whole scene out; and it was
a scene during which, coming and going, as befell, he kept his eye not least
upon the daughter. He had his fine sense of the conviction Mrs. Pocock would
take occasion to reaffirm - a conviction bearing, as he had from the first
deeply divined it to bear, on Mr. Strether's essential inaptitude. She had
looked him in his conscious eyes even before he sailed, and that she didn't
believe he would find the woman had been written in her look. Hadn't she at the
best but a scant faith in his ability to find women? It wasn't even as if he had
found her mother - so much more, to her discrimination, had her mother performed
the finding. Her mother had, in a case her private judgement of which remained
educative of Mrs. Pocock's critical sense, found the man. The man owed his
unchallenged state, in general, to the fact that Mrs. Newsome's discoveries were
accepted at Woollett; but he knew in his bones, our friend did, how almost
irresistibly Mrs. Pocock would now be moved to show what she thought of his own.
Give her a free hand, would be the moral, and the woman would soon be found.
    His impression of Miss Gostrey after her introduction to Chad was meanwhile
an impression of a person almost unnaturally on her guard. He struck himself as
at first unable to extract from her what he wished; though indeed of what he
wished at this special juncture he would doubtless have contrived to make but a
crude statement. It sifted and settled nothing to put to her, tout bêtement, as
she often said, »Do you like him, eh?« - thanks to his feeling it actually the
least of his needs to heap up the evidence in the young man's favour. He
repeatedly knocked at her door to let her have it afresh that Chad's case -
whatever else of minor interest it might yield - was first and foremost a
miracle almost monstrous. It was the alteration of the entire man, and was so
signal an instance that nothing else, for the intelligent observer, could -
could it? - signify. »It's a plot,« he declared - »there's more in it than meets
the eye.« He gave the rein to his fancy. »It's a plant!«
    His fancy seemed to please her. »Whose then?«
    »Well, the party responsible is, I suppose, the fate that waits for one,