The Ambassadors by Henry James

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,"
of an elder day. The legend had been in later years that as the
lower part of his face, which was weak, and slightly crooked,
spoiled the likeness, this was the real reason for the growth of
his beard, which might have seemed to spoil it for those not in the
secret. He shook his mane; he fixed, with his admirable eyes, his
auditor or his observer; he wore no glasses and had a way, partly
formidable, yet also partly encouraging, as from a representative
to a constituent, of looking very hard at those who approached him.
He met you as if you had knocked and he had bidden you enter.
Strether, who hadn't seen him for so long an interval, apprehended
him now with a freshness of taste, and had perhaps never done him
such ideal justice. The head was bigger, the eyes finer, than they
need have been for the career; but that only meant, after all, that
the career was itself expressive. What it expressed at midnight in
the gas-glaring bedroom at Chester was that the subject of it had,
at the end of years, barely escaped, by flight in time, a general
nervous collapse. But this very proof of the full life, as the full
life was understood at Milrose, would have made to Strether's
imagination an element in which Waymarsh could have floated easily
had he only consented to float. Alas nothing so little resembled
floating as the rigour with which, on the edge of his bed, he
hugged his posture of prolonged impermanence. It suggested to his
comrade something that always, when kept up, worried him—a person
established in a railway-coach with a forward inclination. It
represented the angle at which poor Waymarsh was to sit through the
ordeal of Europe.
    Thanks to the stress of occupation, the strain of professions,
the absorption and embarrassment of each, they had not, at home,
during years before this sudden brief and almost bewildering reign
of comparative ease, found so much as a day for a meeting; a fact
that was in some degree an explanation of the sharpness with which
most of his friend's features stood out to Strether. Those he had
lost sight of since the early time came back to him; others that it
was never possible to forget struck him now as sitting, clustered
and expectant, like a somewhat defiant family-group, on the
doorstep of their residence. The room was narrow for its length,
and the occupant of the bed thrust so far a pair of slippered feet
that the visitor had almost to step over them in his recurrent
rebounds from his chair to fidget back and forth. There were marks
the friends made on things to talk about, and on things not to, and
one of the latter in particular fell like the tap of chalk on the
blackboard. Married at thirty, Waymarsh had not lived with his wife
for fifteen years, and it came up vividly between them in the glare
of the gas that Strether wasn't to ask about her. He knew they were
still separate and that she lived at hotels, travelled in Europe,
painted her face and wrote her husband abusive letters, of not one
of which, to a certainty, that sufferer spared himself the perusal;
but he respected without difficulty the cold twilight that had
settled on this side of his companion's life. It was a province in
which mystery reigned and as to which Waymarsh had never spoken the
informing word. Strether, who wanted to do him the highest justice
wherever he COULD do it, singularly admired him for the dignity of
this reserve, and even counted it as one of the grounds—grounds all
handled and numbered—for ranking him, in the range of