It's a question of an
immediate rupture and an immediate return. I've been conceited
enough to dream I can sugar that pill. I take at any rate the
greatest interest in the question. I took it already before I left
home, and I don't mind telling you that, altered as you are, I
take it still more now that I've seen you. You're older and--I
don't know what to call it!--more of a handful; but you're by so
much the more, I seem to make out, to our purpose."
"Do I strike you as improved?" Strether was to recall that Chad
had at this point enquired.
He was likewise to recall--and it had to count for some time as
his greatest comfort--that it had been "given" him, as they said
at Woollett, to reply with some presence of mind: "I haven't the
least idea." He was really for a while to like thinking he had
been positively hard. On the point of conceding that Chad had
improved in appearance, but that to the question of appearance the
remark must be confined, he checked even that compromise and left
his reservation bare. Not only his moral, but also, as it were,
his aesthetic sense had a little to pay for this, Chad being
unmistakeably--and wasn't it a matter of the confounded grey hair
again?--handsomer than he had ever promised.
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