Strether’s candour was never very far off. “Oh it has occurred to you that I’m literally running away from Mrs. Newsome?”
“Well, I haven’t known but what you are. You’re a very attractive man, Strether. You’ve seen for yourself,” said Waymarsh “what that lady downstairs makes of it. Unless indeed,” he rambled on with an effect between the ironic and the anxious, “it’s you who are after her. Is Mrs. Newsome over here?” He spoke as with a droll dread of her.
It made his friend—though rather dimly—smile. “Dear no; she’s safe, thank goodness—as I think I more and more feel—at home. She thought of coming, but she gave it up. I’ve come in a manner instead of her; and come to that extent—for you’re right in your inference—on her business. So you see there is plenty of connexion.”
Waymarsh continued to see at least all there was. “Involving accordingly the particular one I’ve referred to?”
Strether took another turn about the room, giving a twitch to his companion’s blanket and finally gaining the door. His feeling was that of a nurse who had earned personal rest by having made everything straight. “Involving more things than I can think of breaking ground on now. But don’t be afraid—you shall have them from me: you’ll probably find yourself having quite as much of them as you can do with. I shall—if we keep together—very much depend on your impression of some of them.”
Waymarsh’s acknowledgement of this tribute was characteristically indirect. “You mean to say you don’t believe we will keep together?”
“I only glance at the danger,” Strether paternally said, “because when I hear you wail to go back I seem to see you open up such possibilities of folly.”
Waymarsh took it—silent a little—like a large snubbed child “What are you going to do with me?”
It was the very question Strether himself had put to Miss Gostrey, and he wondered if he had sounded like that. But he at least could be more definite. “I’m going to take you right down to London.”
“Oh I’ve been down to London!” Waymarsh more softly moaned. “I’ve no use, Strether, for anything down there.”