"I'm delighted to gather that you feel we've made it."
There was a pleasant irony in the words, which his guest, preoccupied and keeping to the point, didn't take up.
"If I had my sense of wanting the rest of the time—the time of their being still on this side," he continued to explain—"I know now why I wanted it."
He was as grave, as distinct, as a demonstrator before a blackboard, and Chad continued to face him like an intelligent pupil.
"You wanted to have been put through the whole thing."
Strether again, for a moment, said nothing; he turned his eyes away, and they lost themselves, through the open window, in the dusky outer air.
"I shall learn from the Bank here where they're now having their letters, and my last word, which I shall write in the morning and which they're expecting as my ultimatum, will so immediately reach them."
The light of his plural pronoun was sufficiently reflected in his companion's face as he again met it; and he completed his demonstration.
He pursued indeed as if for himself.
"Of course I've first to justify what I shall do."
"You're justifying it beautifully!" Chad declared.
"It's not a question of advising you not to go," Strether said, "but of absolutely preventing you, if possible, from so much as thinking of it.
Let me accordingly appeal to you by all you hold sacred."
Chad showed a surprise. "What makes you think me capable—?"
"You'd not only be, as I say, a brute; you'd be," his companion went on in the same way, "a criminal of the deepest dye."
Chad gave a sharper look, as if to gauge a possible suspicion.
"I don't know what should make you think I'm tired of her."
Strether didn't quite know either, and such impressions, for the imaginative mind, were always too fine, too floating, to produce on the spot their warrant.
There was none the less for him, in the very manner of his host's allusion to satiety as a thinkable motive, a slight breath of the ominous.
"I feel how much more she can do for you. She hasn't done it all yet.
Stay with her at least till she has."
"And leave her THEN?"
Chad had kept smiling, but its effect in Strether was a shade of dryness.
"Don't leave her BEFORE.
When you've got all that can be got—I don't say," he added a trifle grimly.
"That will be the proper time.
But as, for you, from such a woman, there will always be something to be got, my remark's not a wrong to her."
Chad let him go on, showing every decent deference, showing perhaps also a candid curiosity for this sharper accent.
"I remember you, you know, as you were."
"An awful ass, wasn't I?"
The response was as prompt as if he had pressed a spring; it had a ready abundance at which he even winced; so that he took a moment to meet it.
"You certainly then wouldn't have seemed worth all you've let me in for.
You've defined yourself better.
Your value has quintupled."
"Well then, wouldn't that be enough—?" Chad had risked it jocosely, but Strether remained blank.
"Enough?"
"If one SHOULD wish to live on one's accumulations?"
After which, however, as his friend appeared cold to the joke, the young man as easily dropped it.
"Of course I really never forget, night or day, what I owe her.
I owe her everything.
I give you my word of honour," he frankly rang out, "that I'm not a bit tired of her."
Strether at this only gave him a stare: the way youth could express itself was again and again a wonder.
He meant no harm, though he might after all be capable of much; yet he spoke of being "tired" of her almost as he might have spoken of being tired of roast mutton for dinner.
"She has never for a moment yet bored me—never been wanting, as the cleverest women sometimes are, in tact.
She has never talked about her tact—as even they too sometimes talk; but she has always had it.
She has never had it more"—he handsomely made the point—"than just lately."
And he scrupulously went further. "She has never been anything I could call a burden."
Strether for a moment said nothing; then he spoke gravely, with his shade of dryness deepened.
"Oh if you didn't do her justice—!"
"I SHOULD be a beast, eh?"