he could at least treat himself to the statement that would
prepare him for the sharpest echo. This echo--as distinct over there in
the dry thin air as some shrill "heading" above a column of
print--seemed to reach him even as he wrote. "He says there's no
woman," he could hear Mrs. Newsome report, in capitals almost of
newspaper size, to Mrs. Pocock; and he could focus in Mrs. Pocock the
response of the reader of the journal. He could see in the younger
lady's face the earnestness of her attention and catch the full
scepticism of her but slightly delayed "What is there then?" Just so
he could again as little miss the mother's clear decision: "There's
plenty of disposition, no doubt, to pretend there isn't." Strether
had, after posting his letter, the 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 book. 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 betement, 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 doo