't there? - about such things.
However,« he smiled with a final philosophy, »I see it's all right.«
    Strether met his eyes with a sense of multiplying thoughts. What was it that
made him at present, late at night and after journeys, so renewedly, so
substantially young? Strether saw in a moment what it was - it was that he was
younger again than Madame de Vionnet. He himself said immediately none of the
things that he was thinking; he said something quite different. »You have really
been to a distance?«
    »I've been to England.« Chad spoke cheerfully and promptly, but gave no
further account of it than to say: »One must sometimes get off.«
    Strether wanted no more facts - he only wanted to justify, as it were, his
question. »Of course you do as you're free to do. But I hope, this time, that
you didn't go for me.«
    »For very shame at bothering you really too much? My dear man,« Chad
laughed, »what wouldn't I do for you?«
    Strether's easy answer for this was that it was a disposition he had exactly
come to profit by. »Even at the risk of being in your way I've waited on, you
know, for a definite reason.«
    Chad took it in. »Oh yes - for us to make if possible a still better
impression.« And he stood there happily exhaling his full general consciousness.
»I'm delighted to gather that you feel we've made it.«
    There was a pleasant irony in the words, which his guest, preoccupied and
keeping to the point, didn't take up. »If I had my sense of wanting the rest of
the time - the time of their being still on this side,« he continued to explain
- »I know now why I wanted it.«
    He was as grave, as distinct, as a demonstrator before a blackboard, and
Chad continued to face him like an intelligent pupil. »You wanted to have been
put through the whole thing.«
    Strether again, for a moment, said nothing; he turned his eyes away, and
they lost themselves, through the open window, in the dusky outer air. »I shall
learn from the Bank here where they're now having their letters, and my last
word, which I shall write in the morning and which they're expecting as my
ultimatum, will so immediately
