osition he had
exactly come to profit by. "Even at the risk of being in your way I've
waited on, you know, for a definite reason."

Chad took it in. "Oh yes--for us to make if possible a still better
impression." And he stood there happily exhaling his full general
consciousness. "I'm delighted to gather that you feel we've made it."

There was a pleasant irony in the words, which his guest, preoccupied
and keeping to the point, didn't take up. "If I had my sense of
wanting the rest of the time--the time of their being still on this
side," he continued to explain--"I know now why I wanted it."

He was as grave, as distinct, as a demonstrator before a blackboard,
and Chad continued to face him like an intelligent pupil. "You wanted
to have been put through the whole thing."

Strether again, for a moment, said nothing; he turned his eyes away,
and they lost themselves, through the open window, in the dusky outer
air. "I shall learn from the Bank here where they're now having their
letters, and my last word, which I shall write in the morning and which
they're expecting as my ultimatum, will so immediately reach them." The
light of his plural pronoun was sufficiently reflected in his
companion's face as he again met it; and he completed his
demonstration. He pursued indeed as if for himself. "Of course I've
first to justify what I shall do."

"You're justifying it beautifully!" Chad declared.

"It's not a question of advising you not to go," Strether said, "but of
absolutely preventing you, if possible, from so much as thinking of it.
Let me accordingly appeal to you by all you hold sacred."

Chad showed a surprise. "What makes you think me capable--?"

"You'd not only be, as I say, a brute; you'd be," his companion went on
in the same way, "a criminal of the deepest dye."

Chad gave a sharper look, as if to gauge a possible suspicion. "I don't
know what should make you think I'm tired of her."

Strether didn't quite know either, and such impressions, for the
imaginative mind, were always too fine, too floating, to produce on the
spot their warrant. There was none the less for him, in the very
manner of his host's allusion to satiety as a thinkable motive, a
slight breath of the ominous. "I feel how much more she can do for
you. She hasn't done it all yet. Stay with her at least till she has."

"And leave her THEN?"

Chad had kept smiling, but its effect in Strether was a shade of
dryness. "Don'