Waymarsh himself adhered to an ambiguous dumbness that might have represented either the growth of a perception or the despair of one; and at times and in places--where the low-browed galleries were darkest, the opposite gables queerest, the solicitations of every kind densest--the others caught him fixing hard some object of minor interest, fixing even at moments nothing discernible, as if he were indulging it with a truce.

When he met Strether's eye on such occasions he looked guilty and furtive, fell the next minute into some attitude of retractation.

Our friend couldn't show him the right things for fear of provoking some total renouncement, and was tempted even to show him the wrong in order to make him differ with triumph.

There were moments when he himself felt shy of professing the full sweetness of the taste of leisure, and there were others when he found himself feeling as if his passages of interchange with the lady at his side might fall upon the third member of their party very much as Mr.Burchell, at Dr.Primrose's fireside, was influenced by the high flights of the visitors from London.

The smallest things so arrested and amused him that he repeatedly almost apologised--brought up afresh in explanation his plea of a previous grind.