“Give up this to go back and boss the advertising!” Poor Jim, with his arms folded and his little legs out in the open fiacre, drank in the sparkling Paris noon and carried his eyes from one side of their vista to the other. “Why I want to come right out and live here myself. And I want to live while I _am_ here too. I feel with _you_—oh you’ve been grand, old man, and I’ve twigged—that it ain’t right to worry Chad. _I_ don’t mean to persecute him; I couldn’t in conscience. It’s thanks to you at any rate that I’m here, and I’m sure I’m much obliged. You’re a lovely pair.” There were things in this speech that Strether let pass for the time. “Don’t you then think it important the advertising should be thoroughly taken in hand? Chad _will_ be, so far as capacity is concerned,” he went on, “the man to do it.” “Where did he get his capacity,” Jim asked, “over here?” “He didn’t get it over here, and the wonderful thing is that over here he hasn’t inevitably lost it. He has a natural turn for business, an extraordinary head. He comes by that,” Strether explained, “honestly enough. He’s in that respect his father’s son, and also—for she’s wonderful in her way too—his mother’s. He has other tastes and other tendencies; but Mrs. Newsome and your wife are quite right about his having that. He’s very remarkable.” “Well, I guess he is!” Jim Pocock comfortably sighed. “But if you’ve believed so in his making us hum, why have you so prolonged the discussion? Don’t you know we’ve been quite anxious about you?” These questions were not informed with earnestness, but Strether saw he must none the less make a choice and take a line. “Because, you see, I’ve greatly liked it. I’ve liked my Paris, I dare say I’ve liked it too much.” “Oh you old wretch!” Jim gaily exclaimed. “But nothing’s concluded,” Strether went on. “The case is more complex than it looks from Woollett.” “Oh well, it looks bad enough from Woollett!” Jim declared. “Even after all I’ve written?” Jim bethought himself. “Isn’t it what you’ve written that has made Mrs. Newsome pack us off? That at least and Chad’s not turning up?” Strether made a reflexion of his own. “I see. That she should do something was, no doubt, inevitable, and your wife has therefore of course come out to act.” “Oh yes,” Jim concurred—“to act. 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.”