Ralph didn't discourage this hope, though whatever support he offered it was but to be inferred from what was left for recognition of such connections in his more and more preoccupied face. That countenance, charged for a moment with further fair acknowledgments, seemed to turn away from them, before they were uttered, in the interest of something more urgent. "Of course I perfectly understand that you think me, that you must think me, more or less raving mad. I perfectly understand that you must want to keep me in view and be able as far as possible to track me and give some account of me in case of future inquiry. I appreciate that, and it was even exactly for it, I think, that I came. I really believe I ought to be tracked, to be subject to identification, to have an eye kept on me. I'm like one starting a perhaps perilous journey and wanting not to have neglected precautions in advance. I don't in the least mind your thinking me mad--I should be so, or should be at least idiotic, not to conceive my making the impression. At the same time I strike myself as of a sanity I've never enjoyed before. Don't be afraid of offending me, for what is it but your very protection against myself that I've thus invoked? Not that I fear I shall destroy myself--at least in any common way; I'm so far from intending or wishing to commit suicide that I'm proposing to push my affair all the way it will go, or in other words to live with an intensity unprecedented." "Well, if you live with the intensity to which you help others I don't see what responsibility you're likely to be accused of shirking. _I_ can't keep still," the Ambassador then flatly declared, "till I've been down with you to verify that question of your friend in the cab."