The Ambassadors by Henry James (read people like a book .TXT) 📕

assured future. The little I have to show toward the power to take care of myself. The way, the wonderful way, she would certainly take care of me. Her fortune, her kindness, and the constant miracle of her having been disposed to go even so far. Of course, of course”⁠—he summed it up. “There are those sharp facts.”

Chad had meanwhile thought of another still. “And don’t you really care⁠—?”

His friend slowly turned round to him. “Will you go?”

“I’ll go if you’ll say you now consider I should. You know,” he went on, “I was ready six weeks ago.”

“Ah,” said Strether, “that was when you didn’t know I wasn’t! You’re ready at present because you do know it.”

“That may be,” Chad returned; “but all the same I’m sincere. You talk about taking the whole thing on your shoulders, but in what light do you regard me that you think me capable of letting you pay?” Strether patted his arm, as they stood together against the parapet, reassuringly⁠—seeming to wish to contend that he had the wherewithal; but it was again round this question of purchase and price that the young man’s sense of fairness continued to hover. “What it literally comes to for you, if you’ll pardon my putting it so, is that you give up money. Possibly a good deal of money.”

“Oh,” Strether laughed, “if it were only just enough you’d still be justified in putting it so! But I’ve on my side to remind you too that you give up money; and more than ‘possibly’⁠—quite certainly, as I should suppose⁠—a good deal.”

“True enough; but I’ve got a certain quantity,” Chad returned after a moment. “Whereas you, my dear man, you⁠—”

“I can’t be at all said”⁠—Strether took him up⁠—“to have a ‘quantity’ certain or uncertain? Very true. Still, I shan’t starve.”

“Oh you mustn’t starve!” Chad pacifically emphasised; and so, in the pleasant conditions, they continued to talk; though there was, for that matter, a pause in which the younger companion might have been taken as weighing again the delicacy of his then and there promising the elder some provision against the possibility just mentioned. This, however, he presumably thought best not to do, for at the end of another minute they had moved in quite a different direction. Strether had broken in by returning to the subject of Chad’s passage with Sarah and enquiring if they had arrived, in the event, at anything in the nature of a “scene.” To this Chad replied that they had on the contrary kept tremendously polite; adding moreover that Sally was after all not the woman to have made the mistake of not being. “Her hands are a good deal tied, you see. I got so, from the first,” he sagaciously observed, “the start of her.”

“You mean she has taken so much from you?”

“Well, I couldn’t of course in common decency give less: only she hadn’t expected, I think, that I’d give her nearly so much. And she began to take it before she knew it.”

“And she began to like it,” said Strether, “as soon as she began to take it!”

“Yes, she has liked it⁠—also more than she expected.” After which Chad observed: “But she doesn’t like me. In fact she hates me.”

Strether’s interest grew. “Then why does she want you at home?”

“Because when you hate you want to triumph, and if she should get me neatly stuck there she would triumph.”

Strether followed afresh, but looking as he went. “Certainly⁠—in a manner. But it would scarce be a triumph worth having if, once entangled, feeling her dislike and possibly conscious in time of a certain quantity of your own, you should on the spot make yourself unpleasant to her.”

“Ah,” said Chad, “she can bear me⁠—could bear me at least at home. It’s my being there that would be her triumph. She hates me in Paris.”

“She hates in other words⁠—”

“Yes, that’s it!”⁠—Chad had quickly understood this understanding; which formed on the part of each as near an approach as they had yet made to naming Madame de Vionnet. The limitations of their distinctness didn’t, however, prevent its fairly lingering in the air that it was this lady Mrs. Pocock hated. It added one more touch moreover to their established recognition of the rare intimacy of Chad’s association with her. He had never yet more twitched away the last light veil from this phenomenon than in presenting himself as confounded and submerged in the feeling she had created at Woollett. “And I’ll tell you who hates me too,” he immediately went on.

Strether knew as immediately whom he meant, but with as prompt a protest. “Ah no! Mamie doesn’t hate⁠—well,” he caught himself in time⁠—“anybody at all. Mamie’s beautiful.”

Chad shook his head. “That’s just why I mind it. She certainly doesn’t like me.”

“How much do you mind it? What would you do for her?”

“Well, I’d like her if she’d like me. Really, really,” Chad 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