hat Strether
wanted, though he had said much else--it all suddenly bounced back to
their being either stupid or wilful. It was more probably on the whole
the former; so that that would be the drawback of the bridling
brightness. Yes, they would bridle and be bright; they would make the
best of what was before them, but their observation would fail; it
would be beyond them; they simply wouldn't understand. Of what use
would it be then that they had come?--if they weren't to be intelligent
up to THAT point: unless indeed he himself were utterly deluded and
extravagant? Was he, on this question of Chad's improvement, fantastic
and away from the truth? Did he live in a false world, a world that
had grown simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritation--in
the face now of Jim's silence in particular--but the alarm of the vain
thing menaced by the touch of the real? Was this contribution of the
real possibly the mission of the Pococks?--had they come to make the
work of observation, as HE had practised observation, crack and
crumble, and to reduce Chad to the plain terms in which honest minds
could deal with him? Had they come in short to be sane where Strether
was destined to feel that he himself had only been silly?

He glanced at such a contingency, but it failed to hold him long when
once he had reflected that he would have been silly, in this case, with
Maria Gostrey and little Bilham, with Madame de Vionnet and little
Jeanne, with Lambert Strether, in fine, and above all with Chad Newsome
himself. Wouldn't it be found to have made more for reality to be
silly with these persons than sane with Sarah and Jim? Jim in fact, he
presently made up his mind, was individually out of it; Jim didn't
care; Jim hadn't come out either for Chad or for him; Jim in short left
the moral side to Sally and indeed simply availed himself now, for the
sense of recreation, of the fact that he left almost everything to
Sally. He was nothing compared to Sally, and not so much by reason of
Sally's temper and will as by that of her more developed type and
greater acquaintance with the world. He quite frankly and serenely
confessed, as he sat there with Strether, that he felt his type hang
far in the rear of his wife's and still further, if possible, in the
rear of his sister's. Their types, he well knew, were recognised and
acclaimed; whereas the most a leading Woollett business-man could hope
to achieve socially, and for tha