He couldn’t quite yet force it upon Woollett that such a career, such a perverted young life, showed after all a certain plausible side, _did_ in the case before them flaunt something like an impunity for the social man; but he could at least treat himself to the statement that would prepare him for the sharpest echo. This echo—as distinct over there in the dry thin air as some shrill “heading” above a column of print—seemed to reach him even as he wrote. “He says there’s no woman,” he could hear Mrs. Newsome report, in capitals almost of newspaper size, to Mrs. Pocock; and he could focus in Mrs. Pocock the response of the reader of the journal. He could see in the younger lady’s face the earnestness of her attention and catch the full scepticism of her but slightly delayed “What is there then?” Just so he could again as little miss the mother’s clear decision: “There’s plenty of disposition, no doubt, to pretend there isn’t.” Strether had, after posting his letter, the whole scene out; and it was a scene during which, coming and going, as befell, he kept his eye not least upon the daughter. He had his fine sense of the conviction Mrs. Pocock would take occasion to reaffirm—a conviction bearing, as he had from the first deeply divined it to bear, on Mr. Strether’s essential inaptitude. She had looked him in his conscious eyes even before he sailed, and that she didn’t believe _he_ would find the woman had been written in her book. Hadn’t she at the best but a scant faith in his ability to find women? It wasn’t even as if he had found her mother—so much more, to her discrimination, had her mother performed the finding. Her mother had, in a case her private judgement of which remained educative of Mrs. Pocock’s critical sense, found the man. The man owed his unchallenged state, in general, to the fact that Mrs. Newsome’s discoveries were accepted at Woollett; but he knew in his bones, our friend did, how almost irresistibly Mrs. Pocock would now be moved to show what she thought of his own. Give _her_ a free hand, would be the moral, and the woman would soon be found.