Chapter 28

Summary

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 inquiries of the concierge. Chad had not 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 satisfaction there was that everyone 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 lemoncoloured and tender, with the ivory knife athwart it like a 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.