With his long legs extended and his large back much bent, he nursed alternately, for an almost incredible time, 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.