He had originally thought of lines and tones as things to be taken, but these possibilities had now quite melted away.There was no computing at all what the young man before him would think or feel or say on any subject whatever.This intelligence Strether had afterwards, to account for his nervousness, reconstituted as he might, just as he had also reconstituted the promptness with which Chad had corrected his uncertainty.An extraordinarily short time had been required for the correction, and there had ceased to be anything negative in his companion's face and air as soon as it was made."Your engagement to my mother has become then what they call here a fait accompli?"--it had consisted, the determinant touch, in nothing more than that.
Well, that was enough, Strether had felt while his answer hung fire.He had felt at the same time, however, that nothing could less become him than that it should hang fire too long."Yes," he said brightly, "it was on the happy settlement of the question that I started.You see therefore to what tune I'm in your family.
Moreover," he added, "I've been supposing you'd suppose it.""Oh I've been supposing it for a long time, and what you tell me helps me to understand that you should want to do something.To do something, I mean," said Chad, "to commemorate an event so--what do they call it?--so auspicious.I see you make out, and not unnaturally," he continued, "that bringing me home in triumph as a sort of wedding-present to Mother would commemorate it better than anything else.You want to make a bonfire in fact," he laughed, "and you pitch me on.Thank you, thank you!" he laughed again.
He was altogether easy about it, and this made Strether now see how at bottom, and in spite of the shade of shyness that really cost him nothing, he had from the first moment been easy about everything.The shade of shyness was mere good taste.People with manners formed could apparently have, as one of their best cards, the shade of shyness too.He had leaned a little forward to speak;his elbows were on the table; and the inscrutable new face that he had got somewhere and somehow was brought by the movement nearer to his critics There was a fascination for that critic in its not being, this ripe physiognomy, the face that, under observation at least, he had originally carried away from Woollett.Strether found a certain freedom on his own side in defining it as that of a man of the world--a formula that indeed seemed to come now in some degree to his relief; that of a man to whom things had happened and were variously known.In gleams, in glances, the past did perhaps peep out of it; but such lights were faint and instantly merged.Chad was brown and thick and strong, and of old Chad had been rough.Was all the difference therefore that he was actually smooth? Possibly; for that he WAS smooth was as marked as in the taste of a sauce or in the rub of a hand.The effect of it was general--it had retouched his features, drawn them with a cleaner line.It had cleared his eyes and settled his colour and polished his fine square teeth--the main ornament of his face; and at the same time that it had given him a form and a surface, almost a design, it had toned his voice, established his accent, encouraged his smile to more play and his other motions to less.
He had formerly, with a great deal of action, expressed very little; and he now expressed whatever was necessary with almost none at all.It was as if in short he had really, copious perhaps but shapeless, been put into a firm mould and turned successfully out.The phenomenon--Strether kept eyeing it as a phenomenon, an eminent case--was marked enough to be touched by the finger.He finally put his hand across the table and laid it on Chad's arm.
"If you'll promise me--here on the spot and giving me your word of honour--to break straight off, you'll make the future the real right thing for all of us alike.You'll ease off the strain of this decent but none the less acute suspense in which I've for so many days been waiting for you, and let me turn in to rest.Ishall leave you with my blessing and go to bed in peace."Chad again fell back at this and, his hands pocketed, settled himself a little; in which posture he looked, though he rather anxiously smiled, only the more earnest.Then Strether seemed to see that he was really nervous, and he took that as what he would have called a wholesome sign.The only mark of it hitherto had been his more than once taking off and putting on his wide-brimmed crush hat.He had at this moment made the motion again to remove it, then had only pushed it back, so that it hung informally on his strong young grizzled crop.It was a touch that gave the note of the familiar--the intimate and the belated--to their quiet colloquy; and it was indeed by some such trivial aid that Strether became aware at the same moment of something else.The observation was at any rate determined in him by some light too fine to distinguish from so many others, but it was none the less sharply determined.Chad looked unmistakeably during these instants--well, as Strether put it to himself, all he was worth.Our friend had a sudden apprehension of what that would on certain sides be.
He saw him in a flash as the young man marked out by women; and for a concentrated minute the dignity, the comparative austerity, as he funnily fancied it, of this character affected him almost with awe.There was an experience on his interlocutor's part that looked out at him from under the displaced hat, and that looked out moreover by a force of its own, the deep fact of its quantity and quality, and not through Chad's intending bravado or swagger.
