to lose him. There was but
one little chance for her.

Often as she had said it he met it--for it was a touch he liked--each
time the same way. "My coming to grief?"

"Yes--then I might patch you up."

"Oh for my real smash, if it takes place, there will be no patching."

"But you surely don't mean it will kill you."

"No--worse. It will make me old."

"Ah nothing can do that! The wonderful and special thing about you is
that you ARE, at this time of day, youth." Then she always made,
further, one of those remarks that she had completely ceased to adorn
with hesitations or apologies, and that had, by the same token, in
spite of their extreme straightness, ceased to produce in Strether the
least embarrassment. She made him believe them, and they became
thereby as impersonal as truth itself. "It's just your particular
charm."

His answer too was always the same. "Of course I'm youth--youth for
the trip to Europe. I began to be young, or at least to get the
benefit of it, the moment I met you at Chester, and that's what has
been taking place ever since. I never had the benefit at the proper
time--which comes to saying that I never had the thing itself. I'm
having the benefit at this moment; I had it the other day when I said
to Chad 'Wait'; I shall have it still again when Sarah Pocock arrives.
It's a benefit that would make a poor show for many people; and I don't
know who else but you and I, frankly, could begin to see in it what I
feel. I don't get drunk; I don't pursue the ladies; I don't spend
money; I don't even write sonnets. But nevertheless I'm making up late
for what I didn't have early. I cultivate my little benefit in my own
little way. It amuses me more than anything that has happened to me in
all my life. They may say what they like--it's my surrender, it's my
tribute, to youth. One puts that in where one can--it has to come in
somewhere, if only out of the lives, the conditions, the feelings of
other persons. Chad gives me the sense of it, for all his grey hairs,
which merely make it solid in him and safe and serene; and SHE does the
same, for all her being older than he, for all her marriageable
daughter, her separated husband, her agitated history. Though they're
young enough, my pair, I don't say they're, in the freshest way, their
own absolutely prime adolescence; for that has nothing to do with it.
The point is that they're mine. Yes, they're my youth; since somehow
at the ri