He clearly hadn't come out in the name of propriety but to visit unattended equivocal performances; yet still less had he done so to undermine his authority by sharing them with the graceless youth.

Was he to renounce all amusement for the sweet sake of that authority?
and WOULD such renouncement give him for Chad a moral glamour?
The little problem bristled the more by reason of poor Strether's fairly open sense of the irony of things.

Were there then sides on which his predicament threatened to look rather droll to him?
Should he have to pretend to believe--either to himself or the wretched boy--that there was anything that could make the latter worse?
Wasn't some such pretence on the other hand involved in the assumption of possible processes that would make him better?
His greatest uneasiness seemed to peep at him out of the imminent impression that almost any acceptance of Paris might give one's authority away.

It hung before him this morning, the vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked.

It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next.