Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/384

378 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 had not 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 friend 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 on it, 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."