This would give a sense--which the spirit required, rather ached and sighed in the absence of--that somebody was paying something somewhere and somehow, that they were at least not all floating together on the silver stream of impunity.

Just instead of that to go and see her late in the evening, as if, for all the world--well, as if he were as much in the swim as anybody else: this had as little as possible in common with the penal form.
Even when he had felt that objection melt away, however, the practical difference was small; the long stretch of his interval took the colour it would, and if he lived on thus with the sinister from hour to hour it proved an easier thing than one might have supposed in advance.

He reverted in thought to his old tradition, the one he had been brought up on and which even so many years of life had but little worn away; the notion that the state of the wrongdoer, or at least this person's happiness, presented some special difficulty.

What struck him now rather was the ease of it--for nothing in truth appeared easier.

It was an ease he himself fairly tasted of for the rest of the day; giving himself quite up; not so much as trying to dress it out, in any particular whatever, as a difficulty; not after all going to see Maria--which would have been in a manner a result of such dressing; only idling, lounging, smoking, sitting in the shade, drinking lemonade and consuming ices.