You rather
tempt me therefore to put the question in my turn. Don't YOU care
about a certain other person?"
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.
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