His companion did himself presently the same justice. “So have I. I tried even this very morning—while Mrs. Pocock was with me. She enjoys for instance, almost as much as anything else, not being, as I’ve said, afraid of me; and I think I gave her help in that.” Chad took a deeper interest. “Was she very very nasty?” Strether debated. “Well, she was the most important thing—she was definite. She was—at last—crystalline. And I felt no remorse. I saw that they must have come.” “Oh I wanted to see them for myself; so that if it were only for _that_—!” Chad’s own remorse was as small. This appeared almost all Strether wanted. “Isn’t your having seen them for yourself then _the_ thing, beyond all others, that has come of their visit?” Chad looked as if he thought it nice of his old friend to put it so. “Don’t you count it as anything that you’re dished—if you _are_ dished? Are you, my dear man, dished?” It sounded as if he were asking if he had caught cold or hurt his foot, and Strether for a minute but smoked and smoked. “I want to see her again. I must see her.” “Of course you must.” Then Chad hesitated. “Do you mean—a—Mother herself?” “Oh your mother—that will depend.” It was as if Mrs. Newsome had somehow been placed by the words very far off. Chad however endeavoured in spite of this to reach the place. “What do you mean it will depend on?” Strether, for all answer, gave him a longish look. “I was speaking of Sarah. I must positively—though she quite cast me off—see _her_ again. I can’t part with her that way.” “Then she was awfully unpleasant?” Again Strether exhaled. “She was what she had to be. I mean that from the moment they’re not delighted they can only be—well what I admit she was. We gave them,” he went on, “their chance to be delighted, and they’ve walked up to it, and looked all round it, and not taken it.” “You can bring a horse to water—!” Chad suggested. “Precisely. And the tune to which this morning Sarah wasn’t delighted—the tune to which, to adopt your metaphor, she refused to drink—leaves us on that side nothing more to hope.” Chad had a pause, and then as if consolingly: “It was never of course really the least on the cards that they would be ‘delighted.’” “Well, I don’t know, after all,” Strether mused. “I’ve had to come as far round. However”—he shook it off—“it’s doubtless _my_ performance that’s absurd.” “There are certainly moments,” said Chad, “when you seem to me too good to be true. Yet if you are true,” he added, “that seems to be all that need concern me.” “I’m true, but I’m incredible. I’m fantastic and ridiculous—I don’t explain myself even _to_ myself. How can they then,” Strether asked, “understand me? So I don’t quarrel with them.”