able
logic to pay for it he was literally impatient to know the cost, and he
held himself ready to pay in instalments. The first instalment would
be precisely this entertainment of Sarah; as a consequence of which
moreover, he should know vastly better how he stood.

Book Eighth

I

Strether rambled alone during these few days, the effect of the
incident of the previous week having been to simplify in a marked
fashion his mixed relations with Waymarsh. Nothing had passed between
them in reference to Mrs. Newsome's summons but that our friend had
mentioned to his own the departure of the deputation actually at
sea--giving him thus an opportunity to confess to the occult
intervention he imputed to him. Waymarsh however in the event
confessed to nothing; and though this falsified in some degree
Strether's forecast the latter amusedly saw in it the same depth of
good conscience out of which the dear man's impertinence had originally
sprung. He was patient with the dear man now and delighted to observe
how unmistakeably he had put on flesh; he felt his own holiday so
successfully large and free that he was full of allowances and
charities in respect to those cabined and confined' his instinct toward
a spirit so strapped down as Waymarsh's was to walk round it on tiptoe
for fear of waking it up to a sense of losses by this time
irretrievable. It was all very funny he knew, and but the difference,
as he often said to himself, of tweedledum and tweedledee--an
emancipation so purely comparative that it was like the advance of the
door-mat on the scraper; yet the present crisis was happily to profit
by it and the pilgrim from Milrose to know himself more than ever in
the right.

Strether felt that when he heard of the approach of the Pococks the
impulse of pity quite sprang up in him beside the impulse of triumph.
That was exactly why Waymarsh had looked at him with eyes in which the
heat of justice was measured and shaded. He had looked very hard, as
if affectionately sorry for the friend--the friend of fifty-five--whose
frivolity had had thus to be recorded; becoming, however, but obscurely
sententious and leaving his companion to formulate a charge. It was in
this general attitude that he had of late altogether taken refuge; with
the drop of discussion they were solemnly sadly superficial; Strether
recognised in him the mere portentous rumination to which Miss Barrace
had so good-humouredly describ