I've been sacrificing so to strange gods that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my fidelity—fundamentally unchanged after all—to our own.
I feel as if my hands were embrued with the blood of monstrous alien altars—of another faith altogether.
There it is—it's done."
And then he further explained. "It took hold of me because the idea of getting her quite out of the way for Chad helps to clear my ground."
The young man, at this, bounced about, and it brought them face to face in admitted amusement.
"You want me to marry as a convenience to Chad?"
"No," Strether debated—"HE doesn't care whether you marry or not.
It's as a convenience simply to my own plan FOR him."
"'Simply'!"—and little Bilham's concurrence was in itself a lively comment.
"Thank you.
But I thought," he continued, "you had exactly NO plan 'for' him."
"Well then call it my plan for myself—which may be well, as you say, to have none.
His situation, don't you see? is reduced now to the bare facts one has to recognise.
Mamie doesn't want him, and he doesn't want Mamie: so much as that these days have made clear.
It's a thread we can wind up and tuck in."
But little Bilham still questioned. "YOU can—since you seem so much to want to.
But why should I?"
Poor Strether thought it over, but was obliged of course to admit that his demonstration did superficially fail.
"Seriously, there is no reason.
It's my affair—I must do it alone.
I've only my fantastic need of making my dose stiff."
Little Bilham wondered. "What do you call your dose?"
"Why what I have to swallow.
I want my conditions unmitigated."
He had spoken in the tone of talk for talk's sake, and yet with an obscure truth lurking in the loose folds; a circumstance presently not without its effect on his young friend.
Little Bilham's eyes rested on him a moment with some intensity; then suddenly, as if everything had cleared up, he gave a happy laugh.
It seemed to say that if pretending, or even trying, or still even hoping, to be able to care for Mamie would be of use, he was all there for the job.
"I'll do anything in the world for you!"
"Well," Strether smiled, "anything in the world is all I want.
I don't know anything that pleased me in her more," he went on, "than the way that, on my finding her up there all alone, coming on her unawares and feeling greatly for her being so out of it, she knocked down my tall house of cards with her instant and cheerful allusion to the next young man.
It was somehow so the note I needed—her staying at home to receive him."
"It was Chad of course," said little Bilham, "who asked the next young man—I like your name for me!—to call."
"So I supposed—all of which, thank God, is in our innocent and natural manners.
But do you know," Strether asked, "if Chad knows—?"
And then as this interlocutor seemed at a loss: "Why where she has come out."
Little Bilham, at this, met his face with a conscious look—it was as if, more than anything yet, the allusion had penetrated.
"Do you know yourself?"
Strether lightly shook his head.
"There I stop.
Oh, odd as it may appear to you, there ARE things I don't know.
I only got the sense from her of something very sharp, and yet very deep down, that she was keeping all to herself.
That is I had begun with the belief that she HAD kept it to herself; but face to face with her there I soon made out that there was a person with whom she would have shared it.
I had thought she possibly might with ME—but I saw then that I was only half in her confidence.
When, turning to me to greet me—for she was on the balcony and I had come in without her knowing it—she showed me she had been expecting YOU and was proportionately disappointed, I got hold of the tail of my conviction.
Half an hour later I was in possession of all the rest of it.
You know what has happened." He looked at his young friend hard—then he felt sure.
"For all you say, you're up to your eyes.
So there you are."
Little Bilham after an instant pulled half round.
"I assure you she hasn't told me anything."