midnight
He met you as if you had knocked and he had bidden you enter . Strether , who had n'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 .