 had left it, gave him in fact chapter and verse for the moral
that nothing would suffer. It filled for him, this tone of hers, all the air;
yet it struck him at the same time as the hum of vain things. This latter effect
was what he tried to justify - and with the success that, grave though the
appearance, he at last lighted on a form that was happy. He arrived at it by the
inevitable recognition of his having been a fortnight before one of the weariest
of men. If ever a man had come off tired Lambert Strether was that man; and
hadn't it been distinctly on the ground of his fatigue that his wonderful friend
at home had so felt for him and so contrived? It seemed to him somehow at these
instants that, could he only maintain with sufficient firmness his grasp of that
truth, it might become in a manner his compass and his helm. What he wanted most
was some idea that would simplify, and nothing would do this so much as the fact
that he was done for and finished. If it had been in such a light that he had
just detected in his cup the dregs of youth, that was a mere flaw of the surface
of his scheme. He was so distinctly fagged-out that it must serve precisely as
his convenience, and if he could but consistently be good for little enough he
might do everything he wanted.
    Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a single boon - the common
unattainable art of taking things as they came. He appeared to himself to have
given his best years to an active appreciation of the way they didn't come; but
perhaps - as they would seemingly here be things quite other - this long ache
might at last drop to rest. He could easily see that from the moment he should
accept the notion of his foredoomed collapse the last thing he would lack would
be reasons and memories. Oh if he should do the sum no slate would hold the
figures! The fact that he had failed, as he considered, in everything, in each
relation and in half a dozen trades, as he liked luxuriously to put it, might
have made, might still make, for an empty present; but it stood solidly for a
crowded past. It had not been, so much achievement missed, a light yoke nor a
short road. It was at present as if the backward picture had hung there, the
long crooked course, grey in the shadow of his solitude. It had been a dreadful
cheerful sociable solitude, a solitude of life or choice,
