Strether fancied them, liked them, and,
passing through them with her more slowly now, met a sharp renewal
of his original impression. He stopped, he looked back; the whole
thing made a vista, which he found high melancholy and sweet--full,
once more, of dim historic shades, of the faint faraway cannon-roar
of the great Empire. It was doubtless half the projection of his
mind, but his mind was a thing that, among old waxed parquets, pale
shades of pink and green, pseudo-classic candelabra, he had always
needfully to reckon with. They could easily make him irrelevant.
The oddity, the originality, the poetry--he didn't know what to
call it--of Chad's connexion reaffirmed for him its romantic side.
"They ought to see this, you know. They MUST."
"The Pococks?"--she looked about in deprecation; she seemed to see
gaps he didn't.
"Mamie and Sarah--Mamie in particular."
"My shabby old place? But THEIR things--!"
"Oh their things! You were talking of what will do something for
you--"
"So that it strikes you," she broke in, "that my poor place may?
Oh," she ruefully mused, "that WOULD be desperate!"
"Do you know what I wish?" he went on. "I wish Mrs. Newsome herself
could have a look."
She stared, missing a little his logic.
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