 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 that matter industrially, was a certain
freedom to play into this general glamour.
    The impression he made on our friend was another of the things that marked
our friend's road. It was a strange impression, especially as so soon produced;
Strether had received it, he judged, all in the twenty minutes; it struck him at
least as but in a minor degree the work of the long Woollett years. Pocock was
normally and consentingly though not quite wittingly out of the question. It was
despite his being normal; it was despite his being cheerful; it was despite his
being a leading Woollett business-man; and the determination of his fate left
him thus perfectly usual - as everything else about it was clearly, to his
sense, not less so. He seemed to say that there was a whole side of life on
which the perfectly usual was for leading Woollett business-men to be out of the
question. He made no more of it than that, and Strether, so far as Jim was
concerned, desired to make no more. Only Strether's imagination, as always,
worked, and he asked himself if this side of life were not somehow connected,
for those who figured on it, with the fact of marriage. Would his relation to
it, had he married ten years before, have become now the same as Pocock's? Might
it even become the same should he marry in a few months? Should he ever know
himself as much out of the question for Mrs. Newsome as
