on of impulse, accident, range--the prohibition in
other words of freedom--hitherto known. The great oddity was that if he
had felt his arrival, so few weeks back, especially as an adventure,
nothing could now less resemble one than the fact of his staying. It
would be an adventure to break away, to depart, to go back, above all,
to London, and tell Kate Croy he had done so; but there was something
of the merely, the almost meanly, obliged and involved sort in his
going on as he was. That was the effect in particular of Mrs.
Stringham's visit, which had left him as with such a taste in his mouth
of what he couldn't do. It had made this quantity clear to him, and yet
had deprived him of the sense, the other sense, of what, for a refuge,
he possibly _could_.

It was but a small make-believe of freedom, he knew, to go to the
station for Sir Luke. Nothing equally free, at all events, had he yet
turned over so long. What then was his odious position but that again
and again he was afraid? He stiffened himself under this consciousness
as if it had been a tax levied by a tyrant. He hadn't at any time
proposed to himself to live long enough for fear to preponderate in his
life. Such was simply the advantage it had actually got of him. He was
afraid for instance that an advance to his distinguished friend might
prove for him somehow a pledge or a committal. He was afraid of it as a
current that would draw him too far; yet he thought with an equal
aversion of being shabby, being poor, through fear. What finally
prevailed with him was the reflexion that, whatever might happen, the
great man had, after that occasion at the palace, their young woman's
brief sacrifice to society--and the hour of Mrs. Stringham's appeal had
brought it well to the surface--shown him marked benevolence. Mrs.
Stringham's comments on the relation in which Milly had placed them
made him--it was unmistakeable--feel things he perhaps hadn't felt. It
was in the spirit of seeking a chance to feel again adequately whatever
it was he had missed--it was, no doubt, in that spirit, so far as it
went a stroke for freedom, that Densher, arriving betimes, paced the
platform before the train came in. Only, after it had come and he had
presented himself at the door of Sir Luke's compartment with everything
that followed--only, as the situation developed, the sense of an
anti-climax to so many intensities deprived his apprehensions and
hesitations even of the scant digni