“It’s not a question of advising you not to go,” Strether said, “but of absolutely preventing you, if possible, from so much as thinking of it. Let me accordingly appeal to you by all you hold sacred.”
Chad showed a surprise. “What makes you think me capable—?”
“You’d not only be, as I say, a brute; you’d be,” his companion went on in the same way, “a criminal of the deepest dye.”
Chad gave a sharper look, as if to gauge a possible suspicion. “I don’t know what should make you think I’m tired of her.”
Strether didn’t quite know either, and such impressions, for the imaginative mind, were always too fine, too floating, to produce on the spot their warrant. There was none the less for him, in the very manner of his host’s allusion to satiety as a thinkable motive, a slight breath of the ominous. “I feel how much more she can do for you. She hasn’t done it all yet. Stay with her at least till she has.”
“And leave her then?”
Chad had kept smiling, but its effect in Strether was a shade of dryness. “Don’t leave her before. When you’ve got all that can be got—I don’t say,” he added a trifle grimly. “That will be the proper time. But as, for you, from such a woman, there will always be something to be got, my remark’s not a wrong to her.” Chad let him go on, showing every decent deference, showing perhaps also a candid curiosity for this sharper accent. “I remember you, you know, as you were.”
“An awful ass, wasn’t I?”
The response was as prompt as if he had pressed a spring; it had a ready abundance at which he even winced; so that he took a moment to meet it. “You certainly then wouldn’t have seemed worth all you’ve let me in for. You’ve defined yourself better. Your value has quintupled.”
“Well then, wouldn’t that be enough—?”