When he reached home that night, however, he knew he had been, at bottom, neither prepared nor proof; and since we have spoken of what he was, after his return, to recall and interpret, it may as well immediately be said that his real experience of these few hours put on, in that belated vision--for he scarce went to bed till morning--the aspect that is most to our purpose.
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.