BOOK Fourth.
I "I've 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 had 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 wasn't 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.