reminiscence of
Waymarsh's--and lost himself anew in Lambinet. It was as if he had
found out he was tired--tired not from his walk, but from that inward
exercise which had known, on the whole, for three months, so little
intermission. That was it--when once they were off he had dropped;
this moreover was what he had dropped to, and now he was touching
bottom. He was kept luxuriously quiet, soothed and amused by the
consciousness of what he had found at the end of his descent. It was
very much what he had told Maria Gostrey he should like to stay on for,
the hugely-distributed Paris of summer, alternately dazzling and dusky,
with a weight lifted for him off its columns and cornices and with
shade and air in the flutter of awnings as wide as avenues. It was
present to him without attenuation that, reaching out, the day after
making the remark, for some proof of his freedom, he had gone that very
afternoon to see Madame de Vionnet. He had gone again the next day but
one, and the effect of the two visits, the after-sense of the couple of
hours spent with her, was almost that of fulness and frequency. The
brave intention of frequency, so great with him from the moment of his
finding himself unjustly suspected at Woollett, had remained rather
theoretic, and one of the things he could muse about under his poplars
was the source of the special shyness that had still made him careful.
He had surely got rid of it now, this special shyness; what had become
of it if it hadn't precisely, within the week, rubbed off?

It struck him now in fact as sufficiently plain that if he had still
been careful he had been so for a reason. He had really feared, in his
behaviour, a lapse from good faith; if there was a danger of one's
liking such a woman too much one's best safety was in waiting at least
till one had the right to do so. In the light of the last few days the
danger was fairly vivid; so that it was proportionately fortunate that
the right was likewise established. It seemed to our friend that he had
on each occasion profited to the utmost by the latter: how could he
have done so more, he at all events asked himself, than in having
immediately let her know that, if it was all the same to her, he
preferred not to talk about anything tiresome? He had never in his
life so sacrificed an armful of high interests as in that remark; he
had never so prepared the way for the comparatively frivolous as in
addressing it to Madame de V