manner in which Strether was now expert enough to
recognise his uncertainty, in the premises, as to the best tone. The
only tone he aimed at with confidence was a full tone--which was
necessarily difficult in the absence of a full knowledge. The Pococks
were a quantity as yet unmeasured, and, as he had practically brought
them over, so this witness had to that extent exposed himself. He
wanted to feel right about it, but could only, at the best, for the
time, feel vague. "I shall look to you, you know, immensely," our
friend had said, "to help me with them," and he had been quite
conscious of the effect of the remark, and of others of the same sort,
on his comrade's sombre sensibility. He had insisted on the fact that
Waymarsh would quite like Mrs. Pocock--one could be certain he would:
he would be with her about everything, and she would also be with HIM,
and Miss Barrace's nose, in short, would find itself out of joint.

Strether had woven this web of cheerfulness while they waited in the
court for Chad; he had sat smoking cigarettes to keep himself quiet
while, caged and leonine, his fellow traveller paced and turned before
him. Chad Newsome was doubtless to be struck, when he arrived, with
the sharpness of their opposition at this particular hour; he was to
remember, as a part of it, how Waymarsh came with him and with Strether
to the street and stood there with a face half-wistful and half-rueful.
They talked of him, the two others, as they drove, and Strether put
Chad in possession of much of his own strained sense of things. He had
already, a few days before, named to him the wire he was convinced
their friend had pulled--a confidence that had made on the young man's
part quite hugely for curiosity and diversion. The action of the
matter, moreover, Strether could see, was to penetrate; he saw that is,
how Chad judged a system of influence in which Waymarsh had served as a
determinant--an impression just now quickened again; with the whole
bearing of such a fact on the youth's view of his relatives. As it
came up between them that they might now take their friend for a
feature of the control of these latter now sought to be exerted from
Woollett, Strether felt indeed how it would be stamped all over him,
half an hour later for Sarah Pocock's eyes, that he was as much on
Chad's "side" as Waymarsh had probably described him. He was letting
himself at present, go; there was no denying it; it might be
desper