“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?”