two past midnight
There had been plenty to affect him even after , as has been said , they had shaken down ; for his consciousness , though muffled , had its sharpest moments during this passage , a marked drop into innocent friendly Bohemia . They then had put their elbows on the table , deploring the premature end of their two or three dishes ; which they had tried to make up with another bottle while Chad joked a little spasmodically , perhaps even a little irrelevantly , with the hostess . What it all came to had been that fiction and fable _ were _ , inevitably , in the air , and not as a simple term of comparison , but as a result of things said ; also that they were blinking it , all round , and that they yet need n't , so much as that , have blinked it -- though indeed if they had n't Strether did n't quite see what else they could have done . Strether did n't quite see _ that _ even at an hour or two past midnight , even when he had , at his hotel , for a long time , without a light and without undressing , sat back on his bedroom sofa and stared straight before him . He was , at that point of vantage , in full possession , to make of it all what he could . He kept making of it that there had been simply a _ lie _ in the charming affair -- a lie on which one could now , detached and deliberate , perfectly put one 's finger . It was with the lie that they had eaten and drunk and talked and laughed , that they had waited for their _ carriole _ rather impatiently , and had then got into the vehicle and , sensibly subsiding , driven their three or four miles through the darkening summer night .