ght 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 what they are? They're
about as intense as they can live."

"Yes"--and Strether's concurrence had a positive precipitation;
"they're about as intense as they can live."

"They don't lash about and shake the cage," said Jim, who seemed
pleased with his analogy; "and it's at feeding-time that they're
quietest. But they always get there."

"They do indeed--they always get there!" Strether replied with a laugh
that justified his confession of nervousness. He disliked to be
talking sincerely of Mrs. Newsome with Pocock; he could have talked
insincerely. But there was something he wanted to know, a need created
in him by her recent intermission, by his having given from the first
so much, as now more than ever appeared to him, and got so little. It
was as if a queer truth in his companion's metaphor had rolled over him
with a rush. She HAD been quiet at feeding-time; she had fed, and
Sarah had fed with her, out of the big bowl of all his recent free
communication, his vividness and pleasantness, his ingenuity and even
his eloquence, while the current of her response had steadily run thin.
Jim meanwhile however, it was true, slipped characteristically into
shallowness from the moment he ceased to speak out of the experience of
a husband.

"But of course Chad has now the advantage of being there before her. If
he doesn't work that for all it's worth--!" He sighed with contingent
pity at his brother-in-law's possible want of resource. "He has worked
it on YOU, pretty well, eh?" and he asked the next moment if there were
anything new at the Varieties, which he pronounced in the American
manner. They talked about the Varieties--Strether confessing to a
knowledge which produced again on Pocock's part a play of innuendo as
vague as a nursery-rhyme, yet as aggressive as an elbow in his side;
and they finished their drive under the protection of easy themes.
Strether waited to the end, but still in vain, for any show that Jim
had seen Chad as different; and he could scarce have explained the
discouragement he drew fro