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 VIII

come, you know, to make you break with everything, neither more nor less, and take you straight home; so you'll be so good as immediately and favourably to consider it!"—Strether, face to face with Chad after the play, had sounded these words almost breathlessly, and with an effect at first positively disconcerting to himself alone. For Chad's receptive attitude was that of a person who has been gracefully quiet while the messenger at last reaching him has run a mile through the dust. During some seconds after he had spoken Strether felt as if he had made some such exertion; he was not even certain that the perspiration was not on his brow. It was the kind of consciousness for which he had to thank the look that, while the strain lasted, the young man's eyes gave him. They reflected, and the deuce of the thing was that they reflected really with a sort of shyness of kindness, his momentarily disordered state; which fact brought on, in its turn, for our friend, the dawn of a fear that Chad might simply "take it out"—take everything out—in being sorry for him. Such a fear—any fear—was unpleasant. But everything was unpleasant; it was odd how everything had suddenly turned so. This, however, was no reason for letting the least thing go. Strether had the next minute proceeded as roundly as if with an advantage to follow up.

"Of course, I'm a busybody, if you want to fight the case to the death; but, after all, mainly in the sense of having known you, and having given you such attention as you kindly permitted, when you were in jackets and knickerbockers. Yes, it was knickerbockers, I'm busybody enough to remember that, and that you had, for your age—I speak of the first far-away time—tremendously stout legs. Well, we want you to break. Your mother's heart is passionately set upon it; but she has, over and beyond 109