ement in the power and promise that in their early time
Strether had found in him--of the American statesman, the statesman
trained in "Congressional halls," of an elder day. The legend had been
in later years that as the lower part of his face, which was weak, and
slightly crooked, spoiled the likeness, this was the real reason for
the growth of his beard, which might have seemed to spoil it for those
not in the secret. He shook his mane; he fixed, with his admirable
eyes, his auditor or his observer; he wore no glasses and had a way,
partly formidable, yet also partly encouraging, as from a
representative to a constituent, of looking very hard at those who
approached him. He met you as if you had knocked and he had bidden you
enter. Strether, who hadn't seen him for so long an interval,
apprehended him now with a freshness of taste, and had perhaps never
done him such ideal justice. The head was bigger, the eyes finer, than
they need have been for the career; but that only meant, after all,
that the career was itself expressive. What it expressed at midnight
in the gas-glaring bedroom at Chester was that the subject of it had,
at the end of years, barely escaped, by flight in time, a general
nervous collapse. But this very proof of the full life, as the full
life was understood at Milrose, would have made to Strether's
imagination an element in which Waymarsh could have floated easily had
he only consented to float. Alas nothing so little resembled floating
as the rigour with which, on the edge of his bed, he hugged his posture
of prolonged impermanence. It suggested to his comrade something that
always, when kept up, worried him--a person established in a
railway-coach with a forward inclination. It represented the angle at
which poor Waymarsh was to sit through the ordeal of Europe.

Thanks to the stress of occupation, the strain of professions, the
absorption and embarrassment of each, they had not, at home, during
years before this sudden brief and almost bewildering reign of
comparative ease, found so much as a day for a meeting; a fact that was
in some degree an explanation of the sharpness with which most of his
friend's features stood out to Strether. Those he had lost sight of
since the early time came back to him; others that it was never
possible to forget struck him now as sitting, clustered and expectant,
like a somewhat defiant family-group, on the doorstep of their
residence. The room was narr