It was too mixed with another consciousness--it was too smothered, as might be said, in flowers.

He really for the time regretted it--poor dear old sombre glow! Something straight and simple, something heavy and empty, had been eclipsed in its company; something by which he had best known his friend.

Waymarsh wouldn't BE his friend, somehow, without the occasional ornament of the sacred rage, and the right to the sacred rage--inestimably precious for Strether's charity--he also seemed in a manner, and at Mrs.Pocock's elbow, to have forfeited.

Strether remembered the occasion early in their stay when on that very spot he had come out with his earnest, his ominous "Quit it!"-- and, so remembering, felt it hang by a hair that he didn't himself now utter the same note.

Waymarsh was having a good time--this was the truth that was embarrassing for him, and he was having it then and there, he was having it in Europe, he was having it under the very protection of circumstances of which he didn't in the least approve; all of which placed him in a false position, with no issue possible--none at least by the grand manner.