There had already been things in respect to which he knew himself tempted by this perversity. If Waymarsh thought them bad he should at least have his reason for his discomfort; so Strether showed them as worse. Still, he was now, in his way, sincerely perplexed. Chad had been absent from the Boulevard Malesherbes—was absent from Paris altogether; he had learned that from the concierge, but had nevertheless gone up, and gone up—there were no two ways about it—from an uncontrollable, a really, if one would, depraved curiosity. The concierge had mentioned to him that a friend of the tenant of the troisième was for the time in possession; and this had been Strether’s pretext for a further enquiry, an experiment carried on, under Chad’s roof, without his knowledge. “I found his friend in fact there keeping the place warm, as he called it, for him; Chad himself being, as appears, in the south. He went a month ago to Cannes and though his return begins to be looked for it can’t be for some days. I might, you see, perfectly have waited a week; might have beaten a retreat as soon as I got this essential knowledge. But I beat no retreat; I did the opposite; I stayed, I dawdled, I trifled; above all I looked round. I saw, in fine; and—I don’t know what to call it—I sniffed. It’s a detail, but it’s as if there were something—something very good—_to_ sniff.” Waymarsh’s face had shown his friend an attention apparently so remote that the latter was slightly surprised to find it at this point abreast with him. “Do you mean a smell? What of?” “A charming scent. But I don’t know.” Waymarsh gave an inferential grunt. “Does he live there with a woman?” “I don’t know.” Waymarsh waited an instant for more, then resumed. “Has he taken her off with him?” “And will he bring her back?”—Strether fell into the enquiry. But he wound it up as before. “I don’t know.” The way he wound it up, accompanied as this was with another drop back, another degustation of the Léoville, another wipe of his moustache and another good word for François, seemed to produce in his companion a slight irritation. “Then what the devil _do_ you know?” “Well,” said Strether almost gaily, “I guess I don’t know anything!” His gaiety might have been a tribute to the fact that the state he had been reduced to did for him again what had been done by his talk of the matter with Miss Gostrey at the London theatre. It was somehow enlarging; and the air of that amplitude was now doubtless more or less—and all for Waymarsh to feel—in his further response. “That’s what I found out from the young man.” “But I thought you said you found out nothing.” “Nothing but that—that I don’t know anything.” “And what good does that do you?” “It’s just,” said Strether, “what I’ve come to you to help me to discover. I mean anything about anything over here. I _felt_ that, up there. It regularly rose before me in its might. The young man moreover—Chad’s friend—as good as told me so.”