 I
shall like to have been!«
    Two days later he had news from Chad of a communication from Woollett in
response to their determinant telegram, this missive being addressed to Chad
himself and announcing the immediate departure for France of Sarah and Jim and
Mamie. Strether had meanwhile on his own side cabled; he had but delayed that
act till after his visit to Miss Gostrey, an interview by which, as so often
before, he felt his sense of things cleared up and settled. His message to Mrs.
Newsome, in answer to her own, had consisted of the words: »Judge best to take
another month, but with full appreciation of all re-enforcements.« He had added
that he was writing, but he was of course always writing; it was a practice that
continued, oddly enough, to relieve him, to make him come nearer than anything
else to the consciousness of doing something: so that he often wondered if he
hadn't really, under his recent stress, acquired some hollow trick, one of the
specious arts of make-believe. Wouldn't the pages he still so freely dispatched
by the American post have been worthy of a showy journalist, some master of the
great new science of beating the sense out of words? Wasn't he writing against
time, and mainly to show he was kind? - since it had become quite his habit not
to like to read himself over. On those lines he could still be liberal, yet it
was at best a sort of whistling in the dark. It was unmistakeable moreover that
the sense of being in the dark now pressed on him more sharply - creating
thereby the need for a louder and livelier whistle. He whistled long and hard
after sending his message; he whistled again and again in celebration of Chad's
news; there was an interval of a fortnight in which this exercise helped him. He
had no great notion of what, on the spot, Sarah Pocock would have to say, though
he had indeed confused premonitions; but it shouldn't be in her power to say -
it shouldn't be in any one's anywhere to say - that he was neglecting her
mother. He might have written before more freely, but he had never written more
copiously; and he frankly gave for a reason at Woollett that he wished to fill
the void created there by Sarah's departure.
    The increase of his darkness, however, and the quickening, as I have called
it, of his tune, resided in the fact that he was hearing almost nothing. He had
