Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/452

446 said. "I don't know what you had really thought, all along; I never did know—for anything, with you, seemed to be possible. But of course—of course" Without confusion, with nothing but indulgence, he broke down, he pulled up. "After all, you understand. I spoke to you, originally, only as I had to speak. There's only one way—isn't there?—about such things. However," he smiled with a final philosophy, "I see it's all right."

Strether met his eyes with a sense of multiplying thoughts. What was it that made him at present, late at night and after journeys, so renewedly, so substantially young? Strether saw in a moment what it was it was—that he was younger, again, than Mme. de Vionnet. He himself said immediately none of the things he was thinking; he said something quite different. "You have really been to a distance?"

"I've been to England." Chad spoke cheerfully and promptly, but gave no further account of it save to say "One must sometimes get off."

Strether wanted no more facts—he only wanted to justify, as it were, his question. "Of course you do as you're free to do. But I hope, this time, that you didn't go for me."

"For very shame at bothering you really too much? My dear man," Chad laughed, "what wouldn't I do for you?"

Strether's easy answer for this was that it was a disposition he had precisely come to profit by. "Even at the risk of being in your way, I've waited on, you know, for a definite reason."

Chad took it in. "Oh yes—for us to make, if possible, a still better impression." And he stood there happily exhaling his full general consciousness. "I'm delighted to gather that you feel we've made it."

There was a pleasant irony in the words, which his friend, 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 now know why I wanted it."

He was as grave, as distinct, as a demonstrator before a blackboard, and Chad continued to face him like an