Would HIS relation to it, had he married ten years before, have become now the same as Pocock's?
Might it even become the same should he marry in a few months?
Should he ever know himself as much out of the question for Mrs.Newsome as Jim knew himself--in a dim way--for Mrs.Jim?
To turn his eyes in that direction was to be personally reassured; he was different from Pocock; he had affirmed himself differently and was held after all in higher esteem.

What none the less came home to him, however, at this hour, was that the society over there, that of which Sarah and Mamie--and, in a more eminent way, Mrs.Newsome herself--were specimens, was essentially a society of women, and that poor Jim wasn't in it.

He himself Lambert Strether, WAS as yet in some degree--which was an odd situation for a man; but it kept coming back to him in a whimsical way that he should perhaps find his marriage had cost him his place.

This occasion indeed, whatever that fancy represented, was not a time of sensible exclusion for Jim, who was in a state of manifest response to the charm of his adventure.

Small and fat and constantly facetious, straw-coloured and destitute of marks, he would have been practically indistinguishable hadn't his constant preference for light-grey clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and very little stories, done what it could for his identity.