previous days; it had been sweetening
in truth ever since the retreat of the Pococks. He walked and walked as
if to show himself how little he had now to do; he had nothing to do
but turn off to some hillside where he might stretch himself and hear
the poplars rustle, and whence--in the course of an afternoon so spent,
an afternoon richly suffused too with the sense of a book in his
pocket--he should sufficiently command the scene to be able to pick out
just the right little rustic inn for an experiment in respect to
dinner. There was a train back to Paris at 9.20, and he saw himself
partaking, at the close of the day, with the enhancements of a coarse
white cloth and a sanded door, of something fried and felicitous,
washed down with authentic wine; after which he might, as he liked,
either stroll back to his station in the gloaming or propose for the
local carriole and converse with his driver, a driver who naturally
wouldn't fail of a stiff clean blouse, of a knitted nightcap and of the
genius of response--who, in fine, would sit on the shafts, tell him
what the French people were thinking, and remind him, as indeed the
whole episode would incidentally do, of Maupassant. Strether heard his
lips, for the first time in French air, as this vision assumed
consistency, emit sounds of expressive intention without fear of his
company. He had been afraid of Chad and of Maria and of Madame de
Vionnet; he had been most of all afraid of Waymarsh, in whose presence,
so far as they had mixed together in the light of the town, he had
never without somehow paying for it aired either his vocabulary or his
accent. He usually paid for it by meeting immediately afterwards
Waymarsh's eye.

Such were the liberties with which his fancy played after he had turned
off to the hillside that did really and truly, as well as most amiably,
await him beneath the poplars, the hillside that made him feel, for a
murmurous couple of hours, how happy had been his thought. He had the
sense of success, of a finer harmony in things; nothing but what had
turned out as yet according to his plan. It most of all came home to
him, as he lay on his back on the grass, that Sarah had really gone,
that his tension was really relaxed; the peace diffused in these ideas
might be delusive, but it hung about him none the less for the time. It
fairly, for half an hour, sent him to sleep; he pulled his straw hat
over his eyes--he had bought it the day before with a