him quiet?"

"No--he won't 'work' at all, and he won't do anything en dessous. He's
very decent and won't be a traitor in the camp. But he'll be amused
with his own little view of our duplicity, he'll sniff up what he
supposes to be Paris from morning till night, and he'll be, as to the
rest, for Chad--well, just what he is."

She thought it over. "A warning?"

He met it almost with glee. "You ARE as wonderful as everybody says!"
And then to explain all he meant: "I drove him about for his first
hour, and do you know what--all beautifully unconscious--he most put
before me? Why that something like THAT is at bottom, as an
improvement to his present state, as in fact the real redemption of it,
what they think it may not be too late to make of our friend." With
which, as, taking it in, she seemed, in her recurrent alarm, bravely to
gaze at the possibility, he completed his statement. "But it IS too
late. Thanks to you!"

It drew from her again one of her indefinite reflexions. "Oh
'me'--after all!"

He stood before her so exhilarated by his demonstration that he could
fairly be jocular. "Everything's comparative. You're better than
THAT."

"You"--she could but answer him--"are better than anything." But she
had another thought. "WILL Mrs. Pocock come to me?"

"Oh yes--she'll do that. As soon, that is, as my friend Waymarsh--HER
friend now--leaves her leisure."

She showed an interest. "Is he so much her friend as that?"

"Why, didn't you see it all at the hotel?"

"Oh"--she was amused--"'all' is a good deal to say. I don't know--I
forget. I lost myself in HER."

"You were splendid," Strether returned--"but 'all' isn't a good deal to
say: it's only a little. Yet it's charming so far as it goes. She
wants a man to herself."

"And hasn't she got you?"

"Do you think she looked at me--or even at you--as if she had?"
Strether easily dismissed that irony. "Every one, you see, must strike
her as having somebody. You've got Chad--and Chad has got you."

"I see"--she made of it what she could. "And you've got Maria."

Well, he on his side accepted that. "I've got Maria. And Maria has
got me. So it goes."

"But Mr. Jim--whom has he got?"

"Oh he has got--or it's as IF he had--the whole place."

"But for Mr. Waymarsh"--she recalled--"isn't Miss Barrace before any
one else?"

He shook his head. "Miss Barrace is a raffinee, and her amusement
won't lose by Mrs. Pocock. It will gain r