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 might
be.«
    »Oh don't you know her well enough,« Pocock asked, »to have noticed that she
never gives herself away, any more than her mother ever does? They ain't fierce,
either of 'em; they let you come quite close. They wear their fur the smooth
side out - the warm side in. Do you know what they are?« Jim pursued as he
looked about him, giving the question, as Strether felt, but half his care - »do
you know