ount, it might even
prove, on more than one by each mail. If he had begun yesterday with a
small grievance he had therefore an opportunity to begin to-day with
its opposite. He read the letters successively and slowly, putting
others back into his pocket but keeping these for a long time
afterwards gathered in his lap. He held them there, lost in thought,
as if to prolong the presence of what they gave him; or as if at the
least to assure them their part in the constitution of some lucidity.
His friend wrote admirably, and her tone was even more in her style
than in her voice--he might almost, for the hour, have had to come this
distance to get its full carrying quality; yet the plentitude of his
consciousness of difference consorted perfectly with the deepened
intensity of the connexion. It was the difference, the difference of
being just where he was and AS he was, that formed the escape--this
difference was so much greater than he had dreamed it would be; and
what he finally sat there turning over was the strange logic of his
finding himself so free. He felt it in a manner his duty to think out
his state, to approve the process, and when he came in fact to trace
the steps and add up the items they sufficiently accounted for the sum.
He had never expected--that was the truth of it--again to find himself
young, and all the years and other things it had taken to make him so
were exactly his present arithmetic. He had to make sure of them to
put his scruple to rest.

It all sprang at bottom from the beauty of Mrs. Newsome's desire that
he should be worried with nothing that was not of the essence of his
task; by insisting that he should thoroughly intermit and break she had
so provided for his freedom that she would, as it were, have only
herself to thank. Strether could not at this point indeed have
completed his thought by the image of what she might have to thank
herself FOR: the image, at best, of his own likeness-poor Lambert
Strether washed up on the sunny strand by the waves of a single day,
poor Lambert Strether thankful for breathing-time and stiffening
himself while he gasped. There he was, and with nothing in his aspect
or his posture to scandalise: it was only true that if he had seen Mrs.
Newsome coming he would instinctively have jumped up to walk away a
little. He would have come round and back to her bravely, but he would
have had first to pull himself together. She abounded in news of the
sit