Had what now really prevailed with Strether been but a dread of that thump--a dread of wincing a little painfully at what it might invidiously demonstrate?
However this might be, at any rate, one of the marks of the crisis was a visible, a studied lapse, in Waymarsh, of betrayed concern.

As if to make up to his comrade for the stroke by which he had played providence he now conspicuously ignored his movements, withdrew himself from the pretension to share them, stiffened up his sensibility to neglect, and, clasping his large empty hands and swinging his large restless foot, clearly looked to another quarter for justice.
This made for independence on Strether's part, and he had in truth at no moment of his stay been so free to go and come.

The early summer brushed the picture over and blurred everything but the near; it made a vast warm fragrant medium in which the elements floated together on the best of terms, in which rewards were immediate and reckonings postponed.

Chad was out of town again, for the first time since his visitor's first view of him; he had explained this necessity--without detail, yet also without embarrassment, the circumstance was one of those which, in the young man's life, testified to the variety of his ties.

Strether wasn't otherwise concerned with it than for its so testifying--a pleasant multitudinous image in which he took comfort.