Chapter 19

Summary

HE rambled largely alone during these few days, the effect of the incident of the previous week having been to simplify in a marked fashion his mixed relations with Waymarsh. Nothing had passed between them in reference to Mrs. Newsome's summons but that Strether had mentioned to his friend the departure of the deputation actually at sea, giving him thus an opportunity to confess to the occult intervention he imputed to him. Waymarsh, however, in the event confessed to nothing; and though this falsified in some degree Strether's forecast, the latter saw in it amusedly the same depth of good conscience, out of which the dear man's impertinence had originally sprung. He was patient with the dear man now, was delighted to observe that he had unmistakably put on flesh. He felt his own holiday so successfully large and free that he was full of allowances and charities in respect to those cabined and confined; his instinct toward a spirit so strapped down as Waymarsh's was to walk round it on tiptoe for fear of waking it up to a sense of losses by this time irretrievable. It was all very funny, he knew, and but the difference, as he often said to himself, of tweedledum and tweedledee—an emancipation so purely comparative that it was like the advance of the doormat on the scraper. Yet the present crisis was happily to profit by it and the pilgrim from Milrose to know himself more than ever in the right.

Strether felt that when he heard of the approach of the Pococks the impulse of pity quite sprang up to him beside the impulse of triumph. That was exactly why Waymarsh had looked at him with eyes in which the heat of justice was measured and shaded. He had looked very hard, as if affectionately sorry for the friend—the friend of fifty-five—whose frivolity had had thus to be recorded; becoming, however, but obscurely sententious and leaving his companion to formulate a charge. It was in this general attitude that he had of late altogether taken refuge; with the drop of discussion, they were solemnly, sadly superficial. Strether recognised in him the mere portentous rumination to which Miss Barrace had so goodhumouredly described herself as assigning a corner of her salon.