midnight
He did happen to have a scruple -- a scruple about taking no definite step till he should get letters ; but this reasoning carried it off . A single day to feel his feet -- he had felt them as yet only at Chester and in London -- was he could consider , none too much ; and having , as he had often privately expressed it , Paris to reckon with , he threw these hours of freshness consciously into the reckoning . They made it continually greater , but that was what it had best be if it was to be anything at all , and he gave himself up till far into the evening , at the theatre and on the return , after the theatre , along the bright congested Boulevard , to feeling it grow . Waymarsh had accompanied him this time to the play , and the two men had walked together , as a first stage , from the Gymnase to the Café Riche , into the crowded `` terrace '' of which establishment -- the night , or rather the morning , for midnight had struck , being bland and populous -- they had wedged themselves for refreshment . Waymarsh , as a result of some discussion with his friend , had made a marked virtue of his having now let himself go ; and there had been elements of impression in their half-hour over their watered beer-glasses that gave him his occasion for conveying that he held this compromise with his stiffer self to have become extreme . He conveyed it -- for it was still , after all , his stiffer self who gloomed out of the glare of the terrace -- in solemn silence ; and there was indeed a great deal of critical silence , every way , between the companions , even till they gained the Place de l'Opéra , as to the character of their nocturnal progress . This morning there _ were _ letters -- letters which had reached London , apparently all together , the day of Strether 's journey , and had taken their time to follow him ; so that , after a controlled impulse to go into them in the reception-room of the bank , which , reminding him of the post-office at Woollett , affected him as the abutment of some transatlantic bridge , he slipped them into the pocket of his loose grey overcoat with a sense of the felicity of carrying them off .