I don't think either she'll hurt ME: I'm in a situation in which damage was some time ago discounted.
Besides, THAT isn't what worries you—but don't, don't explain!
We're all right as we are: which was the degree of success our adventure was pledged to for each of us.
We weren't, it seemed, all right as we were before; and we've got over the ground, all things considered, quickly.
I hope you'll have a lovely time in the Alps."
Waymarsh fairly looked up at him as from the foot of them.
"I don't know as I OUGHT really to go."
It was the conscience of Milrose in the very voice of Milrose, but, oh it was feeble and flat!
Strether suddenly felt quite ashamed for him; he breathed a greater boldness. "LET yourself, on the contrary, go—in all agreeable directions.
These are precious hours—at our age they mayn't recur.
Don't have it to say to yourself at Milrose, next winter, that you hadn't courage for them."
And then as his comrade queerly stared: "Live up to Mrs. Pocock."
"Live up to her?"
"You're a great help to her."
Waymarsh looked at it as at one of the uncomfortable things that were certainly true and that it was yet ironical to say.
"It's more then than you are."
"That's exactly your own chance and advantage.
Besides," said Strether, "I do in my way contribute.
I know what I'm about."
Waymarsh had kept on his great panama, and, as he now stood nearer the door, his last look beneath the shade of it had turned again to darkness and warning.
"So do I!
See here, Strether."
"I know what you're going to say.
'Quit this'?"
"Quit this!"
But it lacked its old intensity; nothing of it remained; it went out of the room with him.
III
Almost the first thing, strangely enough, that, about an hour later, Strether found himself doing in Sarah's presence was to remark articulately on this failure, in their friend, of what had been superficially his great distinction.
It was as if—he alluded of course to the grand manner—the dear man had sacrificed it to some other advantage; which would be of course only for himself to measure.
It might be simply that he was physically so much more sound than on his first coming out; this was all prosaic, comparatively cheerful and vulgar.
And fortunately, if one came to that, his improvement in health was really itself grander than any manner it could be conceived as having cost him.
"You yourself alone, dear Sarah"—Strether took the plunge—"have done him, it strikes me, in these three weeks, as much good as all the rest of his time together."
It was a plunge because somehow the range of reference was, in the conditions, "funny," and made funnier still by Sarah's attitude, by the turn the occasion had, with her appearance, so sensibly taken.
Her appearance was really indeed funnier than anything else—the spirit in which he felt her to be there as soon as she was there, the shade of obscurity that cleared up for him as soon as he was seated with her in the small salon de lecture that had, for the most part, in all the weeks, witnessed the wane of his early vivacity of discussion with Waymarsh.
It was an immense thing, quite a tremendous thing, for her to have come: this truth opened out to him in spite of his having already arrived for himself at a fairly vivid view of it.
He had done exactly what he had given Waymarsh his word for—had walked and re-walked the court while he awaited her advent; acquiring in this exercise an amount of light that affected him at the time as flooding the scene.
She had decided upon the step in order to give him the benefit of a doubt, in order to be able to say to her mother that she had, even to abjectness, smoothed the way for him.
The doubt had been as to whether he mightn't take her as not having smoothed it—and the admonition had possibly come from Waymarsh's more detached spirit.
Waymarsh had at any rate, certainly, thrown his weight into the scale—he had pointed to the importance of depriving their friend of a grievance.
She had done justice to the plea, and it was to set herself right with a high ideal that she actually sat there in her state.
Her calculation was sharp in the immobility with which she held her tall parasol-stick upright and at arm's length, quite as if she had struck the place to plant her flag; in the separate precautions she took not to show as nervous; in the aggressive repose in which she did quite nothing but wait for him.
Doubt ceased to be possible from the moment he had taken in that she had arrived with no proposal whatever; that her concern was simply to show what she had come to receive.
She had come to receive his submission, and Waymarsh was to have made it plain to him that she would expect nothing less.
He saw fifty things, her host, at this convenient stage; but one of those he most saw was that their anxious friend hadn't quite had the hand required of him.
Waymarsh HAD, however, uttered the request that she might find him mild, and while hanging about the court before her arrival he had turned over with zeal the different ways in which he could be so.
The difficulty was that if he was mild he wasn't, for her purpose, conscious.
If she wished him conscious—as everything about her cried aloud that she did—she must accordingly be at costs to make him so.
Conscious he was, for himself—but only of too many things; so she must choose the one she required.
Practically, however, it at last got itself named, and when once that had happened they were quite at the centre of their situation.
One thing had really done as well as another; when Strether had spoken of Waymarsh's leaving him, and that had necessarily brought on a reference to Mrs. Pocock's similar intention, the jump was but short to supreme lucidity.