But Sally comes out to act, you
know," he lucidly added, "every time she leaves the house. She
never comes out but she DOES act. She's acting moreover now for her
mother, and that fixes the scale." Then he wound up, opening all
his senses to it, with a renewed embrace of pleasant Paris. "We
haven't all the same at Woollett got anything like this."
Strether continued to consider. "I'm bound to say for you all that
you strike me as having arrived in a very mild and reasonable frame
of mind. You don't show your claws. I felt just now in Mrs. Pocock
no symptom of that. She isn't fierce," he went on. "I'm such a
nervous idiot that I thought she might 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.
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