Strether had them clearly at his fingers' ends.
"By which you mean of course a lot of money."
"Well, not only.
I'm acting with a sense for him of other things too.
Consideration and comfort and security—the general safety of being anchored by a strong chain.
He wants, as I see him, to be protected.
Protected I mean from life."
"Ah voila!"—her thought fitted with a click.
"From life.
What you REALLY want to get him home for is to marry him."
"Well, that's about the size of it."
"Of course," she said, "it's rudimentary.
But to any one in particular?"
He smiled at this, looking a little more conscious.
"You get everything out."
For a moment again their eyes met.
"You put everything in!"
He acknowledged the tribute by telling her.
"To Mamie Pocock."
She wondered; then gravely, even exquisitely, as if to make the oddity also fit:
"His own niece?"
"Oh you must yourself find a name for the relation.
His brother-in-law's sister.
Mrs. Jim's sister-in-law."
It seemed to have on Miss Gostrey a certain hardening effect.
"And who in the world's Mrs. Jim?"
"Chad's sister—who was Sarah Newsome.
She's married—didn't I mention it?—to Jim Pocock."
"Ah yes," she tacitly replied; but he had mentioned things—!
Then, however, with all the sound it could have, "Who in the world's Jim Pocock?" she asked.
"Why Sally's husband.
That's the only way we distinguish people at Woollett," he good-humoredly explained.
"And is it a great distinction—being Sally's husband?"
He considered.
"I think there can be scarcely a greater—unless it may become one, in the future, to be Chad's wife."
"Then how do they distinguish YOU?"
"They DON'T—except, as I've told you, by the green cover."
Once more their eyes met on it, and she held him an instant.
"The green cover won't—nor will ANY cover—avail you with ME.
You're of a depth of duplicity!"
Still, she could in her own large grasp of the real condone it.
"Is Mamie a great parti?"
"Oh the greatest we have—our prettiest brightest girl."
Miss Gostrey seemed to fix the poor child.
"I know what they CAN be.
And with money?"
"Not perhaps with a great deal of that—but with so much of everything else that we don't miss it.
We DON'T miss money much, you know," Strether added, "in general, in America, in pretty girls."
"No," she conceded; "but I know also what you do sometimes miss.
And do you," she asked, "yourself admire her?"