not working?"

Well, Strether put it otherwise, "She's sounding the note of
home--which is the very best thing she can do."

"The best for Madame de Vionnet?"

"The best for home itself. The natural one; the right one."

"Right," Maria asked, "when it fails?"

Strether had a pause. "The difficulty's Jim. Jim's the note of home."

She debated. "Ah surely not the note of Mrs. Newsome."

But he had it all. "The note of the home for which Mrs. Newsome wants
him--the home of the business. Jim stands, with his little legs apart,
at the door of THAT tent; and Jim is, frankly speaking, extremely
awful."

Maria stared. "And you in, you poor thing, for your evening with him?"

"Oh he's all right for ME!" Strether laughed. "Any one's good enough
for ME. But Sarah shouldn't, all the same, have brought him. She
doesn't appreciate him."

His friend was amused with this statement of it. "Doesn't know, you
mean, how bad he is?"

Strether shook his head with decision. "Not really."

She wondered. "Then doesn't Mrs. Newsome?"

It made him frankly do the same. "Well, no--since you ask me."

Maria rubbed it in. "Not really either?"

"Not at all. She rates him rather high." With which indeed,
immediately, he took himself up. "Well, he IS good too, in his way. It
depends on what you want him for."

Miss Gostrey, however, wouldn't let it depend on anything--wouldn't
have it, and wouldn't want him, at any price. "It suits my book," she
said, "that he should be impossible; and it suits it still better," she
more imaginatively added, "that Mrs. Newsome doesn't know he is."

Strether, in consequence, had to take it from her, but he fell back on
something else. "I'll tell you who does really know."

"Mr. Waymarsh? Never!"

"Never indeed. I'm not ALWAYS thinking of Mr. Waymarsh; in fact I find
now I never am." Then he mentioned the person as if there were a good
deal in it. "Mamie."

"His own sister?" Oddly enough it but let her down. "What good will
that do?"

"None perhaps. But there--as usual--we are!"

III

There they were yet again, accordingly, for two days more; when
Strether, on being, at Mrs. Pocock's hotel, ushered into that lady's
salon, found himself at first assuming a mistake on the part of the
servant who had introduced him and retired. The occupants hadn't come
in, for the room looked empty as only a room can look in Paris, of a
fine afternoon when the faint murmur of the