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.
"But of course Chad has now the advantage of being there before her.

If he doesn't work that for all it's worth--!" He sighed with contingent pity at his brother-in-law's possible want of resource.

"He has worked it on YOU, pretty well, eh ?" and he asked the next moment if there were anything new at the Varieties, which he pronounced in the American manner.

They talked about the Varieties--Strether confessing to a knowledge which produced again on Pocock's part a play of innuendo as vague as a nursery-rhyme, yet as aggressive as an elbow in his side; and they finished their drive under the protection of easy themes.
Strether waited to the end, but still in vain, for any show that Jim had seen Chad as different; and he could scarce have explained the discouragement he drew from the absence of this testimony.