ation, it might be confidence; he should offer himself to the
arriving travellers bristling with all the lucidity he had cultivated.

He repeated to Chad what he had been saying in the court to Waymarsh;
how there was no doubt whatever that his sister would find the latter a
kindred spirit, no doubt of the alliance, based on an exchange of
views, that the pair would successfully strike up. They would become
as thick as thieves--which moreover was but a development of what
Strether remembered to have said in one of his first discussions with
his mate, struck as he had then already been with the elements of
affinity between that personage and Mrs. Newsome herself. "I told him,
one day, when he had questioned me on your mother, that she was a
person who, when he should know her, would rouse in him, I was sure, a
special enthusiasm; and that hangs together with the conviction we now
feel--this certitude that Mrs. Pocock will take him into her boat. For
it's your mother's own boat that she's pulling."

"Ah," said Chad, "Mother's worth fifty of Sally!"

"A thousand; but when you presently meet her, all the same you'll be
meeting your mother's representative--just as I shall. I feel like the
outgoing ambassador," said Strether, "doing honour to his appointed
successor." A moment after speaking as he had just done he felt he had
inadvertently rather cheapened Mrs. Newsome to her son; an impression
audibly reflected, as at first seen, in Chad's prompt protest. He had
recently rather failed of apprehension of the young man's attitude and
temper--remaining principally conscious of how little worry, at the
worst, he wasted, and he studied him at this critical hour with renewed
interest. Chad had done exactly what he had promised him a fortnight
previous--had accepted without another question his plea for delay. He
was waiting cheerfully and handsomely, but also inscrutably and with a
slight increase perhaps of the hardness originally involved in his
acquired high polish. He was neither excited nor depressed; was easy
and acute and deliberate--unhurried unflurried unworried, only at most
a little less amused than usual. Strether felt him more than ever a
justification of the extraordinary process of which his own absurd
spirit had been the arena; he knew as their cab rolled along, knew as
he hadn't even yet known, that nothing else than what Chad had done and
had been would have led to his present showing. They had made