“Then,” he answered, “one must pick them out right. But all I mean is—for I express myself with violence—that she’s in a position to watch me. There’s an element of suspense for me, and she can see me wriggle. But my wriggling doesn’t matter,” he pursued. “I can bear it. Besides, I shall wriggle out.” The picture at any rate stirred in her an appreciation that he felt to be sincere. “I don’t see how a man can be kinder to a woman than you are to me.” Well, kind was what he wanted to be; yet even while her charming eyes rested on him with the truth of this he none the less had his humour of honesty. “When I say suspense I mean, you know,” he laughed, “suspense about my own case too!” “Oh yes—about your own case too!” It diminished his magnanimity, but she only looked at him the more tenderly. “Not, however,” he went on, “that I want to talk to you about that. It’s my own little affair, and I mentioned it simply as part of Mrs. Pocock’s advantage.” No, no; though there was a queer present temptation in it, and his suspense was so real that to fidget was a relief, he wouldn’t talk to her about Mrs. Newsome, wouldn’t work off on her the anxiety produced in him by Sarah’s calculated omissions of reference. The effect she produced of representing her mother had been produced—and that was just the immense, the uncanny part of it—without her having so much as mentioned that lady. She had brought no message, had alluded to no question, had only answered his enquiries with hopeless limited propriety. She had invented a way of meeting them—as if he had been a polite perfunctory poor relation, of distant degree—that made them almost ridiculous in him. He couldn’t moreover on his own side ask much without appearing to publish how he had lately lacked news; a circumstance of which it was Sarah’s profound policy not to betray a suspicion. These things, all the same, he wouldn’t breathe to Madame de Vionnet—much as they might make him walk up and down. And what he didn’t say—as well as what _she_ didn’t, for she had also her high decencies—enhanced the effect of his being there with her at the end of ten minutes more intimately on the basis of saving her than he had yet had occasion to be. It ended in fact by being quite beautiful between them, the number of things they had a manifest consciousness of not saying. He would have liked to turn her, critically, to the subject of Mrs. Pocock, but he so stuck to the line he felt to be the point of honour and of delicacy that he scarce even asked her what her personal impression had been. He knew it, for that matter, without putting her to trouble: that she wondered how, with such elements, Sarah could still have no charm, was one of the principal things she held her tongue about. Strether would have been interested in her estimate of the elements—indubitably there, some of them, and to be appraised according to taste—but he denied himself even the luxury of this diversion.