His friend hesitated. “I beg your pardon. They have.”
Chad showed, not without amusement, his doubt. “Who then?”
Strether—though a little dimly—smiled at him. “Women—too.”
“‘Two’?”—Chad stared and laughed. “Oh I don’t believe, for such work, in any more than one! So you’re proving too much. And what is beastly, at all events,” he added, “is losing you.”
Strether had set himself in motion for departure, but at this he paused. “Are you afraid?”
“Afraid—?”
“Of doing wrong. I mean away from my eye.” Before Chad could speak, however, he had taken himself up. “I am, certainly,” he laughed, “prodigious.”
“Yes, you spoil us for all the stupid—!” This might have been, on Chad’s part, in its extreme emphasis, almost too freely extravagant; but it was full, plainly enough, of the intention of comfort, it carried with it a protest against doubt and a promise, positively, of performance. Picking up a hat in the vestibule he came out with his friend, came downstairs, took his arm, affectionately, as to help and guide him, treating him if not exactly as aged and infirm, yet as a noble eccentric who appealed to tenderness, and keeping on with him, while they walked, to the next corner and the next. “You needn’t tell me, you needn’t tell me!”—this again as they proceeded, he wished to make Strether feel. What he needn’t tell him was now at last, in the geniality of separation, anything at all it concerned him to know. He knew, up to the hilt—that really came over Chad; he understood, felt, recorded his vow; and they lingered on it as they had lingered in their walk to Strether’s hotel the night of their first meeting. The latter took, at this hour, all he could get; he had given all he had had to give; he was as depleted as if he had spent his last sou. But there was just one thing for which, before they broke off, Chad seemed disposed slightly to bargain. His companion needn’t, as he said, tell him, but he might himself mention that he had been getting some news of the art of advertisement. He came out quite suddenly with this announcement while Strether wondered if his revived interest were what had taken him, with strange inconsequence, over to London. He appeared at all events to have been looking into the question and had encountered a revelation. Advertising scientifically worked presented itself thus as the great new force. “It really does the thing, you know.”
They were face to face under the street-lamp as they had been the first night, and Strether, no doubt, looked blank. “Affects, you mean, the sale of the object advertised?”
“Yes—but affects it extraordinarily; really beyond what one had supposed. I mean of course when it’s done as one makes out that in our roaring age, it can be done. I’ve been finding out a little, though it doubtless doesn’t amount to much more than what you originally, so awfully vividly—and all, very nearly, that first night—put before me. It’s an art like another, and infinite like all the arts.” He went on as if for the joke of it—almost as if his friend’s face amused him. “In the hands, naturally, of a master. The right man must take hold. With the right man to work it c’est un monde.”