Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/450

444 answer to such a question but that he was still practically committed—he had perhaps never yet so much known it. It made him feel old, and he would buy his railway-ticket feeling, no doubt, older—the next day; but he had meanwhile come up four flights, including the entresol, at midnight, and without a lift, for Chad's life. The young man, hearing him by this time, and with Baptiste sent to rest, was already at the door; so that Strether had before him, in renewed visibility, the cause in which he was labouring and even, with the troisième fairly gained, panting a little.

Chad offered him, as always, a welcome in which the cordial and the formal—so far as the formal was the respectful—handsomely met; and after he had expressed the hope that Strether would let himself be put up for the night the latter was in full possession of the key, as it might have been called, to what had lately happened. If he had just thought of himself as old, Chad, at sight of him, was thinking of him as older; he wanted to put him up for the night just because he was ancient and weary. It could never be said the tenant of these quarters wasn't nice to him; a tenant who, if he might indeed now keep him, was probably prepared to work it still more thoroughly. Our friend had in fact the impression that, with the least encouragement in the world, Chad would propose to keep him indefinitely; an impression in the lap of which one of his own possibilities seemed to sit. Mme. de Vionnet wished him to stay—so why didn't that happily fit? He could instal himself for the rest of his days in his young friend's spare room and draw out these days at his young friend's expense; there would really be no such logical expression of the countenance he had chosen to give. There was literally a minute—it was strange enough—during which he grasped the idea that as he was acting, as he could only act, he was inconsistent. The sign that the inspiration he had obeyed really hung together would be that—in default, always, of another career—he should promote the good cause by mounting guard on it. These things, during his first minutes, came and went; but they were after all practically disposed of as soon as he had mentioned his errand. He had come to say good-bye—