eak enough, further still, to
defer her journey and agree to accompany the gentlemen on their own,
might a separate carriage mark her independence; though it was in spite
of this to befall after luncheon that she went off alone and that, with
a tryst taken for a day of her company in London, they lingered another
night. She had, during the morning--spent in a way that he was to
remember later on as the very climax of his foretaste, as warm with
presentiments, with what he would have called collapses--had all sorts
of things out with Strether; and among them the fact that though there
was never a moment of her life when she wasn't "due" somewhere, there
was yet scarce a perfidy to others of which she wasn't capable for his
sake. She explained moreover that wherever she happened to be she
found a dropped thread to pick up, a ragged edge to repair, some
familiar appetite in ambush, jumping out as she approached, yet
appeasable with a temporary biscuit. It became, on her taking the risk
of the deviation imposed on him by her insidious arrangement of his
morning meal, a point of honour for her not to fail with Waymarsh of
the larger success too; and her subsequent boast to Strether was that
she had made their friend fare--and quite without his knowing what was
the matter--as Major Pendennis would have fared at the Megatherium. She
had made him breakfast like a gentleman, and it was nothing, she
forcibly asserted, to what she would yet make him do. She made him
participate in the slow reiterated ramble with which, for Strether, the
new day amply filled itself; and it was by her art that he somehow had
the air, on the ramparts and in the Rows, of carrying a point of his
own.

The three strolled and stared and gossiped, or at least the two did;
the case really yielding for their comrade, if analysed, but the
element of stricken silence. This element indeed affected Strether as
charged with audible rumblings, but he was conscious of the care of
taking it explicitly as a sign of pleasant peace. He wouldn't appeal
too much, for that provoked stiffness; yet he wouldn't be too freely
tacit, for that suggested giving up. Waymarsh himself adhered to an
ambiguous dumbness that might have represented either the growth of a
perception or the despair of one; and at times and in places--where the
low-browed galleries were darkest, the opposite gables queerest, the
solicitations of every kind densest--the others caught him fixing hard