accounted for the sum. He had never expected--that was the truth
of it--again to find himself young, and all the years and other
things it had taken to make him so were exactly his present
arithmetic. He had to make sure of them to put his scruple to
rest.

It all sprang at bottom from the beauty of Mrs. Newsome's desire
that he should be worried with nothing that was not of the essence
of his task; by insisting that he should thoroughly intermit and
break she had so provided for his freedom that she would, as it
were, have only herself to thank. Strether could not at this point
indeed have completed his thought by the image of what she might
have to thank herself FOR: the image, at best, of his own
likeness-poor Lambert Strether washed up on the sunny strand by
the waves of a single day, poor Lambert Strether thankful for
breathing-time and stiffening himself while he gasped. There he
was, and with nothing in his aspect or his posture to scandalise:
it was only true that if he had seen Mrs. Newsome coming he would
instinctively have jumped up to walk away a little. He would have
come round and back to her bravely, but he would have had first to
pull himself together. She abounded in news of the situation at
home, proved to him how perfectly she was arranging for his
absence, told him who would take up this and who take up that
exactly where he had left it, gave him in fact chapter and verse
for the moral that nothing would suffer. It filled for him, this
tone of hers, all the air; yet it struck him at the same time as
the hum of vain things. This latter effect was what he tried to
justify--and with the success that, grave though the appearance,
he at last lighted on a form that was happy. He arrived at it by
the inevitable recognition of his having been a fortnight before