He had his fine sense of the conviction Mrs.Pocock would take occasion to reaffirm--a conviction bearing, as he had from the first deeply divined it to bear, on Mr.Strether's essential inaptitude.

She had looked him in his conscious eyes even before he sailed, and that she didn't believe HE would find the woman had been written in her book.

Hadn't she at the best but a scant faith in his ability to find women?
It wasn't even as if he had found her mother--so much more, to her discrimination, had her mother performed the finding.

Her mother had, in a case her private judgement of which remained educative of Mrs.Pocock's critical sense, found the man.

The man owed his unchallenged state, in general, to the fact that Mrs.
Newsome's discoveries were accepted at Woollett; but he knew in his bones, our friend did, how almost irresistibly Mrs.Pocock would now be moved to show what she thought of his own.