use and
be grateful. He was not--that was the beauty of it--to be asked to
deflect too much from his dignity. No wonder the old boy bloomed in
this bland air of his own distillation. Strether felt for a moment as
if Sarah were actually walking up and down outside. Wasn't she hanging
about the porte-cochere while her friend thus summarily opened a way?
Strether would meet her but to take it, and everything would be for the
best in the best of possible worlds. He had never so much known what
any one meant as, in the light of this demonstration, he knew what Mrs.
Newsome did. It had reached Waymarsh from Sarah, but it had reached
Sarah from her mother, and there was no break in the chain by which it
reached HIM. "Has anything particular happened," he asked after a
minute--"so suddenly to determine her? Has she heard anything
unexpected from home?"

Waymarsh, on this, it seemed to him, looked at him harder than ever.
"'Unexpected'?" He had a brief hesitation; then, however, he was firm.
"We're leaving Paris."

"Leaving? That IS sudden."

Waymarsh showed a different opinion. "Less so than it may seem. The
purpose of Mrs. Pocock's visit is to explain to you in fact that it's
NOT."

Strether didn't at all know if he had really an advantage--anything
that would practically count as one; but he enjoyed for the moment--as
for the first time in his life--the sense of so carrying it off. He
wondered--it was amusing--if he felt as the impudent feel. "I shall
take great pleasure, I assure you, in any explanation. I shall be
delighted to receive Sarah."

The sombre glow just darkened in his comrade's eyes; but he was struck
with the way it died out again. It was too mixed with another
consciousness--it was too smothered, as might be said, in flowers. He
really for the time regretted it--poor dear old sombre glow! Something
straight and simple, something heavy and empty, had been eclipsed in
its company; something by which he had best known his friend. Waymarsh
wouldn't BE his friend, somehow, without the occasional ornament of the
sacred rage, and the right to the sacred rage--inestimably precious for
Strether's charity--he also seemed in a manner, and at Mrs. Pocock's
elbow, to have forfeited. Strether remembered the occasion early in
their stay when on that very spot he had come out with his earnest, his
ominous "Quit it!"--and, so remembering, felt it hang by a hair that he
didn't himself now utter the same no