eerful sociable
solitude, a solitude of life or choice, of community; but though there
had been people enough all round it there had been but three or four
persons IN it. Waymarsh was one of these, and the fact struck him just
now as marking the record. Mrs. Newsome was another, and Miss Gostrey
had of a sudden shown signs of becoming a third. Beyond, behind them
was the pale figure of his real youth, which held against its breast
the two presences paler than itself--the young wife he had early lost
and the young son he had stupidly sacrificed. He had again and again
made out for himself that he might have kept his little boy, his little
dull boy who had died at school of rapid diphtheria, if he had not in
those years so insanely given himself to merely missing the mother. It
was the soreness of his remorse that the child had in all likelihood
not really been dull--had been dull, as he had been banished and
neglected, mainly because the father had been unwittingly selfish. This
was doubtless but the secret habit of sorrow, which had slowly given
way to time; yet there remained an ache sharp enough to make the
spirit, at the sight now and again of some fair young man just growing
up, wince with the thought of an opportunity lost. Had ever a man, he
had finally fallen into the way of asking himself, lost so much and
even done so much for so little? There had been particular reasons why
all yesterday, beyond other days, he should have had in one ear this
cold enquiry. His name on the green cover, where he had put it for
Mrs. Newsome, expressed him doubtless just enough to make the
world--the world as distinguished, both for more and for less, from
Woollett--ask who he was. He had incurred the ridicule of having to
have his explanation explained. He was Lambert Strether because he was
on the cover, whereas it should have been, for anything like glory,
that he was on the cover because he was Lambert Strether. He would
have done anything for Mrs. Newsome, have been still more
ridiculous--as he might, for that matter, have occasion to be yet;
which came to saying that this acceptance of fate was all he had to
show at fifty-five.

He judged the quantity as small because it WAS small, and all the more
egregiously since it couldn't, as he saw the case, so much as thinkably
have been larger. He hadn't had the gift of making the most of what he
tried, and if he had tried and tried again--no one but himself knew how
oft