ed herself as assigning a corner of her
salon. It was quite as if he knew his surreptitious step had been
divined, and it was also as if he missed the chance to explain the
purity of his motive; but this privation of relief should be precisely
his small penance: it was not amiss for Strether that he should find
himself to that degree uneasy. If he had been challenged or accused,
rebuked for meddling or otherwise pulled up, he would probably have
shown, on his own system, all the height of his consistency, all the
depth of his good faith. Explicit resentment of his course would have
made him take the floor, and the thump of his fist on the table would
have affirmed him as consciously incorruptible. Had what now really
prevailed with Strether been but a dread of that thump--a dread of
wincing a little painfully at what it might invidiously demonstrate?
However this might be, at any rate, one of the marks of the crisis was
a visible, a studied lapse, in Waymarsh, of betrayed concern. As if to
make up to his comrade for the stroke by which he had played providence
he now conspicuously ignored his movements, withdrew himself from the
pretension to share them, stiffened up his sensibility to neglect, and,
clasping his large empty hands and swinging his large restless foot,
clearly looked to another quarter for justice.

This made for independence on Strether's part, and he had in truth at
no moment of his stay been so free to go and come. The early summer
brushed the picture over and blurred everything but the near; it made a
vast warm fragrant medium in which the elements floated together on the
best of terms, in which rewards were immediate and reckonings
postponed. Chad was out of town again, for the first time since his
visitor's first view of him; he had explained this necessity--without
detail, yet also without embarrassment, the circumstance was one of
those which, in the young man's life, testified to the variety of his
ties. Strether wasn't otherwise concerned with it than for its so
testifying--a pleasant multitudinous image in which he took comfort. He
took comfort, by the same stroke, in the swing of Chad's pendulum back
from that other swing, the sharp jerk towards Woollett, so stayed by
his own hand. He had the entertainment of thinking that if he had for
that moment stopped the clock it was to promote the next minute this
still livelier motion. He himself did what he hadn't done before; he
took two o