“I see. They quarrel,” said Chad rather comfortably, “with _us_.” Strether noted once more the comfort, but his young friend had already gone on. “I should feel greatly ashamed, all the same, if I didn’t put it before you again that you ought to think, after all, tremendously well. I mean before giving up beyond recall—” With which insistence, as from a certain delicacy, dropped. Ah but Strether wanted it. “Say it all, say it all.” “Well, at your age, and with what—when all’s said and done—Mother might do for you and be for you.” Chad had said it all, from his natural scruple, only to that extent; so that Strether after an instant himself took a hand. “My absence of an 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.”