obliged. You're a
lovely pair."

There were things in this speech that Strether let pass for the time.
"Don't you then think it important the advertising should be thoroughly
taken in hand? Chad WILL be, so far as capacity is concerned," he went
on, "the man to do it."

"Where did he get his capacity," Jim asked, "over here?"

"He didn't get it over here, and the wonderful thing is that over here
he hasn't inevitably lost it. He has a natural turn for business, an
extraordinary head. He comes by that," Strether explained, "honestly
enough. He's in that respect his father's son, and also--for she's
wonderful in her way too--his mother's. He has other tastes and other
tendencies; but Mrs. Newsome and your wife are quite right about his
having that. He's very remarkable."

"Well, I guess he is!" Jim Pocock comfortably sighed. "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 mi