Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/449

Rh sight of it; it was as if his last day were oddly copying his first. The windows of Chad's apartment were open to the balcony—a pair of them lighted; and a figure that had come out and taken up little Bilham's attitude, a figure whose cigarette-spark he could see, leaned on the rail and looked down at him. It denoted, however, no reappearance of his younger friend; it quickly defined itself in the tempered darkness as Chad's more solid shape; so Chad's was the attention that, after he had stepped forward into the street and signalled, he easily engaged: Chad's the voice that, with promptness and seemingly with joy, called him straight up.

That the young man was visible there in just this position expressed somehow for Strether that, as Maria Gostrey had reported, he had been absent and silent; and our friend drew breath on each landing—the lift at that hour having ceased to work—before the implications of the fact. He had been, for a week, intensely away, away to a distance and alone; but he was more back than ever, and the attitude in which Strether had surprised him was something more than a return—it was clearly a conscious surrender. He had arrived but an hour before, from London, from Lucerne, from Homburg, from no matter where—though the visitor's vision, on the staircase, liked to fill it out; and after a bath, a talk with Baptiste and a supper of light cold clever French things, which one could see there in the circle of the lamp, pretty and ultra-Parisian, he had come into the air again for a smoke, was occupied at the moment of Strether's greeting in what might have been called taking up his life afresh. His life, his life!—Strether paused anew, on the last flight, at this final rather breathless sense of what Chad's life was doing with him. It was dragging him, at strange hours, up the staircases of the rich; it was keeping him out of bed at the end of long, hot days; it was transforming beyond recognition the simple, subtle, conveniently uniform thing that had anciently passed with him for a life of his own. Why should it concern him that Chad should be fortified in the pleasant practice of smoking on balconies, of supping on salads, of feeling his special conditions agreeably reaffirm themselves, of finding reassurance in comparisons and contrasts? There was no