I've done my best.
You can't be surprised," the young man easily went on, "when you yourself set me on it.
I was indeed," he added, "already on it a little; but you set me harder.
It was six weeks ago that I thought I had come out."
Strether took it well in.
"But you haven't come out!"
"I don't know—it's what I WANT to know," said Chad.
"And if I could have sufficiently wanted—by myself—to go back, I think I might have found out."
"Possibly"—Strether considered.
"But all you were able to achieve was to want to want to! And even then," he pursued, "only till our friends there came.
Do you want to want to still?"
As with a sound half-dolorous, half-droll and all vague and equivocal, Chad buried his face for a little in his hands, rubbing it in a whimsical way that amounted to an evasion, he brought it out more sharply: "DO you?"
Chad kept for a time his attitude, but at last he looked up, and then abruptly,
"Jim IS a damned dose!" he declared.
"Oh I don't ask you to abuse or describe or in any way pronounce on your relatives; I simply put it to you once more whether you're NOW ready.
You say you've 'seen.'
Is what you've seen that you can't resist?"
Chad gave him a strange smile—the nearest approach he had ever shown to a troubled one.
"Can't you make me NOT resist?"
"What it comes to," Strether went on very gravely now and as if he hadn't heard him, "what it comes to is that more has been done for you, I think, than I've ever seen done—attempted perhaps, but never so successfully done—by one human being for another."
"Oh an immense deal certainly"—Chad did it full justice.
"And you yourself are adding to it."
It was without heeding this either that his visitor continued.
"And our friends there won't have it."
"No, they simply won't."
"They demand you on the basis, as it were, of repudiation and ingratitude; and what has been the matter with me," Strether went on, "is that I haven't seen my way to working with you for repudiation."
Chad appreciated this.
"Then as you haven't seen yours you naturally haven't seen mine.
There it is."
After which he proceeded, with a certain abruptness, to a sharp interrogation. "NOW do you say she doesn't hate me?"
Strether hesitated. "'She'—?"
"Yes—Mother.
We called it Sarah, but it comes to the same thing."
"Ah," Strether objected, "not to the same thing as her hating YOU."
On which—though as if for an instant it had hung fire—Chad remarkably replied:
"Well, if they hate my good friend, THAT comes to the same thing."
It had a note of inevitable truth that made Strether take it as enough, feel he wanted nothing more.
The young man spoke in it for his "good friend" more than he had ever yet directly spoken, confessed to such deep identities between them as he might play with the idea of working free from, but which at a given moment could still draw him down like a whirlpool.
And meanwhile he had gone on. "Their hating you too moreover—that also comes to a good deal."
"Ah," said Strether, "your mother doesn't."
Chad, however, loyally stuck to it—loyally, that is, to Strether.
"She will if you don't look out."
"Well, I do look out. I am, after all, looking out. That's just why," our friend explained,
"I want to see her again."
It drew from Chad again the same question.
"To see Mother?"
"To see—for the present—Sarah."
"Ah then there you are!
And what I don't for the life of me make out," Chad pursued with resigned perplexity, "is what you GAIN by it."
Oh it would have taken his companion too long to say!