e what he wanted, and yet bed what he wanted less. His most
frequent form of words was that he knew himself, and they were applied
on this occasion to his certainty of not sleeping. He knew himself
well enough to know that he should have a night of prowling unless he
should succeed, as a preliminary, in getting prodigiously tired. If
the effort directed to this end involved till a late hour the presence
of Strether--consisted, that is, in the detention of the latter for
full discourse--there was yet an impression of minor discipline
involved for our friend in the picture Waymarsh made as he sat in
trousers and shirt on the edge of his couch. With his long legs
extended and his large back much bent, he nursed alternately, for an
almost incredible time, his elbows and his beard. He struck his
visitor as extremely, as almost wilfully uncomfortable; yet what had
this been for Strether, from that first glimpse of him disconcerted in
the porch of the hotel, but the predominant notes. The discomfort was
in a manner contagious, as well as also in a manner inconsequent and
unfounded; the visitor felt that unless he should get used to it--or
unless Waymarsh himself should--it would constitute a menace for his
own prepared, his own already confirmed, consciousness of the
agreeable. On their first going up together to the room Strether had
selected for him Waymarsh had looked it over in silence and with a sigh
that represented for his companion, if not the habit of disapprobation,
at least the despair of felicity; and this look had recurred to
Strether as the key of much he had since observed. "Europe," he had
begun to gather from these things, had up to now rather failed of its
message to him; he hadn't got into tune with it and had at the end of
three months almost renounced any such expectation.

He really appeared at present to insist on that by just perching there
with the gas in his eyes. This of itself somehow conveyed the futility
of single rectifications in a multiform failure. He had a large
handsome head and a large sallow seamed face--a striking significant
physiognomic total, the upper range of which, the great political brow,
the thick loose hair, the dark fuliginous eyes, recalled even to a
generation whose standard had dreadfully deviated the impressive image,
familiar by engravings and busts, of some great national worthy of the
earlier part of the mid-century. He was of the personal type--and it
was an el