. We've given them the
most liberal conditions.«
    »Ah,« said Chad, »splendid conditions! It was open to them, open to them« -
he seemed to make it out, as he smoked, with his eyes still on the stars. He
might in quiet sport have been reading their horoscope. Strether wondered
meanwhile what had been open to them, and he finally let him have it. »It was
open to them simply to let me alone; to have made up their minds, on really
seeing me for themselves, that I could go on well enough as I was.«
    Strether assented to this proposition with full lucidity, his companion's
plural pronoun, which stood all for Mrs. Newsome and her daughter, having no
ambiguity for him. There was nothing, apparently, to stand for Mamie and Jim;
and this added to our friend's sense of Chad's knowing what he thought. »But
they've made up their minds to the opposite - that you can't go on as you are.«
    »No,« Chad continued in the same way; »they won't have it for a minute.«
    Strether on his side also reflectively smoked. It was as if their high place
really represented some moral elevation from which they could look down on their
recent past. »There never was the smallest chance, do you know, that they would
have it for a moment.«
    »Of course not - no real chance. But if they were willing to think there was
-!«
    »They weren't willing.« Strether had worked it all out. »It wasn't for you
they came out, but for me. It wasn't to see for themselves what you're doing,
but what I'm doing. The first branch of their curiosity was inevitably destined,
under my culpable delay, to give way to the second; and it's on the second that,
if I may use the expression and you don't mind my marking the invidious fact,
they've been of late exclusively perched. When Sarah sailed it was me, in other
words, they were after.«
    Chad took it in both with intelligence and with indulgence. »It is rather a
business then - what I've let you in for!«
    Strether had again a brief pause; which ended in a reply that seemed to
dispose once for all of this element of compunction. Chad was to treat it, at
any rate, so far as they were
