Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/24

18 chamber resented by his condition. There he had, on the spot, the first consequence of their union. A place was too small for him after it that had seemed large enough before. He had awaited it with something that he would have been sorry, have been almost ashamed, not to recognise as emotion, yet with a tacit assumption, at the same time, that emotion would in the event find itself relieved. The actual oddity was that he was only more excited; and his excitement—to which, indeed, he would have found it difficult instantly to give a name—brought him once more downstairs and caused him for some minutes vaguely to wander. He went once more to the garden; he looked into the public room, found Miss Gostrey writing letters and backed out; he roamed, fidgeted and wasted time; but he was to have his more intimate session with his friend before the evening closed.

It was late—it was not till Strether had spent an hour upstairs with him—that this subject consented to betake himself to doubtful rest. Dinner and the subsequent stroll by moonlight—a dream, on Strether's part, of romantic effects rather prosaically merged in a mere missing of thicker coats—had measurably intervened, and this midnight conference was the result of Waymarsh's having—when they were free, as he put it, of their fashionable friend—found the smoking-room not quite what he wanted, and yet bed what he wanted still less. His most frequent form of words was that he knew himself, and they were applied on this occasion to his certainty of not sleeping. He knew himself well enough to know that he should have a night of prowling unless he should succeed, as a preliminary, in getting as tired as he wanted. If the effort directed to this end involved, till a late hour, the presence of Strether—consisted, that is, in the detention of the latter for full discourse—there was yet an impression of minor discipline involved, for our friend, in the picture Waymarsh made as he sat, in trousers and shirt, on the edge of his couch. With his long legs extended and his large back much bent, he nursed alternately, for an almost incredible time, his elbows and his beard. He struck his visitor as extremely, as almost wilfully uncomfortable; yet what had this been for Strether, from that first glimpse of