His answer too was always the same. “Of course I’m youth—youth for the trip to Europe. I began to be young, or at least to get the benefit of it, the moment I met you at Chester, and that’s what has been taking place ever since. I never had the benefit at the proper time—which comes to saying that I never had the thing itself. I’m having the benefit at this moment; I had it the other day when I said to Chad ‘Wait’; I shall have it still again when Sarah Pocock arrives. It’s a benefit that would make a poor show for many people; and I don’t know who else but you and I, frankly, could begin to see in it what I feel. I don’t get drunk; I don’t pursue the ladies; I don’t spend money; I don’t even write sonnets. But nevertheless I’m making up late for what I didn’t have early. I cultivate my little benefit in my own little way. It amuses me more than anything that has happened to me in all my life. They may say what they like—it’s my surrender, it’s my tribute, to youth. One puts that in where one can—it has to come in somewhere, if only out of the lives, the conditions, the feelings of other persons. Chad gives me the sense of it, for all his grey hairs, which merely make it solid in him and safe and serene; and _she_ does the same, for all her being older than he, for all her marriageable daughter, her separated husband, her agitated history. Though they’re young enough, my pair, I don’t say they’re, in the freshest way, their _own_ absolutely prime adolescence; for that has nothing to do with it. The point is that they’re mine. Yes, they’re my youth; since somehow at the right time nothing else ever was. What I meant just now therefore is that it would all go—go before doing its work—if they were to fail me.” On which, just here, Miss Gostrey inveterately questioned. “What do you, in particular, call its work?” “Well, to see me through.” “But through what?”—she liked to get it all out of him. “Why through this experience.” That was all that would come. It regularly gave her none the less the last word. “Don’t you remember how in those first days of our meeting it was _I_ who was to see you through?” “Remember? Tenderly, deeply”—he always rose to it. “You’re just doing your part in letting me maunder to you thus.” “Ah don’t speak as if my part were small; since whatever else fails you—” “_You_ won’t, ever, ever, ever?”—he thus took her up. “Oh I beg your pardon; you necessarily, you inevitably _will_. Your conditions—that’s what I mean—won’t allow me anything to do for you.” “Let alone—I see what you mean—that I’m drearily dreadfully old. I _am_, but there’s a service—possible for you to render—that I know, all the same, I shall think of.” “And what will it be?” This, in fine, however, she would never tell him. “You shall hear only if your smash takes place. As that’s really out of the question, I won’t expose myself”—a point at which, for reasons of his own, Strether ceased to press.