rm of discipline in which they
might meet--some awkwardness they would suffer from, some danger, or at
least some grave inconvenience, they would incur. This would give a
sense--which the spirit required, rather ached and sighed in the
absence of--that somebody was paying something somewhere and somehow,
that they were at least not all floating together on the silver stream
of impunity. Just instead of that to go and see her late in the
evening, as if, for all the world--well, as if he were as much in the
swim as anybody else: this had as little as possible in common with
the penal form.

Even when he had felt that objection melt away, however, the practical
difference was small; the long stretch of his interval took the colour
it would, and if he lived on thus with the sinister from hour to hour
it proved an easier thing than one might have supposed in advance. He
reverted in thought to his old tradition, the one he had been brought
up on and which even so many years of life had but little worn away;
the notion that the state of the wrongdoer, or at least this person's
happiness, presented some special difficulty. What struck him now
rather was the ease of it--for nothing in truth appeared easier. It
was an ease he himself fairly tasted of for the rest of the day; giving
himself quite up; not so much as trying to dress it out, in any
particular whatever, as a difficulty; not after all going to see
Maria--which would have been in a manner a result of such dressing;
only idling, lounging, smoking, sitting in the shade, drinking lemonade
and consuming ices. The day had turned to heat and eventual thunder,
and he now and again went back to his hotel to find that Chad hadn't
been there. He hadn't yet struck himself, since leaving Woollett, so
much as a loafer, though there had been times when he believed himself
touching bottom. This was a deeper depth than any, and with no
foresight, scarcely with a care, as to what he should bring up. He
almost wondered if he didn't LOOK demoralised and disreputable; he had
the fanciful vision, as he sat and smoked, of some accidental, some
motived, return of the Pococks, who would be passing along the
Boulevard and would catch this view of him. They would have distinctly,
on his appearance, every ground for scandal. But fate failed to
administer even that sternness; the Pococks never passed and Chad made
no sign. Strether meanwhile continued to hold off from Miss Gostrey,
kee