t 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
Jim knew himself--in a dim way--for Mrs. Jim?

To turn his eyes in that direction was to be personally reassured; he
was different from Pocock; he had affirmed himself differently and was
held after all in higher esteem. What none the less came home to him,
however, at this hour, was that the society over there, that of which
Sarah and Mamie--and, in a more eminent way, Mrs. Newsome herself--were
specimens, was essentially a society of women, and that poor Jim wasn't
in it. He himself Lambert Strether, WAS as yet in some degree--which
was an odd situation for a man; but it kept coming back to him in a
whimsical way that he should perhaps find his marriage had cost him his
place. This occasion indeed, whatever that fancy represented, was not
a time of sensible exclusion for Jim, who was in a state of manifest
response to the charm of his adventure. Small and fat and constantly
facetious, straw-coloured and destitute of marks, he would have been
practically indistinguishable hadn't his constant preference for
light-grey clothes, for white hats, for v