Henry James

“ One thing had really done as well as another; when Strether had spoken of Waymarsh's leaving him, and that had necessarily brought on a reference to Mrs. Pocock's similar intention, the jump was but short to supreme lucidity. Light became indeed after that so intense that Strether would doubtless have but half made out, in the prodigious glare, by which of the two the issue had been in fact precipitated. ”

“ Everything has come as a sort of indistinguishable part of everything else. Your coming out belonged closely to my having come before you, and my having come was a result of our general state of mind. Our general state of mind had proceeded, on its side, from our funny ignorance, our funny misconceptions and confusions—from which, since then, an inexorable tide of light seems to have floated us into our perhaps still funnier knowledge. ”

“ Waymarsh had, however, uttered the request that she might find him mild, and while hanging about the court before her arrival Strether had turned over with zeal the different ways in which he could be so. The difficulty was that if he was mild he wasn't, for her purpose, conscious. If she wished him conscious—as everything about her cried aloud that she did—she must accordingly be at costs to make him so. ”

“ She was acting in an interest grander and clearer than that of her poor little personal, poor little Parisian equilibrium, and all his consciousness of her mother's moral pressure profited by this proof of its sustaining force. She would be held up; she would be strengthened; he needn't in the least be uneasy for her. What would, once more, have been distinct to him had he tried to make it so, was that, as Mrs. Newsome was essentially all moral pressure, the presence of this element was almost identical with her own presence. ”

“ When a thing has been already described in such a lovely way———!" But she caught herself up, and her comment on his description rang out sufficiently loud. "Do you consider her even an apology for a decent woman?" ”

“ Yet he knew it to be perhaps the most positive declaration he had ever made in his life, and his visitor's reception of it virtually gave it that importance. "That's exactly what I'm delighted to do. God knows we don't want her! You take good care not to meet," she observed in a still higher key, "my question about their life. If you do consider it a thing one can even speak of, I congratulate you on your taste!"
The life she alluded to was, of course, Chad's and Mme. ”