He could perform before strangers, but relatives were fatal, and it was now as if, comparatively, Waymarsh were a relative.

He seemed to hear him say "Strike up then!" and to enjoy a foretaste of conscientious domestic criticism.

He HAD struck up, so far as he actually could; Chad knew by this time in profusion what he wanted; and what vulgar violence did his fellow pilgrim expect of him when he had really emptied his mind?
It went somehow to and fro that what poor Waymarsh meant was "I told you so--that you'd lose your immortal soul!" but it was also fairly explicit that Strether had his own challenge and that, since they must go to the bottom of things, he wasted no more virtue in watching Chad than Chad wasted in watching him.

His dip for duty's sake--where was it worse than Waymarsh's own?
For HE needn't have stopped resisting and refusing, needn't have parleyed, at that rate, with the foe.
The strolls over Paris to see something or call somewhere were accordingly inevitable and natural, and the late sessions in the wondrous troisieme, the lovely home, when men dropped in and the picture composed more suggestively through the haze of tobacco, of music more or less good and of talk more or less polyglot, were on a principle not to be distinguished from that of the mornings and the afternoons.

Nothing, Strether had to recognise as he leaned back and smoked, could well less resemble a scene of violence than even the liveliest of these occasions.