Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/26

20 enter. Strether, who had not seen him for a long interval, apprehended him now with a freshness of taste, and had perhaps never done him such ideal justice as on this occasion. The head was bigger, the eyes finer, than they need have been for the career; but that only meant, after all, that the career was itself expressive. What it expressed at midnight in the gas-glaring bedroom at Chester was that the subject of it had, at the end of years, barely escaped, by flight in time, a general nervous collapse. But this very proof of the full life, as the full life was understood at Milrose, would have made, to Strether's imagination, an element in which Waymarsh could have floated easily had he only consented to float. Alas, nothing so little resembled floating as the rigour with which, on the edge of his bed, he hugged his posture of prolonged impermanence. It suggested to his comrade something that always, when kept up, worried him—a person established in a railway-coach with a forward inclination. It represented the angle at which poor Waymarsh was to sit through the ordeal of Europe.

Thanks to the stress of occupation, the strain of professions, the absorption and embarrassment of each, they had not, for some five years before this sudden breach and almost bewildering reign of comparative ease, found, at home, so much as a day for a meeting; a fact that was in some degree an explanation of the sharpness with which, for Strether, most of his friend's features stood out. Those he had lost sight of since the early time came back to him; others that it was never possible to forget struck him now as sitting, clustered and expectant, like a somewhat defiant family group, on the doorstep of their residence. The room was narrow for its length, and Strether's friend on the bed thrust so far a pair of slippered feet that he had almost to step over them in his recurrent rebounds from his chair to fidget back and forth. There were marks they made on things to talk about and on things not to, and one of the latter, in particular, fell like the tap of chalk on the blackboard. Married at thirty, Waymarsh had not lived with his wife for fifteen years, and it came up vividly between them in the glare of the gas that Strether was not to ask about her. He knew they were still separate and