 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 narrow for its length, and the occupant of the bed thrust so far a pair
of slippered feet that the visitor had almost to step over them in his recurrent
rebounds from his chair to fidget
