ad declared.

It gave his companion a moment's pause. "You asked me just now if I
don't, as you said, 'care' about a certain person. You rather tempt me
therefore to put the question in my turn. Don't YOU care about a
certain other person?"

Chad looked at him hard in the lamplight of the window. "The
difference is that I don't want to."

Strether wondered. "'Don't want' to?"

"I try not to--that is I HAVE tried. I've done my best. You can't be
surprised," the young man easily went on, "when you yourself set me on
it. I was indeed," he added, "already on it a little; but you set me
harder. It was six weeks ago that I thought I had come out."

Strether took it well in. "But you haven't come out!"

"I don't know--it's what I WANT to know," said Chad. "And if I could
have sufficiently wanted--by myself--to go back, I think I might have
found out."

"Possibly"--Strether considered. "But all you were able to achieve was
to want to want to! And even then," he pursued, "only till our friends
there came. Do you want to want to still?" As with a sound
half-dolorous, half-droll and all vague and equivocal, Chad buried his
face for a little in his hands, rubbing it in a whimsical way that
amounted to an evasion, he brought it out more sharply: "DO you?"

Chad kept for a time his attitude, but at last he looked up, and then
abruptly, "Jim IS a damned dose!" he declared.

"Oh I don't ask you to abuse or describe or in any way pronounce on
your relatives; I simply put it to you once more whether you're NOW
ready. You say you've 'seen.' Is what you've seen that you can't
resist?"

Chad gave him a strange smile--the nearest approach he had ever shown
to a troubled one. "Can't you make me NOT resist?"

"What it comes to," Strether went on very gravely now and as if he
hadn't heard him, "what it comes to is that more has been done for you,
I think, than I've ever seen done--attempted perhaps, but never so
successfully done--by one human being for another."

"Oh an immense deal certainly"--Chad did it full justice. "And you
yourself are adding to it."

It was without heeding this either that his visitor continued. "And our
friends there won't have it."

"No, they simply won't."

"They demand you on the basis, as it were, of repudiation and
ingratitude; and what has been the matter with me," Strether went on,
"is that I haven't seen my way to working with you for repudiation."

Chad appreciated this.