They were folded now over the breasts of buried generations;
but a flutter or two lived again in the turned page of shock-headed
slouch-hatted loiterers whose young intensity of type, in the direction
of pale acuteness, deepened his vision, and even his appreciation,
of racial differences, and whose manipulation of the uncut volume was
too often, however, but a listening at closed doors. He reconstructed
a possible groping Chad of three or four years before, a Chad who had,
after all, simply--for that was the only way to see it--been too vulgar
for his privilege. Surely it WAS a privilege to have been young and
happy just there. Well, the best thing Strether knew of him was that
he had had such a dream.
But his own actual business half an hour later was with a third
floor on the Boulevard Malesherbes--so much as that was definite;
and the fact of the enjoyment by the third-floor windows of a
continuous balcony, to which he was helped by this knowledge, had
perhaps something to do with his lingering for five minutes on the
opposite side of the street. There were points as to which he had
quite made up his mind, and one of these bore precisely on the
wisdom of the abruptness to which events had finally committed him,
a policy that he was pleased to find not at all shaken as he now
looked at his watch and wondered.
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