g her motive.

He was rather glad, none the less, that they had in point of fact not
parted at the Cheval Blanc, that he hadn't been reduced to giving them
his blessing for an idyllic retreat down the river. He had had in the
actual case to make-believe more than he liked, but this was nothing,
it struck him, to what the other event would have required. Could he,
literally, quite have faced the other event? Would he have been
capable of making the best of it with them? This was what he was
trying to do now; but with the advantage of his being able to give more
time to it a good deal counteracted by his sense of what, over and
above the central fact itself, he had to swallow. It was the quantity
of make-believe involved and so vividly exemplified that most disagreed
with his spiritual stomach. He moved, however, from the consideration
of that quantity--to say nothing of the consciousness of that
organ--back to the other feature of the show, the deep, deep truth of
the intimacy revealed. That was what, in his vain vigil, he oftenest
reverted to: intimacy, at such a point, was LIKE that--and what in the
world else would one have wished it to be like? It was all very well
for him to feel the pity of its being so much like lying; he almost
blushed, in the dark, for the way he had dressed the possibility in
vagueness, as a little girl might have dressed her doll. He had made
them--and by no fault of their own--momentarily pull it for him, the
possibility, out of this vagueness; and must he not therefore take it
now as they had had simply, with whatever thin attenuations, to give it
to him? The very question, it may be added, made him feel lonely and
cold. There was the element of the awkward all round, but Chad and
Madame de Vionnet had at least the comfort that they could talk it over
together. With whom could HE talk of such things?--unless indeed
always, at almost any stage, with Maria? He foresaw that Miss Gostrey
would come again into requisition on the morrow; though it wasn't to be
denied that he was already a little afraid of her "What on
earth--that's what I want to know now--had you then supposed?" He
recognised at last that he had really been trying all along to suppose
nothing. Verily, verily, his labour had been lost. He found himself
supposing innumerable and wonderful things.

Book Twelfth

I

Strether couldn't have said he had during the previous hours definitely
expected it;