"
"You can bring a horse to water--!" Chad suggested.
"Precisely. And the tune to which this morning Sarah wasn't
delighted--the tune to which, to adopt your metaphor, she refused
to drink--leaves us on that side nothing more to hope."
Chad had a pause, and then as if consolingly: "It was never of
course really the least on the cards that they would be 'delighted.'"
"Well, I don't know, after all," Strether mused. "I've had to come
as far round. However"--he shook it off--"it's doubtless MY
performance that's absurd."
"There are certainly moments," said Chad, "when you seem to me too
good to be true. Yet if you are true," he added, "that seems to be
all that need concern me."
"I'm true, but I'm incredible. I'm fantastic and ridiculous--
I don't explain myself even TO myself. How can they then,"
Strether asked, "understand me? So I don't quarrel with them."
"I see. They quarrel," said Chad rather comfortably, "with US."
Strether noted once more the comfort, but his young friend had
already gone on. "I should feel greatly ashamed, all the same,
if I didn't put it before you again that you ought to think,
after all, tremendously well. I mean before giving up beyond recall--"
With which insistence, as from a certain delicacy, dropped.
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