He felt it in fact, he had it beside him; the old arcade indeed, as his inner sense listened, gave out the faint sound, as from far off, of the wild waving of wings.

They were folded now over the breasts of buried generations; but a flutter or two lived again in the turned page of shock-headed slouch-hatted loiterers whose young intensity of type, in the direction of pale acuteness, deepened his vision, and even his appreciation, of racial differences, and whose manipulation of the uncut volume was too often, however, but a listening at closed doors.

He reconstructed a possible groping Chad of three or four years before, a Chad who had, after all, simply--for that was the only way to see it--been too vulgar for his privilege.

Surely it WAS a privilege to have been young and happy just there.

Well, the best thing Strether knew of him was that he had had such a dream.
But his own actual business half an hour later was with a third floor on the Boulevard Malesherbes--so much as that was definite; and the fact of the enjoyment by the third-floor windows of a continuous balcony, to which he was helped by this knowledge, had perhaps something to do with his lingering for five minutes on the opposite side of the street.