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 very big cigars and very
little stories, done what it could for his identity. There were
signs in him, though none of them plaintive, of always paying for
others; and the principal one perhaps was just this failure of
type. It was with this that he paid, rather than with fatigue or
waste; and also doubtless a little with the effort of humour--never
irrelevant to the conditions, to the relations, with which he was
acquainted.
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