better than by my taking the onus. It
reduces your personal friction and your personal offence to almost
nothing."

Ah but Chad, with his completer conception of the friendly, wouldn't
quite have this! They had remained on the balcony, where, after their
day of great and premature heat, the midnight air was delicious; and
they leaned back in turn against the balustrade, all in harmony with
the chairs and the flower-pots, the cigarettes and the starlight. "The
onus isn't REALLY yours--after our agreeing so to wait together and
judge together. That was all my answer to Sally," Chad pursued--"that
we have been, that we are, just judging together."

"I'm not afraid of the burden," Strether explained; "I haven't come in
the least that you should take it off me. I've come very much, it
seems to me, to double up my fore legs in the manner of the camel when
he gets down on his knees to make his back convenient. But I've
supposed you all this while to have been doing a lot of special and
private judging--about which I haven't troubled you; and I've only
wished to have your conclusion first from you. I don't ask more than
that; I'm quite ready to take it as it has come."

Chad turned up his face to the sky with a slow puff of his smoke.
"Well, I've seen."

Strether waited a little. "I've left you wholly alone; haven't, I
think I may say, since the first hour or two--when I merely preached
patience--so much as breathed on you."

"Oh you've been awfully good!"

"We've both been good then--we've played the game. We've given them
the most liberal conditions."

"Ah," said Chad, "splendid conditions! It was open to them, open to
them"--he seemed to make it out, as he smoked, with his eyes still on
the stars. He might in quiet sport have been reading their horoscope.
Strether wondered meanwhile what had been open to them, and he finally
let him have it. "It was open to them simply to let me alone; to have
made up their minds, on really seeing me for themselves, that I could
go on well enough as I was."

Strether assented to this proposition with full lucidity, his
companion's plural pronoun, which stood all for Mrs. Newsome and her
daughter, having no ambiguity for him. There was nothing, apparently,
to stand for Mamie and Jim; and this added to our friend's sense of
Chad's knowing what he thought. "But they've made up their minds to
the opposite--that you CAN'T go on as you are."

"No," Chad continued in the same