with a truce. When he met Strether's eye on such
occasions he looked guilty and furtive, fell the next minute into
some attitude of retractation. Our friend couldn't show him the
right things for fear of provoking some total renouncement, and was
tempted even to show him the wrong in order to make him differ with
triumph. There were moments when he himself felt shy of professing
the full sweetness of the taste of leisure, and there were others
when he found himself feeling as if his passages of interchange
with the lady at his side might fall upon the third member of their
party very much as Mr. Burchell, at Dr. Primrose's fireside, was
influenced by the high flights of the visitors from London. The
smallest things so arrested and amused him that he repeatedly
almost apologised—brought up afresh in explanation his plea of a
previous grind. He was aware at the same time that his grind had
been as nothing to Waymarsh's, and he repeatedly confessed that, to
cover his frivolity, he was doing his best for his previous virtue.
Do what he might, in any case, his previous virtue was still there,
and it seemed fairly to stare at him out of the windows of shops
that were not as the shops of Woollett, fairly to make him want
things that he shouldn't know what to do with. It was by the
oddest, the least admissible of laws demoralising him now; and the
way it boldly took was to make him want more wants. These first
walks in Europe were in fact a kind of finely lurid intimation of
what one might find at the end of that process. Had he come back
after long years, in something already so like the evening of life,
only to be exposed to it? It was at all events over the
shop-windows that he made, with Waymarsh, most free; though it
would have been easier had not the latter most sensibly yielded to
the appeal of the merely useful trades. He pierced with his sombre
detachment the plate-glass of ironmongers and saddlers, while
Strether flaunted an affinity with the dealers in stamped
letter-paper and in smart neckties. Strether was in fact
recurrently shameless in the presence of the tailors, though it was
just over the heads of the tailors that his countryman most loftily
looked. This gave Miss Gostrey a grasped opportunity to back up
Waymarsh at his expense. The weary lawyer—it was unmistakeable—had
a conception of dress; but that, in view of some of the features of
the effect produced, was just what made the danger of insistence on
it. Strether wondered if he by this time thought Miss Gostrey less
fashionable or Lambert Strether more so; and it appeared probable
that most of the remarks exchanged between this latter pair about
passers, figures, faces, personal types, exemplified in their
degree the disposition to talk as "society" talked.
Was what was happening to himself then, was what already HAD
happened, really that a woman of fashion was floating him into
society and that an old friend deserted on the brink was watching
the force of the current? When the woman of fashion permitted
Strether—as she permitted him at the most—the purchase of a pair of
gloves, the terms she made about it, the prohibition of neckties
and other items till she should be able to guide him through the
Burlington Arcade, were such as to fall upon a sensitive ear as a
challenge to just imputations. Miss Gostrey was such a woman of
fashion as could make without a symptom of vulgar blinking an
appointment for the Burlington Arcade. Mere discriminations about a
pair of gloves could thus at any rate represent—always for such
sensitive ears as were in question—possibilities of something that
Strether could make a mark against only as the peril of apparent
wantonness. He had quite the consciousness of his new friend, for
their companion, that he might have had of a Jesuit in petticoats,
a representative of the recruiting interests of the Catholic
Church. The Catholic Church, for Waymarsh-that was to say the
enemy, the monster of bulging eyes and far-reaching
occasions he looked guilty and furtive, fell the next minute into
some attitude of retractation. Our friend couldn't show him the
right things for fear of provoking some total renouncement, and was
tempted even to show him the wrong in order to make him differ with
triumph. There were moments when he himself felt shy of professing
the full sweetness of the taste of leisure, and there were others
when he found himself feeling as if his passages of interchange
with the lady at his side might fall upon the third member of their
party very much as Mr. Burchell, at Dr. Primrose's fireside, was
influenced by the high flights of the visitors from London. The
smallest things so arrested and amused him that he repeatedly
almost apologised—brought up afresh in explanation his plea of a
previous grind. He was aware at the same time that his grind had
been as nothing to Waymarsh's, and he repeatedly confessed that, to
cover his frivolity, he was doing his best for his previous virtue.
Do what he might, in any case, his previous virtue was still there,
and it seemed fairly to stare at him out of the windows of shops
that were not as the shops of Woollett, fairly to make him want
things that he shouldn't know what to do with. It was by the
oddest, the least admissible of laws demoralising him now; and the
way it boldly took was to make him want more wants. These first
walks in Europe were in fact a kind of finely lurid intimation of
what one might find at the end of that process. Had he come back
after long years, in something already so like the evening of life,
only to be exposed to it? It was at all events over the
shop-windows that he made, with Waymarsh, most free; though it
would have been easier had not the latter most sensibly yielded to
the appeal of the merely useful trades. He pierced with his sombre
detachment the plate-glass of ironmongers and saddlers, while
Strether flaunted an affinity with the dealers in stamped
letter-paper and in smart neckties. Strether was in fact
recurrently shameless in the presence of the tailors, though it was
just over the heads of the tailors that his countryman most loftily
looked. This gave Miss Gostrey a grasped opportunity to back up
Waymarsh at his expense. The weary lawyer—it was unmistakeable—had
a conception of dress; but that, in view of some of the features of
the effect produced, was just what made the danger of insistence on
it. Strether wondered if he by this time thought Miss Gostrey less
fashionable or Lambert Strether more so; and it appeared probable
that most of the remarks exchanged between this latter pair about
passers, figures, faces, personal types, exemplified in their
degree the disposition to talk as "society" talked.
Was what was happening to himself then, was what already HAD
happened, really that a woman of fashion was floating him into
society and that an old friend deserted on the brink was watching
the force of the current? When the woman of fashion permitted
Strether—as she permitted him at the most—the purchase of a pair of
gloves, the terms she made about it, the prohibition of neckties
and other items till she should be able to guide him through the
Burlington Arcade, were such as to fall upon a sensitive ear as a
challenge to just imputations. Miss Gostrey was such a woman of
fashion as could make without a symptom of vulgar blinking an
appointment for the Burlington Arcade. Mere discriminations about a
pair of gloves could thus at any rate represent—always for such
sensitive ears as were in question—possibilities of something that
Strether could make a mark against only as the peril of apparent
wantonness. He had quite the consciousness of his new friend, for
their companion, that he might have had of a Jesuit in petticoats,
a representative of the recruiting interests of the Catholic
Church. The Catholic Church, for Waymarsh-that was to say the
enemy, the monster of bulging eyes and far-reaching
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