this last, for an hour, to
his heart's content, making for the shady woody horizon and boring so deep into
his impression and his idleness that he might fairly have got through them again
and reached the maroon-coloured wall. It was a wonder, no doubt, that the taste
of idleness for him shouldn't need more time to sweeten; but it had in fact
taken the few previous days; it had been sweetening in truth ever since the
retreat of the Pococks. He walked and walked as if to show himself how little he
had now to do; he had nothing to do but turn off to some hillside where he might
stretch himself and hear the poplars rustle, and whence - in the course of an
afternoon so spent, an afternoon richly suffused too with the sense of a book in
his pocket - he should sufficiently command the scene to be able to pick out
just the right little rustic inn for an experiment in respect to dinner. There
was a train back to Paris at 9.20, and he saw himself partaking, at the close of
the day, with the enhancements of a coarse white cloth and a sanded floor, of
something fried and felicitous, washed down with authentic wine; after which he
might, as he liked, either stroll back to his station in the gloaming or propose
for the local carriole and converse with his driver, a driver who naturally
wouldn't fail of a stiff clean blouse, of a knitted nightcap and of the genius
of response - who, in fine, would sit on the shafts, tell him what the French
people were thinking, and remind him, as indeed the whole episode would
incidentally do, of Maupassant. Strether heard his lips, for the first time in
French air, as this vision assumed consistency, emit sounds of expressive
intention without fear of his company. He had been afraid of Chad and of Maria
and of Madame de Vionnet; he had been most of all afraid of Waymarsh, in whose
presence, so far as they had mixed together in the light of the town, he had
never without somehow paying for it aired either his vocabulary or his accent.
He usually paid for it by meeting immediately afterwards Waymarsh's eye.
    Such were the liberties with which his fancy played after he had turned off
to the hillside that did really and truly, as well as most amiably, await him
beneath the poplars, the hillside that made him feel, for a murmurous couple of
hours, how happy had been his thought. He had the sense of success, of a finer
harmony in