"Is it for her to have turned a man out so wonderfully, too, only for somebody else ?" He appeared to make a point of this, and little Bilham looked at him now.

"When it's for each other that people give things up they don't miss them." Then he threw off as with an extravagance of which he was conscious: "Let them face the future together!" Little Bilham looked at him indeed.

"You mean that after all he shouldn't go back ?" "I mean that if he gives her up--!" "Yes ?" "Well, he ought to be ashamed of himself." But Strether spoke with a sound that might have passed for a laugh.
Volume II Book Seventh I It wasn't the first time Strether had sat alone in the great dim church--still less was it the first of his giving himself up, so far as conditions permitted, to its beneficent action on his nerves.

He had been to Notre Dame with Waymarsh, he had been there with Miss Gostrey, he had been there with Chad Newsome, and had found the place, even in company, such a refuge from the obsession of his problem that, with renewed pressure from that source, he had not unnaturally recurred to a remedy meeting the case, for the moment, so indirectly, no doubt, but so relievingly.

He was conscious enough that it was only for the moment, but good moments--if he could call them good--still had their value for a man who by this time struck himself as living almost disgracefully from hand to mouth.