“Well, I’d like her if she’d like me. Really, really,” Chad declared. It gave his companion a moment’s pause. “You asked me just now if I don’t, as you said, ‘care’ about a certain person. You rather tempt me therefore to put the question in my turn. Don’t _you_ care about a certain other person?” Chad looked at him hard in the lamplight of the window. “The difference is that I don’t want to.” Strether wondered. “‘Don’t want’ to?” “I try not to—that is I _have_ tried. I’ve done my best. You can’t be surprised,” the young man easily went on, “when you yourself set me on it. I was indeed,” he added, “already on it a little; but you set me harder. It was six weeks ago that I thought I had come out.” Strether took it well in. “But you haven’t come out!” “I don’t know—it’s what I _want_ to know,” said Chad. “And if I could have sufficiently wanted—by myself—to go back, I think I might have found out.” “Possibly”—Strether considered. “But all you were able to achieve was to want to want to! And even then,” he pursued, “only till our friends there came. Do you want to want to still?” As with a sound half-dolorous, half-droll and all vague and equivocal, Chad buried his face for a little in his hands, rubbing it in a whimsical way that amounted to an evasion, he brought it out more sharply: “_Do_ you?” Chad kept for a time his attitude, but at last he looked up, and then abruptly, “Jim _is_ a damned dose!” he declared. “Oh I don’t ask you to abuse or describe or in any way pronounce on your relatives; I simply put it to you once more whether you’re _now_ ready. You say you’ve ‘seen.’ Is what you’ve seen that you can’t resist?” Chad gave him a strange smile—the nearest approach he had ever shown to a troubled one. “Can’t you make me _not_ resist?” “What it comes to,” Strether went on very gravely now and as if he hadn’t heard him, “what it comes to is that more has been done for you, I think, than I’ve ever seen done—attempted perhaps, but never so successfully done—by one human being for another.” “Oh an immense deal certainly”—Chad did it full justice. “And you yourself are adding to it.” It was without heeding this either that his visitor continued. “And our friends there won’t have it.” “No, they simply won’t.” “They demand you on the basis, as it were, of repudiation and ingratitude; and what has been the matter with me,” Strether went on, “is that I haven’t seen my way to working with you for repudiation.” Chad appreciated this. “Then as you haven’t seen yours you naturally haven’t seen mine. There it is.” After which he proceeded, with a certain abruptness, to a sharp interrogation. “_Now_ do you say she doesn’t hate me?” Strether hesitated. “‘She’—?” “Yes—Mother. We called it Sarah, but it comes to the same thing.” “Ah,” Strether objected, “not to the same thing as her hating _you_.”