“You’ve cabled?”
“No—I’ve made Chad do it.”
“That you decline to come?”
“That he declines. We had it out this morning and I brought him round. He had come in, before I was down, to tell me he was ready—ready, I mean, to return. And he went off, after ten minutes with me, to say he wouldn’t.”
Miss Gostrey followed with intensity. “Then you’ve stopped him?”
Strether settled himself afresh in his chair. “I’ve stopped him. That is for the time. That”—he gave it to her more vividly—“is where I am.”
“I see, I see. But where’s Mr. Newsome? He was ready,” she asked, “to go?”
“All ready.”
“And sincerely—believing you’d be?”
“Perfectly, I think; so that he was amazed to find the hand I had laid on him to pull him over suddenly converted into an engine for keeping him still.”