uation at home, proved to him how perfectly she was arranging for
his absence, told him who would take up this and who take up that
exactly where he had left it, gave him in fact chapter and verse for
the moral that nothing would suffer. It filled for him, this tone of
hers, all the air; yet it struck him at the same time as the hum of
vain things. This latter effect was what he tried to justify--and with
the success that, grave though the appearance, he at last lighted on a
form that was happy. He arrived at it by the inevitable recognition of
his having been a fortnight before one of the weariest of men. If ever
a man had come off tired Lambert Strether was that man; and hadn't it
been distinctly on the ground of his fatigue that his wonderful friend
at home had so felt for him and so contrived? It seemed to him somehow
at these instants that, could he only maintain with sufficient firmness
his grasp of that truth, it might become in a manner his compass and
his helm. What he wanted most was some idea that would simplify, and
nothing would do this so much as the fact that he was done for and
finished. If it had been in such a light that he had just detected in
his cup the dregs of youth, that was a mere flaw of the surface of his
scheme. He was so distinctly fagged-out that it must serve precisely
as his convenience, and if he could but consistently be good for little
enough he might do everything he wanted.

Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a single boon--the
common unattainable art of taking things as they came. He appeared to
himself to have given his best years to an active appreciation of the
way they didn't come; but perhaps--as they would seemingly here be
things quite other--this long ache might at last drop to rest. He
could easily see that from the moment he should accept the notion of
his foredoomed collapse the last thing he would lack would be reasons
and memories. Oh if he SHOULD do the sum no slate would hold the
figures! The fact that he had failed, as he considered, in everything,
in each relation and in half a dozen trades, as he liked luxuriously to
put it, might have made, might still make, for an empty present; but it
stood solidly for a crowded past. It had not been, so much achievement
missed, a light yoke nor a short load. It was at present as if
the backward picture had hung there, the long crooked course, grey in
the shadow of his solitude. It had been a dreadful ch