Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/73

Rh seemed to peep at him out of the possible impression that almost any acceptance of Paris might give one's authority away. It hung before him this morning, the vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together; and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next. It was a place of which, unmistakably, Chad was fond; wherefore, if he, Strether, should like it too much, what on earth, with such a bond, would become of either of them? It all depended, of course—which was a gleam of light—on how the "too much" was measured; though indeed our friend fairly felt, while he prolonged the meditation I describe, that for himself, even already, a certain measure had been reached. It will have been sufficiently seen that he was not a man to neglect any good chance for reflection. Was it at all possible, for instance, to like Paris enough without liking it too much? He luckily, however, hadn't promised Mrs. Newsome not to like it at all. He was ready to recognise at this stage that such an engagement would have tied his hands. The Luxembourg gardens were, incontestably, just so adorable at this hour by reason—in addition to their intrinsic charm—of his not having taken it. The only engagement he had taken, when he looked the thing in the face, was to do what he reasonably could.

It upset him a little, none the less, after a while, to find himself at last remembering on what current of association he had been floated as far. Old imaginations of the Latin Quarter had played their part for him, and he had duly recalled its having been with this scene of rather ominous legend that, like so many young men in fiction as well as in fact, Chad had begun his course. He was quite out of it with his "home," as Strether figured the place, in the Boulevard Malesherbes now; which was perhaps why, repairing, for all fairness, at bottom, to the elder neighbourhood, our friend had felt that he could allow for the usual, the immemorial, without courting perturbation. He was not, otherwise said, in danger of seeing the youth and the Particular Person flaunt by together; and yet he was