first approach, as he had seen
Mamie hang over her own the day little Bilham himself might have
seen her from below; he passed back into the rooms, the three that
occupied the front and that communicated by wide doors; and, while
he circulated and rested, tried to recover the impression that they
had made on him three months before, to catch again the voice in
which they had seemed then to speak to him. That voice, he had to
note, failed audibly to sound; which he took as the proof of