full of allowances and
charities in respect to those cabined and confined: his instinct toward a spirit
so strapped down as Waymarsh's was to walk round it on tiptoe for fear of waking
it up to a sense of losses by this time irretrievable. It was all very funny, he
knew, and but the difference, as he often said to himself, of tweedledum and
tweedledee - an emancipation so purely comparative that it was like the advance
of the door-mat on the scraper; yet the present crisis was happily to profit by
it and the pilgrim from Milrose to know himself more than ever in the right.
    Strether felt that when he heard of the approach of the Pococks the impulse
of pity quite sprang up in him beside the impulse of triumph. That was exactly
why Waymarsh had looked at him with eyes in which the heat of justice was
measured and shaded. He had looked very hard, as if affectionately sorry for the
friend - the friend of fifty-five - whose frivolity had had thus to be recorded;
becoming, however, but obscurely sententious and leaving his companion to
formulate a charge. It was in this general attitude that he had of late
altogether taken refuge; with the drop of discussion they were solemnly sadly
superficial; Strether recognised in him the mere portentous rumination to which
Miss Barrace had so good-humouredly described herself as assigning a corner of
her salon. It was quite as if he knew his surreptitious step had been divined,
and it was also as if he missed the chance to explain the purity of his motive;
but this privation of relief should be precisely his small penance: it was not
amiss for Strether that he should find himself to that degree uneasy. If he had
been challenged or accused, rebuked for meddling or otherwise pulled up, he
would probably have shown, on his own system, all the height of his consistency,
all the depth of his good faith. Explicit resentment of his course would have
made him take the floor, and the thump of his fist on the table would have
affirmed him as consciously incorruptible. Had what now really prevailed with
Strether been but a dread of that thump - a dread of wincing a little painfully
at what it might invidiously demonstrate? However this might be, at any rate,
one of the marks of the crisis was a visible, a studied lapse, in Waymarsh, of
betrayed concern. As if to make up to his comrade for the stroke by which he had
played providence he now conspicuously ignored his movements, withdrew himself
from the pretension to share them, stiffened up his sensibility to neglect, and