Miss Gostrey had in due course been perfect for such a step; she had known exactly what they wanted--to go straight somewhere and talk; and Strether had even felt she had known what he wished to say and that he was arranging immediately to begin.

She hadn't pretended this, as she HAD pretended on the other hand, to have divined Waymarsh's wish to extend to her an independent protection homeward; but Strether nevertheless found how, after he had Chad opposite to him at a small table in the brilliant halls that his companion straightway selected, sharply and easily discriminated from others, it was quite, to his mind, as if she heard him speak; as if, sitting up, a mile away, in the little apartment he knew, she would listen hard enough to catch.

He found too that he liked that idea, and he wished that, by the same token, Mrs.Newsome might have caught as well.

For what had above all been determined in him as a necessity of the first order was not to lose another hour, nor a fraction of one; was to advance, to overwhelm, with a rush.

This was how he would anticipate--by a night-attack, as might be--any forced maturity that a crammed consciousness of Paris was likely to take upon itself to assert on behalf of the boy.