Chad looked at him hard in the lamplight of the window. “The difference is that I don’t want to.”
Strether wondered. “‘Don’t want’ to?”
“I try not to—that is I have tried. I’ve done my best. You can’t be surprised,” the young man easily went on, “when you yourself set me on it. I was indeed,” he added, “already on it a little; but you set me harder. It was six weeks ago that I thought I had come out.”
Strether took it well in. “But you haven’t come out!”
“I don’t know—it’s what I want to know,” said Chad. “And if I could have sufficiently wanted—by myself—to go back, I think I might have found out.”
“Possibly”—Strether considered. “But all you were able to achieve was to want to want to! And even then,” he pursued, “only till our friends there came. Do you want to want to still?” As with a sound half-dolorous, half-droll and all vague and equivocal, Chad buried his face for a little in his hands, rubbing it in a whimsical way that amounted to an evasion, he brought it out more sharply: “Do you?”
Chad kept for a time his attitude, but at last he looked up, and then abruptly, “Jim is a damned dose!” he declared.
“Oh I don’t ask you to abuse or describe or in any way pronounce on your relatives; I simply put it to you once more whether you’re now ready. You say you’ve ‘seen.’ Is what you’ve seen that you can’t resist?”
Chad gave him a strange smile—the nearest approach he had ever shown to a troubled one. “Can’t you make me not resist?”
“What it comes to,” Strether went on very gravely now and as if he hadn’t heard him, “what it comes to is that more has been done for you, I think, than I’ve ever seen done—attempted perhaps, but never so successfully done—by one human being for another.”