difference, I admit,
has become one of us in a marvellous way." And she appealed to Strether
in the manner of a woman who could always glide off with smoothness
into another subject. Wasn't HE struck with the way Mr. Newsome had
made the place his own, and hadn't he been in a position to profit by
his friend's wondrous expertness?

Strether felt the bravery, at the least, of her presenting herself so
promptly to sound that note, and yet asked himself what other note,
after all, she COULD strike from the moment she presented herself at
all. She could meet Mrs. Pocock only on the ground of the obvious, and
what feature of Chad's situation was more eminent than the fact that he
had created for himself a new set of circumstances? Unless she hid
herself altogether she could show but as one of these, an illustration
of his domiciled and indeed of his confirmed condition. And the
consciousness of all this in her charming eyes was so clear and fine
that as she thus publicly drew him into her boat she produced in him
such a silent agitation as he was not to fail afterwards to denounce as
pusillanimous. "Ah don't be so charming to me!--for it makes us
intimate, and after all what IS between us when I've been so
tremendously on my guard and have seen you but half a dozen times?" He
recognised once more the perverse law that so inveterately governed his
poor personal aspects: it would be exactly LIKE the way things always
turned out for him that he should affect Mrs. Pocock and Waymarsh as
launched in a relation in which he had really never been launched at
all. They were at this very moment--they could only be--attributing to
him the full licence of it, and all by the operation of her own tone
with him; whereas his sole licence had been to cling with intensity to
the brink, not to dip so much as a toe into the flood. But the flicker
of his fear on this occasion was not, as may be added, to repeat
itself; it sprang up, for its moment, only to die down and then go out
for ever. To meet his fellow visitor's invocation and, with Sarah's
brilliant eyes on him, answer, WAS quite sufficiently to step into her
boat. During the rest of the time her visit lasted he felt himself
proceed to each of the proper offices, successively, for helping to
keep the adventurous skiff afloat. It rocked beneath him, but he
settled himself in his place. He took up an oar and, since he was to
have the credit of pulling, pulled.

"That will make