e out was that he would abound for him to the end in
conscientious assurances. This was what was between them while the
visitor remained; so far from having to go over old ground he found his
entertainer keen to agree to everything. It couldn't be put too
strongly for him that he'd be a brute. "Oh rather!--if I should do
anything of THAT sort. I hope you believe I really feel it."

"I want it," said Strether, "to be my last word of all to you. I can't
say more, you know; and I don't see how I can do more, in every way,
than I've done."

Chad took this, almost artlessly, as a direct allusion. "You've seen
her?"

"Oh yes--to say good-bye. And if I had doubted the truth of what I
tell you--"

"She'd have cleared up your doubt?" Chad understood--"rather"--again!
It even kept him briefly silent. But he made that up. "She must have
been wonderful."

"She WAS," Strether candidly admitted--all of which practically told as
a reference to the conditions created by the accident of the previous
week.

They appeared for a little to be looking back at it; and that came out
still more in what Chad next said. "I don't know what you've really
thought, all along; I never did know--for anything, with you, seemed to
be possible. But of course--of course--" Without confusion, quite
with nothing but indulgence, he broke down, he pulled up. "After all,
you understand. I spoke to you originally only as I HAD to speak.
There's only one way--isn't there?--about such things. However," he
smiled with a final philosophy, "I see it's all right."

Strether met his eyes with a sense of multiplying thoughts. What was
it that made him at present, late at night and after journeys, so
renewedly, so substantially young? Strether saw in a moment what it
was--it was that he was younger again than Madame de Vionnet. He
himself said immediately none of the things that he was thinking; he
said something quite different. "You HAVE really been to a distance?"

"I've been to England." Chad spoke cheerfully and promptly, but gave no
further account of it than to say: "One must sometimes get off."

Strether wanted no more facts--he only wanted to justify, as it were,
his question. "Of course you do as you're free to do. But I hope,
this time, that you didn't go for ME."

"For very shame at bothering you really too much? My dear man," Chad
laughed, "what WOULDn't I do for you?"

Strether's easy answer for this was that it was a disp