Chapter 12 - Page 2

friend under the rubric of Postes et Telegraphes--
the something in the air of these establishments; the vibration of
the vast strange life of the town, the influence of the types,
the performers concocting their messages; the little prompt Paris women,
arranging, pretexting goodness knew what, driving the dreadful
needle-pointed public pen at the dreadful sand-strewn public table:
implements that symbolised for Strether's too interpretative innocence
something more acute in manners, more sinister in morals, more fierce
in the national life. After he had put in his paper he had ranged
himself, he was really amused to think, on the side of the fierce,
the sinister, the acute. He was carrying on a correspondence,
across the great city, quite in the key of the Postes et Telegraphes
in general; and it was fairly as if the acceptance of that fact had
come from something in his state that sorted with the occupation of
his neighbours. He was mixed up with the typical tale of Paris, and so
were they, poor things--how could they all together help being?
They were no worse than he, in short, and he no worse than they--
if, queerly enough, no better; and at all events he had settled his
hash, so that he went out to begin, from that moment, his day of
waiting. The great settlement was, as he felt, in his preference
for seeing his correspondent in her own best conditions. THAT was
part of the typical tale, the part most significant in respect to
himself. He liked the place she lived in, the picture that each
time squared itself, large and high and clear, around her: every
occasion of seeing it was a pleasure of a different shade. Yet
what precisely was he doing with shades of pleasure now, and why
hadn't he properly and logically compelled her to commit herself
to whatever of disadvantage and penalty the situation might throw
up? He might have proposed, as for Sarah Pocock, the cold
hospitality of his own salon de lecture, in which the chill of
Sarah's visit seemed still to abide and shades of pleasure were
dim; he might have suggested a stone bench in the dusty Tuileries
or a penny chair at the back part of the Champs Elysees. These
things would have been a trifle stern, and sternness alone now
wouldn't be sinister. An instinct in him cast about for some form
of discipline in which they might meet--some awkwardness they would
suffer from, some danger, or at least some grave inconvenience,
they would incur. This would give a sense--which the spirit
required, rather ached and sighed in the absence of--that somebody
was paying something somewhere and somehow, that they were at least
not all floating together on the silver stream of impunity. Just
instead of that to go and see her late in the evening, as if, for
all