Pocock was normally and consentingly though not quite wittingly out of the question.

It was despite his being normal; it was despite his being cheerful; it was despite his being a leading Woollett business-man; and the determination of his fate left him thus perfectly usual--as everything else about it was clearly, to his sense, not less so.

He seemed to say that there was a whole side of life on which the perfectly usual WAS for leading Woollett business-men to be out of the question.

He made no more of it than that, and Strether, so far as Jim was concerned, desired to make no more.

Only Strether's imagination, as always, worked, and he asked himself if this side of life were not somehow connected, for those who figured on it with the fact of marriage.