His friend weighed a moment in silence the justice of the charge. “I can scarcely be called fierce, I think, when I so freely take my chance of the possibility, the danger, of being influenced in a sense counter to Mrs. Newsome’s own feelings.” Waymarsh gave this proposition a long hard look. “I see. You’re afraid yourself of being squared. But you’re a humbug,” he added, “all the same.” “Oh!” Strether quickly protested. “Yes, you ask me for protection—which makes you very interesting; and then you won’t take it. You say you want to be squashed—” “Ah but not so easily! Don’t you see,” Strether demanded “where my interest, as already shown you, lies? It lies in my not being squared. If I’m squared where’s my marriage? If I miss my errand I miss that; and if I miss that I miss everything—I’m nowhere.” Waymarsh—but all relentlessly—took this in. “What do I care where you are if you’re spoiled?” Their eyes met on it an instant. “Thank you awfully,” Strether at last said. “But don’t you think _her_ judgement of that—?” “Ought to content me? No.” It kept them again face to face, and the end of this was that Strether again laughed. “You do her injustice. You really _must_ know her. Good-night.” He breakfasted with Mr. Bilham on the morrow, and, as inconsequently befell, with Waymarsh massively of the party. The latter announced, at the eleventh hour and much to his friend’s surprise, that, damn it, he would as soon join him as do anything else; on which they proceeded together, strolling in a state of detachment practically luxurious for them to the Boulevard Malesherbes, a couple engaged that day with the sharp spell of Paris as confessedly, it might have been seen, as any couple among the daily thousands so compromised. They walked, wandered, wondered and, a little, lost themselves; Strether hadn’t had for years so rich a consciousness of time—a bag of gold into which he constantly dipped for a handful. It was present to him that when the little business with Mr. Bilham should be over he would still have shining hours to use absolutely as he liked. There was no great pulse of haste yet in this process of saving Chad; nor was that effect a bit more marked as he sat, half an hour later, with his legs under Chad’s mahogany, with Mr. Bilham on one side, with a friend of Mr. Bilham’s on the other, with Waymarsh stupendously opposite, and with the great hum of Paris coming up in softness, vagueness—for Strether himself indeed already positive sweetness—through the sunny windows toward which, the day before, his curiosity had raised its wings from below. The feeling strongest with him at that moment had borne fruit almost faster than he could taste it, and Strether literally felt at the present hour that there was a precipitation in his fate. He had known nothing and nobody as he stood in the street; but hadn’t his view now taken a bound in the direction of every one and of every thing?