He then knew more or less how he had been affected--he but half
knew at the time. There had been plenty to affect him even after,
as has been said, they had shaken down; for his consciousness,
though muffled, had its sharpest moments during this passage, a
marked drop into innocent friendly Bohemia. They then had put
their elbows on the table, deploring the premature end of their two
or three dishes; which they had tried to make up with another
bottle while Chad joked a little spasmodically, perhaps even a
little irrelevantly, with the hostess. What it all came to had
been that fiction and fable WERE, inevitably, in the air, and not
as a simple term of comparison, but as a result of things said;
also that they were blinking it, all round, and that they yet needn't,
so much as that, have blinked it--though indeed if they hadn't
Strether didn't quite see what else they could have done.
Strether didn't quite see THAT even at an hour or two past midnight,
even when he had, at his hotel, for a long time, without a light
and without undressing, sat back on his bedroom sofa and stared
straight before him. He was, at that point of vantage, in full
possession, to make of it all what he could. He kept making of it
that there had been simply a LIE in the charming affair--a lie
on which one could now, detached and deliberate, perfectly put
one's finger.
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