They were face to face under the street-lamp as they had been the first night, and Strether, no doubt, looked blank. “Affects, you mean, the sale of the object advertised?” “Yes—but affects it extraordinarily; really beyond what one had supposed. I mean of course when it’s done as one makes out that in our roaring age, it _can_ be done. I’ve been finding out a little, though it doubtless doesn’t amount to much more than what you originally, so awfully vividly—and all, very nearly, that first night—put before me. It’s an art like another, and infinite like all the arts.” He went on as if for the joke of it—almost as if his friend’s face amused him. “In the hands, naturally, of a master. The right man must take hold. With the right man to work it _c’est un monde_.” Strether had watched him quite as if, there on the pavement without a pretext, he had begun to dance a fancy step. “Is what you’re thinking of that you yourself, in the case you have in mind, would be the right man?” Chad had thrown back his light coat and thrust each of his thumbs into an armhole of his waistcoat; in which position his fingers played up and down. “Why, what is he but what you yourself, as I say, took me for when you first came out?” Strether felt a little faint, but he coerced his attention. “Oh yes, and there’s no doubt that, with your natural parts, you’d have much in common with him. Advertising is clearly at this time of day the secret of trade. It’s quite possible it will be open to you—giving the whole of your mind to it—to make the whole place hum with you. Your mother’s appeal is to the whole of your mind, and that’s exactly the strength of her case.” Chad’s fingers continued to twiddle, but he had something of a drop. “Ah we’ve been through my mother’s case!” “So I thought. Why then do you speak of the matter?” “Only because it was part of our original discussion. To wind up where we began, my interest’s purely platonic. There at any rate the fact is—the fact of the possible. I mean the money in it.” “Oh damn the money in it!” said Strether. And then as the young man’s fixed smile seemed to shine out more strange: “Shall you give your friend up for the money in it?” Chad preserved his handsome grimace as well as the rest of his attitude. “You’re not altogether—in your so great ‘solemnity’—kind. Haven’t I been drinking you in—showing you all I feel you’re worth to me? What have I done, what am I doing, but cleave to her to the death? The only thing is,” he good-humouredly explained, “that one can’t but have it before one, in the cleaving—the point where the death comes in. Don’t be afraid for _that_. It’s pleasant to a fellow’s feelings,” he developed, “to ‘size-up’ the bribe he applies his foot to.” “Oh then if all you want’s a kickable surface the bribe’s enormous.”