enough. "It must be funny."

"Oh it IS funny." That of course essentially went with it.

But it brought them back. How indeed then she must cared, in answer to
which Strether's entertainer dropped a comprehensive "Ah!" expressive
perhaps of some impatience for the time he took to get used to it. She
herself had got used to it long before.

II

When one morning within the week he perceived the whole thing to be
really at last upon him Strether's immediate feeling was all relief. He
had known this morning that something was about to happen--known it, in
a moment, by Waymarsh's manner when Waymarsh appeared before him during
his brief consumption of coffee and a roll in the small slippery
salle-a-manger so associated with rich rumination. Strether had taken
there of late various lonely and absent-minded meals; he communed
there, even at the end of June, with a suspected chill, the air of old
shivers mixed with old savours, the air in which so many of his
impressions had perversely matured; the place meanwhile renewing its
message to him by the very circumstance of his single state. He now
sat there, for the most part, to sigh softly, while he vaguely tilted
his carafe, over the vision of how much better Waymarsh was occupied.
That was really his success by the common measure--to have led this
companion so on and on. He remembered how at first there had been
scarce a squatting-place he could beguile him into passing; the actual
outcome of which at last was that there was scarce one that could
arrest him in his rush. His rush--as Strether vividly and amusedly
figured it--continued to be all with Sarah, and contained perhaps
moreover the word of the whole enigma, whipping up in its fine
full-flavoured froth the very principle, for good or for ill, of his
own, of Strether's destiny. It might after all, to the end, only be
that they had united to save him, and indeed, so far as Waymarsh was
concerned, that HAD to be the spring of action. Strether was glad at
all events, in connexion with the case, that the saving he required was
not more scant; so constituted a luxury was it in certain lights just
to lurk there out of the full glare. He had moments of quite seriously
wondering whether Waymarsh wouldn't in fact, thanks to old friendship
and a conceivable indulgence, make about as good terms for him as he
might make for himself. They wouldn't be the same terms of course; but
they might have the advantage that