was all prosaic, comparatively cheerful and
vulgar. And fortunately, if one came to that, his improvement in
health was really itself grander than any manner it could be conceived
as having cost him. "You yourself alone, dear Sarah"--Strether took
the plunge--"have done him, it strikes me, in these three weeks, as
much good as all the rest of his time together."

It was a plunge because somehow the range of reference was, in the
conditions, "funny," and made funnier still by Sarah's attitude, by the
turn the occasion had, with her appearance, so sensibly taken. Her
appearance was really indeed funnier than anything else--the spirit in
which he felt her to be there as soon as she was there, the shade of
obscurity that cleared up for him as soon as he was seated with her in
the small salon de lecture that had, for the most part, in all the
weeks, witnessed the wane of his early vivacity of discussion with
Waymarsh. It was an immense thing, quite a tremendous thing, for her
to have come: this truth opened out to him in spite of his having
already arrived for himself at a fairly vivid view of it. He had done
exactly what he had given Waymarsh his word for--had walked and
re-walked the court while he awaited her advent; acquiring in this
exercise an amount of light that affected him at the time as flooding
the scene. She had decided upon the step in order to give him the
benefit of a doubt, in order to be able to say to her mother that she
had, even to abjectness, smoothed the way for him. The doubt had been
as to whether he mightn't take her as not having smoothed it--and the
admonition had possibly come from Waymarsh's more detached spirit.
Waymarsh had at any rate, certainly, thrown his weight into the
scale--he had pointed to the importance of depriving their friend of a
grievance. She had done justice to the plea, and it was to set herself
right with a high ideal that she actually sat there in her state. Her
calculation was sharp in the immobility with which she held her tall
parasol-stick upright and at arm's length, quite as if she had struck
the place to plant her flag; in the separate precautions she took not
to show as nervous; in the aggressive repose in which she did quite
nothing but wait for him. Doubt ceased to be possible from the moment
he had taken in that she had arrived with no proposal whatever; that
her concern was simply to show what she had come to receive. She had
come to receive his submi