"But if you've believed so in his making us hum, why have you so prolonged the discussion?
Don't you know we've been quite anxious about you?"
These questions were not informed with earnestness, but Strether saw he must none the less make a choice and take a line.
"Because, you see, I've greatly liked it.
I've liked my Paris, I dare say I've liked it too much."
"Oh you old wretch!" Jim gaily exclaimed.
"But nothing's concluded," Strether went on.
"The case is more complex than it looks from Woollett."
"Oh well, it looks bad enough from Woollett!" Jim declared.
"Even after all I've written?"
Jim bethought himself.
"Isn't it what you've written that has made Mrs. Newsome pack us off?
That at least and Chad's not turning up?"
Strether made a reflexion of his own.
"I see.
That she should do something was, no doubt, inevitable, and your wife has therefore of course come out to act."
"Oh yes," Jim concurred—"to act.
But Sally comes out to act, you know," he lucidly added, "every time she leaves the house.
She never comes out but she DOES act.
She's acting moreover now for her mother, and that fixes the scale."
Then he wound up, opening all his senses to it, with a renewed embrace of pleasant Paris.
"We haven't all the same at Woollett got anything like this."
Strether continued to consider.
"I'm bound to say for you all that you strike me as having arrived in a very mild and reasonable frame of mind.
You don't show your claws.
I felt just now in Mrs. Pocock no symptom of that.
She isn't fierce," he went on.
"I'm such a nervous idiot that I thought she might be."
"Oh don't you know her well enough," Pocock asked, "to have noticed that she never gives herself away, any more than her mother ever does?
They ain't fierce, either of 'em; they let you come quite close.
They wear their fur the smooth side out—the warm side in.
Do you know what they are?" Jim pursued as he looked about him, giving the question, as Strether felt, but half his care—"do you know what they are?
They're about as intense as they can live."
"Yes"—and Strether's concurrence had a positive precipitation; "they're about as intense as they can live."
"They don't lash about and shake the cage," said Jim, who seemed pleased with his analogy; "and it's at feeding-time that they're quietest.
But they always get there."
"They do indeed—they always get there!" Strether replied with a laugh that justified his confession of nervousness.
He disliked to be talking sincerely of Mrs. Newsome with Pocock; he could have talked insincerely.
But there was something he wanted to know, a need created in him by her recent intermission, by his having given from the first so much, as now more than ever appeared to him, and got so little.
It was as if a queer truth in his companion's metaphor had rolled over him with a rush.
She HAD been quiet at feeding-time; she had fed, and Sarah had fed with her, out of the big bowl of all his recent free communication, his vividness and pleasantness, his ingenuity and even his eloquence, while the current of her response had steadily run thin.
Jim meanwhile however, it was true, slipped characteristically into shallowness from the moment he ceased to speak out of the experience of a husband.
"But of course Chad has now the advantage of being there before her.
If he doesn't work that for all it's worth—!"
He sighed with contingent pity at his brother-in-law's possible want of resource.
"He has worked it on YOU, pretty well, eh?" and he asked the next moment if there were anything new at the Varieties, which he pronounced in the American manner.
They talked about the Varieties—Strether confessing to a knowledge which produced again on Pocock's part a play of innuendo as vague as a nursery-rhyme, yet as aggressive as an elbow in his side; and they finished their drive under the protection of easy themes.
Strether waited to the end, but still in vain, for any show that Jim had seen Chad as different; and he could scarce have explained the discouragement he drew from the absence of this testimony.
It was what he had taken his own stand on, so far as he had taken a stand; and if they were all only going to see nothing he had only wasted his time.
He gave his friend till the very last moment, till they had come into sight of the hotel; and when poor Pocock only continued cheerful and envious and funny he fairly grew to dislike him, to feel him extravagantly common.