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Updated: June 4, 2025
"How much, poor Mr. Strether, you seem to have to see about! But you can't say," she gaily declared, "that I don't do what I can to help you. Mr. Waymarsh is placed. I've left him in the house with Miss Gostrey." "The way," little Bilham exclaimed, "Mr. Strether gets the ladies to work for him! He's just preparing to draw in another; to pounce don't you see him? on Madame de Vionnet."
Strether had found himself deferring to his companion's abruptness as to a hint that he should be answered as soon as they were more isolated. This happened when after a few steps in the outer air they had turned the next comer. There our friend had kept it up. "Why isn't he free if he's good?" Little Bilham looked him full in the face. "Because it's a virtuous attachment."
I feel don't YOU? that I want to stop little Bilham; he's so exactly right as he is." She continued to talk to Waymarsh. "He's too delightful. If he'll only not spoil it! But they always WILL; they always do; they always have." "I don't think Waymarsh knows," Strether said after a moment, "quite what it's open to Bilham to spoil."
"It was Chad of course," said little Bilham, "who asked the next young man I like your name for me! to call." "So I supposed all of which, thank God, is in our innocent and natural manners. But do you know," Strether asked, "if Chad knows ?" And then as this interlocutor seemed at a loss: "Why where she has come out."
And yet it's always as charming as this; it's as if, by something in the air, our squalor didn't show. It puts us all back into the last century." "I'm afraid," Strether said, amused, "that it puts me rather forward: oh ever so far!" "Into the next? But isn't that only," little Bilham asked, "because you're really of the century before?" "The century before the last? Thank you!" Strether laughed.
It would have been odious and unmannerly as well as quite perverse if I hadn't. What interest have you in deceiving me?" The young man cast about. "What interest have I?" "Yes. Chad MIGHT have. But you?" "Ah, ah, ah!" little Bilham exclaimed.
"Ah but" little Bilham put it with discouragement "what do we achieve after all? We see about you and report when we even go so far as reporting. But nothing's done." "Oh you, Mr. Bilham," she replied as with an impatient rap on the glass, "you're not worth sixpence! You come over to convert the savages for I know you verily did, I remember you and the savages simply convert YOU."
Here, for instance, is the central scene of the whole story, the scene in the old Parisian garden, where Strether, finally filled to the brim with the sensation of all the life for which his own opportunity has passed, overflows with his passionate exhortation to little Bilham warning him, adjuring him not to make his mistake, not to let life slide away ungrasped.
It was on the detail of this quantity and what could the fact be but mystifying?-that Bilham and Miss Barrace threw so little light. So there they were. When Miss Gostrey arrived, at the end of a week, she made him a sign; he went immediately to see her, and it wasn't till then that he could again close his grasp on the idea of a corrective.
"And where the devil IS he?" She passed it on with a laugh. "Where the devil, Strether, are you?" He spoke as if he had just been thinking it out. "Well, quite already in Chad's hands, it would seem." And he had had with this another thought. "Will that be just all through Bilham the way he's going to work it? It would be, for him, you know, an idea. And Chad with an idea !"
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