e you, my dear man, dished?"

It sounded as if he were asking if he had caught cold or hurt his foot,
and Strether for a minute but smoked and smoked. "I want to see her
again. I must see her."

"Of course you must." Then Chad hesitated. "Do you mean--a--Mother
herself?"

"Oh your mother--that will depend."

It was as if Mrs. Newsome had somehow been placed by the words very far
off. Chad however endeavoured in spite of this to reach the place.
"What do you mean it will depend on?"

Strether, for all answer, gave him a longish look. "I was speaking of
Sarah. I must positively--though she quite cast me off--see HER again.
I can't part with her that way."

"Then she was awfully unpleasant?"

Again Strether exhaled. "She was what she had to be. I mean that from
the moment they're not delighted they can only be--well what I admit
she was. We gave them," he went on, "their chance to be delighted, and
they've walked up to it, and looked all round it, and not taken it."

"You can bring a horse to water--!" Chad suggested.

"Precisely. And the tune to which this morning Sarah wasn't
delighted--the tune to which, to adopt your metaphor, she refused to
drink--leaves us on that side nothing more to hope."

Chad had a pause, and then as if consolingly: "It was never of course
really the least on the cards that they would be 'delighted.'"

"Well, I don't know, after all," Strether mused. "I've had to come as
far round. However"--he shook it off--"it's doubtless MY performance
that's absurd."

"There are certainly moments," said Chad, "when you seem to me too good
to be true. Yet if you are true," he added, "that seems to be all that
need concern me."

"I'm true, but I'm incredible. I'm fantastic and ridiculous--I don't
explain myself even TO myself. How can they then," Strether asked,
"understand me? So I don't quarrel with them."

"I see. They quarrel," said Chad rather comfortably, "with US."
Strether noted once more the comfort, but his young friend had already
gone on. "I should feel greatly ashamed, all the same, if I didn't put
it before you again that you ought to think, after all, tremendously
well. I mean before giving up beyond recall--" With which insistence,
as from a certain delicacy, dropped.

Ah but Strether wanted it. "Say it all, say it all."

"Well, at your age, and with what--when all's said and done--Mother
might do for you and be for you."

Chad had said it all, from hi