Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/74

68 in the very air of which—just to feel what the early, natural note must have been—he wished most to take counsel. It became, on the spot, vivid to him that he had originally had for a few days an almost envious vision of the boy's romantic privilege. Melancholy Murger, with Francine and Musette and Rodolphe, was, in the company of the tattered at home, one of the unbound dozen—if he was not indeed in his single self as much as two or three; and when Chad had written, five or six years ago, after a sojourn then already prolonged for several months, that he had decided to go in for economy and the real thing, Strether's fancy had quite fondly accompanied him in this migration, which was to convey him, as they somewhat confusedly learned at Woollett, across the bridges and up the Montagne Sainte-Genevieve. This was the region—Chad had been quite distinct about it—in which the best French, and many other things, were to be learned at least cost, and in which all sorts of clever fellows, compatriots there for a purpose, formed an awfully pleasant set. The clever fellows, the friendly countrymen, were mainly young painters, sculptors, architects, students of music and of medicine; but they were, Chad sagely opined, a much more profitable lot to be with—even on the footing of not being quite one of them—than the "terrible toughs" (Strether remembered the edifying discrimination) of the American bars and banks round about the Opera. Chad had thrown out, in the communications following this one—for at that time he did once in a while communicate—that several members of a band of earnest workers under one of the great artists had taken him right in, making him dine every night, almost for nothing, at their place, and even pressing him not to neglect the hypothesis of there being as much "in him" as in any of them. There had been literally a moment at which it appeared that there might be something in him; there had been at any rate a moment at which he had written that he didn't know but what a month or two more might see him enrolled in some atelier. The season had been one at which Mrs. Newsome was moved to gratitude for small mercies; it had broken on them all as a blessing that their absentee had perhaps a conscience—that he was sated, in short, with idleness