his elbows and his beard. He struck his visitor as extremely, as
almost wilfully uncomfortable; yet what had this been for Strether,
from that first glimpse of him disconcerted in the porch of the
hotel, but the predominant notes. The discomfort was in a manner
contagious, as well as also in a manner inconsequent and unfounded;
the visitor felt that unless he should get used to it--or unless
Waymarsh himself should--it would constitute a menace for his own
prepared, his own already confirmed, consciousness of the
agreeable. On their first going up together to the room Strether
had selected for him Waymarsh had looked it over in silence and
with a sigh that represented for his companion, if not the habit of
disapprobation, at least the despair of felicity; and this look had
recurred to Strether as the key of much he had since observed.
"Europe," he had begun to gather from these things, had up to now
rather failed of its message to him; he hadn't got into tune with
it and had at the end of three months almost renounced any such
expectation.

He really appeared at present to insist on that by just perching
there with the gas in his eyes. This of itself somehow conveyed the
futility of single rectifications in a multiform failure. He had a
large handsome head and a large sallow seamed face--a striking
significant physiognomic total, the upper range of which, the great
political brow, the thick loose hair, the dark fuliginous eyes,
recalled even to a generation whose standard had dreadfully
deviated the impressive image, familiar by engravings and busts, of
some great national worthy of the earlier part of the mid-century.
He was of the personal type--and it was an element in the power and
promise that in their early time Strether had found in him--of the
American statesman, the statesman trained in "Congressional halls,"