some object of minor interest, fixing even at moments nothing
discernible, as if he were indulging it with a truce. When he met
Strether's eye on such occasions he looked guilty and furtive, fell the
next minute into some attitude of retractation. Our friend couldn't
show him the right things for fear of provoking some total
renouncement, and was tempted even to show him the wrong in order to
make him differ with triumph. There were moments when he himself felt
shy of professing the full sweetness of the taste of leisure, and there
were others when he found himself feeling as if his passages of
interchange with the lady at his side might fall upon the third member
of their party very much as Mr. Burchell, at Dr. Primrose's fireside,
was influenced by the high flights of the visitors from London. The
smallest things so arrested and amused him that he repeatedly almost
apologised--brought up afresh in explanation his plea of a previous
grind. He was aware at the same time that his grind had been as
nothing to Waymarsh's, and he repeatedly confessed that, to cover his
frivolity, he was doing his best for his previous virtue. Do what he
might, in any case, his previous virtue was still there, and it seemed
fairly to stare at him out of the windows of shops that were not as the
shops of Woollett, fairly to make him want things that he shouldn't
know what to do with. It was by the oddest, the least admissible of
laws demoralising him now; and the way it boldly took was to make him
want more wants. These first walks in Europe were in fact a kind of
finely lurid intimation of what one might find at the end of that
process. Had he come back after long years, in something already so
like the evening of life, only to be exposed to it? It was at all
events over the shop-windows that he made, with Waymarsh, most free;
though it would have been easier had not the latter most sensibly
yielded to the appeal of the merely useful trades. He pierced with his
sombre detachment the plate-glass of ironmongers and saddlers, while
Strether flaunted an affinity with the dealers in stamped letter-paper
and in smart neckties. Strether was in fact recurrently shameless in
the presence of the tailors, though it was just over the heads of the
tailors that his countryman most loftily looked. This gave Miss
Gostrey a grasped opportunity to back up Waymarsh at his expense. The
weary lawyer--it was unmistakeable--had a conception of dress;