Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/380

374 walked up to it, and looked all round it, and not taken it."

"You can bring a horse to water!" Chad suggested.

"Precisely. And the tune to which, this morning, Sarah wasn't delighted—the tune to which, to adopt your metaphor, she refused to drink—leaves us on that side nothing more to hope."

Chad had a pause, and then as if consolingly: "It was never of course really the least on the cards that they would be 'delighted.'"

"Well, I don't know, after all," Strether mused. "I've had to come as far round. However"—he shook it off—"it's doubtless my performance that's absurd."

"There are certainly moments," said Chad, "when you seem to me too good to be true. Yet if you are true," he added, "that seems to be all that need concern me."

"I'm true, but I'm incredible. I'm fantastic and ridiculous—I don't explain myself even to myself. How can they then," Strether asked, "understand me? So I don't quarrel with them."

"I see. They quarrel," said Chad rather comfortably, "with us." Strether noted once more the comfort, but his young friend had already gone on. "I should feel greatly ashamed, all the same, if I didn't put it before you again that you ought to think, after all, tremendously well. I mean before giving up beyond recall" With which his insistence, as from a certain delicacy, dropped.

Ah, but Strether wanted it. "Say it all, say it all."

"Well, at your age, and with what—when all's said and done—mother might do for you and be for you."

Chad had said it all, from his natural scruple, only to that extent; so that Strether, after an instant, himself took a hand. "My absence of an assured future. The little I have to show toward the power to take care of myself. The way, the wonderful way, she would certainly take care of me. Her fortune, her kindness, and the constant miracle of her having been disposed to go even so far. Of course, of course," he summed it up. "There are those sharp facts."

Chad had meanwhile thought of another still. "And then isn't there your liking her so?"