Henry James

“ Strether found himself in possession as he never yet had been; he had been there alone, had turned over books and prints, had invoked, in Chad's absence, the spirit of the place, but never at the witching hour, and never with a relish quite so like a pang.
He spent a long time on the balcony; he hung over it as he had seen little Bilham hang the day of his first approach, as he had seen Mamie hang over her own the day little Bilham himself might have seen her from below; he passed back into the rooms, the three that occupied the front and that communicated by wide doors ”

“ Chad cast a pleasant backward glance over his possibilities of motive. "I've only wanted to be kind and friendly, to be decent and attentive and I still only want to be."
Strether smiled at his comfortable clearness. "Well, there can certainly be no way for it better than by my taking the onus. It reduces your personal friction and your personal offence to almost nothing."
Ah, but Chad, with his completer conception of the friendly, wouldn't quite have this! They had remained on the balcony, where, after their day of great and premature heat, the midnight air was delicious ”

“ Mamie's beautiful."
Chad shook his head. "That's just why I mind it. She certainly doesn't like me."
"How much do you mind it? What would you do for her?"
"Well, I'd like her if she'd like me. Really, really," Chad declared.
It gave his companion a moment's pause. "You asked me just now if I don't 'like,' for herself, a certain person. You rather tempt me therefore to put the question in my turn. Don't you 'like' 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?" ”

“ The night was hot and heavy, and the single lamp sufficient; the great flare of the lighted city, rising high, spending itself afar, played up from the Boulevard and, through the vague vista of the successive rooms, brought objects into view and added to their dignity. ”

“ Strether assented to this proposition with full lucidity, his companion's plural pronoun, which stood all for Mrs. Newsome and her daughter, having no ambiguity for him. There was nothing, apparently, to stand for Mamie and Jim; and this added to our friend's sense of Chad's knowing what he thought.
"But they've made up their minds to the opposite—that you can't go on as you are."
"No," Chad continued in the same way; "they won't have it for a minute." ”

“ Chad had said it all, from his natural scruple, only to that extent; so that Strether, after an instant, himself took a hand. "My absence of an assured future. The little I have to show toward the power to take care of myself. ”

“ You've been 'wonderful, wonderful,' as we say—we poor people who watch the play from the pit; and that's what has, admirably, made her. Made her all the more effectually that she could see you didn't set about it on purpose. ”

“ Strether had broken in by returning to the subject of Chad's passage with Sarah, and inquiring if they had arrived, in the event, at anything in the nature of a "scene." To this Chad replied that they had, on the contrary, kept tremendously polite; adding, moreover, that Sally was after all not the woman to have made the mistake of not being. "Her hands are a good deal tied, you see. ”