“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.” “They don’t lash about and shake the cage,” said Jim, who seemed pleased with his analogy; “and it’s at feeding-time that they’re quietest. But they always get there.” “They do indeed—they always get there!” Strether replied with a laugh that justified his confession of nervousness. He disliked to be talking sincerely of Mrs. Newsome with Pocock; he could have talked insincerely. But there was something he wanted to know, a need created in him by her recent intermission, by his having given from the first so much, as now more than ever appeared to him, and got so little. It was as if a queer truth in his companion’s metaphor had rolled over him with a rush. She _had_ been quiet at feeding-time; she had fed, and Sarah had fed with her, out of the big bowl of all his recent free communication, his vividness and pleasantness, his ingenuity and even his eloquence, while the current of her response had steadily run thin. Jim meanwhile however, it was true, slipped characteristically into shallowness from the moment he ceased to speak out of the experience of a husband.