Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/383

Rh Strether knew as immediately whom he meant; but with as prompt a protest. "Ah, no! Mamie doesn't hate—well," he caught himself in time—"anybody at all. Mamie's beautiful."

Chad shook his head. "That's just why I mind it. She certainly doesn't like me."

"How much do you mind it? What would you do for her?"

"Well, I'd like her if she'd like me. Really, really," Chad declared.

It gave his companion a moment's pause. "You asked me just now if I don't 'like,' for herself, a certain person. You rather tempt me therefore to put the question in my turn. Don't you 'like' a certain other person?"

Chad looked at him hard in the lamplight of the window. "The difference is that I don't want to."

Strether wondered. "'Don't want' to?"

"I try not to—that is I have tried. 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 upon 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?"