ss. "Do you know that they're not, after all, going to Matcham;
so that, if they don't--if, at least, Maggie doesn't--you won't, I
suppose, go by yourself?" It was, as I say, at Matcham, where the event
had placed him, it was at Matcham during the Easter days, that it most
befell him, oddly enough, to live over, inwardly, for its wealth of
special significance, this passage by which the event had been really
a good deal determined. He had paid, first and last, many an English
country visit; he had learned, even from of old, to do the English
things, and to do them, all sufficiently, in the English way; if he
didn't always enjoy them madly he enjoyed them at any rate as much,
to an appearance, as the good people who had, in the night of time,
unanimously invented them, and who still, in the prolonged afternoon of
their good faith, unanimously, even if a trifle automatically, practised
them; yet, with it all, he had never so much as during such sojourns the
trick of a certain detached, the amusement of a certain inward critical,
life; the determined need, which apparently all participant, of
returning upon itself, of backing noiselessly in, far in again, and
rejoining there, as it were, that part of his mind that was not engaged
at the front. His body, very constantly, was engaged at the front--in
shooting, in riding, in golfing, in walking, over the fine diagonals
of meadow-paths or round the pocketed corners of billiard-tables; it
sufficiently, on the whole, in fact, bore the brunt of bridge-playing,
of breakfasting, lunching, tea-drinking, dining, and of the nightly
climax over the bottigliera, as he called it, of the bristling tray; it
met, finally, to the extent of the limited tax on lip, on gesture,
on wit, most of the current demands of conversation and expression.
Therefore something of him, he often felt at these times, was left
out; it was much more when he was alone, or when he was with his own
people--or when he was, say, with Mrs. Verver and nobody else--that he
moved, that he talked, that he listened, that he felt, as a congruous
whole.

"English society," as he would have said, cut him, accordingly, in
two, and he reminded himself often, in his relations with it, of a
man possessed of a shining star, a decoration, an order of some sort,
something so ornamental as to make his identity not complete, ideally,
without it, yet who, finding no other such object generally worn, should
be perpetually, and the least