migration, and even that the first effects of the migration would
not have been, without some particular bad accident, to have been
deplored. There had been three months--he had sufficiently figured
it out--in which Chad had wanted to try. He HAD tried, though not
very hard--he had had his little hour of good faith. The weakness
of this principle in him was that almost any accident attestedly
bad enough was stronger. Such had at any rate markedly been the
case for the precipitation of a special series of impressions.
They had proved, successively, these impressions--all of Musette
and Francine, but Musette and Francine vulgarised by the larger
evolution of the type--irresistibly sharp: he had "taken up," by
what was at the time to be shrinkingly gathered, as it was scantly
mentioned, with one ferociously "interested" little person after
another. Strether had read somewhere of a Latin motto, a
description of the hours, observed on a clock by a traveller in
Spain; and he had been led to apply it in thought to Chad's number
one, number two, number three. Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat--they
had all morally wounded, the last had morally killed. The last had
been longest in possession--in possession, that is, of whatever
was left of the poor boy's finer mortality. And it hadn't been
she, it had been one of her early predecessors, who had determined
the second migration, the expensive return and relapse, the
exchange again, as was fairly to be presumed, of the vaunted best
French for some special variety of the worst.

He pulled himself then at last together for his own progress back;
not with the feeling that he had taken his walk in vain. He
prolonged it a little, in the immediate neighbourhood, after he
had quitted his chair; and the upshot of the whole morning for him
was that his campaign had begun. He had wanted to put himself in