It affected Strether: horrors were so little—superficially at least—in this robust and reasoning image. But he was none the less there to be veracious. “Yes, I dare say we _have_ imagined horrors. But where’s the harm if we haven’t been wrong?” Chad raised his face to the lamp, and it was one of the moments at which he had, in his extraordinary way, most his air of designedly showing himself. It was as if at these instants he just presented himself, his identity so rounded off, his palpable presence and his massive young manhood, as such a link in the chain as might practically amount to a kind of demonstration. It was as if—and how but anomalously?—he couldn’t after all help thinking sufficiently well of these things to let them go for what they were worth. What could there be in this for Strether but the hint of some self-respect, some sense of power, oddly perverted; something latent and beyond access, ominous and perhaps enviable? The intimation had the next thing, in a flash, taken on a name—a name on which our friend seized as he asked himself if he weren’t perhaps really dealing with an irreducible young Pagan. This description—he quite jumped at it—had a sound that gratified his mental ear, so that of a sudden he had already adopted it. Pagan—yes, that was, wasn’t it? what Chad _would_ logically be. It was what he must be. It was what he was. The idea was a clue and, instead of darkening the prospect, projected a certain clearness. Strether made out in this quick ray that a Pagan was perhaps, at the pass they had come to, the thing most wanted at Woollett. They’d be able to do with one—a good one; he’d find an opening—yes; and Strether’s imagination even now prefigured and accompanied the first appearance there of the rousing personage. He had only the slight discomfort of feeling, as the young man turned away from the lamp, that his thought had in the momentary silence possibly been guessed. “Well, I’ve no doubt,” said Chad, “you’ve come near enough. The details, as you say, don’t matter. It _has_ been generally the case that I’ve let myself go. But I’m coming round—I’m not so bad now.” With which they walked on again to Strether’s hotel. “Do you mean,” the latter asked as they approached the door, “that there isn’t any woman with you now?” “But pray what has that to do with it?” “Why it’s the whole question.” “Of my going home?” Chad was clearly surprised. “Oh not much! Do you think that when I want to go any one will have any power—” “To keep you”—Strether took him straight up—“from carrying out your wish? Well, our idea has been that somebody has hitherto—or a good many persons perhaps—kept you pretty well from ‘wanting.’ That’s what—if you’re in anybody’s hands—may again happen. You don’t answer my question”—he kept it up; “but if you aren’t in anybody’s hands so much the better. There’s nothing then but what makes for your going.”