 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
