"He's not so good as you think!"
They remained with him, these words, promising him, in their
character of warning, considerable help; but the support he tried
to draw from them found itself on each renewal of contact with
Chad defeated by something else. What could it be, this
disconcerting force, he asked himself, but the sense, constantly
renewed, that Chad WAS--quite in fact insisted on being--as good
as he thought? It seemed somehow as if he couldn't BUT be as good
from the moment he wasn't as bad. There was a succession of days
at all events when contact with him--and in its immediate effect,
as if it could produce no other--elbowed out of Strether's
consciousness everything but itself. Little Bilham once more
pervaded the scene, but little Bilham became even in a higher
degree than he had originally been one of the numerous forms of
the inclusive relation; a consequence promoted, to our friend's
sense, by two or three incidents with which we have yet to make
acquaintance. Waymarsh himself, for the occasion, was drawn into
the eddy; it absolutely, though but temporarily, swallowed him
down, and there were days when Strether seemed to bump against him
as a sinking swimmer might brush a submarine object.
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