ssion, and Waymarsh was to have made it plain
to him that she would expect nothing less. He saw fifty things, her
host, at this convenient stage; but one of those he most saw was that
their anxious friend hadn't quite had the hand required of him.
Waymarsh HAD, however, uttered the request that she might find him
mild, and while hanging about the court before her arrival he had
turned over with zeal the different ways in which he could be so. The
difficulty was that if he was mild he wasn't, for her purpose,
conscious. If she wished him conscious--as everything about her cried
aloud that she did--she must accordingly be at costs to make him so.
Conscious he was, for himself--but only of too many things; so she must
choose the one she required.

Practically, however, it at last got itself named, and when once that
had happened they were quite at the centre of their situation. One
thing had really done as well as another; when Strether had spoken of
Waymarsh's leaving him, and that had necessarily brought on a reference
to Mrs. Pocock's similar intention, the jump was but short to supreme
lucidity. Light became indeed after that so intense that Strether
would doubtless have but half made out, in the prodigious glare, by
which of the two the issue had been in fact precipitated. It was, in
their contracted quarters, as much there between them as if it had been
something suddenly spilled with a crash and a splash on the floor. The
form of his submission was to be an engagement to acquit himself within
the twenty-four hours. "He'll go in a moment if you give him the
word--he assures me on his honour he'll do that": this came in its
order, out of its order, in respect to Chad, after the crash had
occurred. It came repeatedly during the time taken by Strether to feel
that he was even more fixed in his rigour than he had supposed--the
time he was not above adding to a little by telling her that such a way
of putting it on her brother's part left him sufficiently surprised.
She wasn't at all funny at last--she was really fine; and he felt
easily where she was strong--strong for herself. It hadn't yet so come
home to him that she was nobly and appointedly officious. She was
acting in interests grander and clearer than that of her poor little
personal, poor little Parisian equilibrium, and all his consciousness
of her mother's moral pressure profited by this proof of its sustaining
force. She would be held up; she would b