ess, merged their identity in a bound of the heart just
as immediate and which remained after they had passed. It simply did
wonders for him--this was the truth--that Sir Luke was, as he would
have said, quiet.

The result of it was the oddest consciousness as of a blest calm after
a storm. He had been trying for weeks, as we know, to keep
superlatively still, and trying it largely in solitude and silence; but
he looked back on it now as on the heat of fever. The real, the right
stillness was this particular form of society. They walked together and
they talked, looked up pictures again and recovered impressions--Sir
Luke knew just what he wanted; haunted a little the dealers in old
wares; sat down at Florian's for rest and mild drinks; blessed above
all the grand weather, a bath of warm air, a pageant of autumn light.
Once or twice while they rested the great man closed his eyes--keeping
them so for some minutes while his companion, the more easily watching
his face for it, made private reflexions on the subject of lost sleep.
He had been up at night with her--he in person, for hours; but this was
all he showed of it and was apparently to remain his nearest approach
to an allusion. The extraordinary thing was that Densher could take it
in perfectly as evidence, could turn cold at the image looking out of
it; and yet that he could at the same time not intermit a throb of his
response to accepted liberation. The liberation was an experience that
held its own, and he continued to know why, in spite of his deserts, in
spite of his folly, in spite of everything, he had so fondly hoped for
it. He had hoped for it, had sat in his room there waiting for it,
because he had thus divined in it, should it come, some power to let
him off. He was _being_ let off; dealt with in the only way that didn't
aggravate his responsibility. The beauty was also that this wasn't on
system or on any basis of intimate knowledge; it was just by being a
man of the world and by knowing life, by feeling the real, that Sir
Luke did him good. There had been in all the case too many women. A
man's sense of it, another man's, changed the air; and he wondered what
man, had he chosen, would have been more to his purpose than this one.
He was large and easy--that was the benediction; he knew what mattered
and what didn't; he distinguished between the essence and the shell,
the just grounds and the unjust for fussing. One was thus--if one were
concerned with