Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/453

Rh 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 friend went on in the same way, "a criminal of the deepest dye."

Chad gave a sharper look, as if to sound a 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 sensitive spirit, 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 possible 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, I suppose, 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