Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/59

Rh She let it all sink in. "What you've come out for then is simply to render him an immense service."

Poor Strether was willing to take it so. "Ah—if you like."

"He stands, as they say, if you succeed with him, to gain"

"Oh, a lot of advantages." Strether had them clearly at his fingers' ends.

"By which you mean, of course, a lot of money."

"Well, not only. I'm acting with a sense, for him, of other things too. Consideration and comfort and security—the general safety of being anchored by a strong chain. He wants, as I see him, to be protected. Protected, I mean, from life."

"Ah, voilà!—"her thought fitted with a click. "From life. What you really want to get him home for is to marry him."

"Well, that's about the size of it."

"Of course," she said, "it's rudimentary. But to anyone in particular?"

He smiled at this—he looked a little more conscious. "You get everything out."

For a moment again their eyes met. "You put everything in!"

He acknowledged the tribute by telling her. "To Mamie Pocock."

She wondered; then gravely, even exquisitely, as if to make the oddity also fit: "His own niece?"

"Oh, you must yourself find a name for the relation. His brother-in-law's sister. Mrs. Jim's sister-in-law."

It seemed to have on Miss Gostrey a certain hardening effect. "And who in the world's Mrs. Jim."

"Chad's sister—who was Sarah Newsome. She's married—didn't I mention it?—to Jim Pocock."

"Ah yes," she tacitly replied; but he had mentioned things! Then, however, with all the sound it could have, "Who in the world's Jim Pocock?" she asked.

"Why, Sally's husband. That's the only way we distinguish people at Woollett," he good-humouredly explained.

"And is it a great distinction—being Sally's husband?"