It had immediately, on Strether’s imagination, so deep and soft an effect that our friend could only for the moment keep it before him. “Never?” “Never,” Chad obligingly and serenely repeated. It made his companion take several more steps. “Then _you’re_ not afraid.” “Afraid to go?” Strether pulled up again. “Afraid to stay.” The young man looked brightly amazed. “You want me now to ‘stay’?” “If I don’t immediately sail the Pococks will immediately come out. That’s what I mean,” said Strether, “by your mother’s ultimatum.” Chad showed a still livelier, but not an alarmed interest. “She has turned on Sarah and Jim?” Strether joined him for an instant in the vision. “Oh and you may be sure Mamie. _That’s_ whom she’s turning on.” This also Chad saw—he laughed out. “Mamie—to corrupt me?” “Ah,” said Strether, “she’s very charming.” “So you’ve already more than once told me. I should like to see her.” Something happy and easy, something above all unconscious, in the way he said this, brought home again to his companion the facility of his attitude and the enviability of his state. “See her then by all means. And consider too,” Strether went on, “that you really give your sister a lift in letting her come to you. You give her a couple of months of Paris, which she hasn’t seen, if I’m not mistaken, since just after she was married, and which I’m sure she wants but the pretext to visit.” Chad listened, but with all his own knowledge of the world. “She has had it, the pretext, these several years, yet she has never taken it.” “Do you mean _you?_” Strether after an instant enquired. “Certainly—the lone exile. And whom do you mean?” said Chad. “Oh I mean _me_. I’m her pretext. That is—for it comes to the same thing—I’m your mother’s.” “Then why,” Chad asked, “doesn’t Mother come herself?” His friend gave him a long look. “Should you like her to?” And as he for the moment said nothing: “It’s perfectly open to you to cable for her.” Chad continued to think. “Will she come if I do?” “Quite possibly. But try, and you’ll see.” “Why don’t _you_ try?” Chad after a moment asked. “Because I don’t want to.” Chad thought. “Don’t desire her presence here?” Strether faced the question, and his answer was the more emphatic. “Don’t put it off, my dear boy, on _me!_” “Well—I see what you mean. I’m sure you’d behave beautifully but you _don’t_ want to see her. So I won’t play you that trick.’ “Ah,” Strether declared, “I shouldn’t call it a trick. You’ve a perfect right, and it would be perfectly straight of you.” Then he added in a different tone: “You’d have moreover, in the person of Madame de Vionnet, a very interesting relation prepared for her.”