"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.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's passionately set upon it, but she has above and beyond that excellent arguments and reasons.I've not put them into her head--I needn't remind you how little she's a person who needs that.But they exist--you must take it from me as a friend both of hers and yours--for myself as well.I didn't invent them, I didn't originally work them out; but I understand them, I think I can explain them--by which I mean make you actively do them justice; and that's why you see me here.
You had better know the worst at once.It's a question of an immediate rupture and an immediate return.I've been conceited enough to dream I can sugar that pill.I take at any rate the greatest interest in the question.I took it already before I left home, and I don't mind telling you that, altered as you are, Itake it still more now that I've seen you.You're older and--Idon't know what to call it!--more of a handful; but you're by so much the more, I seem to make out, to our purpose.""Do I strike you as improved?" Strether was to recall that Chad had at this point enquired.
He was likewise to recall--and it had to count for some time as his greatest comfort--that it had been "given" him, as they said at Woollett, to reply with some presence of mind: "I haven't the least idea." He was really for a while to like thinking he had been positively hard.On the point of conceding that Chad had improved in appearance, but that to the question of appearance the remark must be confined, he checked even that compromise and left his reservation bare.Not only his moral, but also, as it were, his aesthetic sense had a little to pay for this, Chad being unmistakeably--and wasn't it a matter of the confounded grey hair again?--handsomer than he had ever promised.That however fell in perfectly with what Strether had said.They had no desire to keep down his proper expansion, and he wouldn't be less to their purpose for not looking, as he had too often done of old, only bold and wild.There was indeed a signal particular in which he would distinctly be more so.Strether didn't, as he talked, absolutely follow himself; he only knew he was clutching his thread and that he held it from moment to moment a little tighter;his mere uninterruptedness during the few minutes helped him to do that.He had frequently for a month, turned over what he should say on this very occasion, and he seemed at last to have said nothing he had thought of--everything was so totally different.
But in spite of all he had put the flag at the window.This was what he had done, and there was a minute during which he affected himself as having shaken it hard, flapped it with a mighty flutter, straight in front of his companion's nose.It gave him really almost the sense of having already acted his part.The momentary relief--as if from the knowledge that nothing of THATat least could be undone--sprang from a particular cause, the cause that had flashed into operation, in Miss Gostrey's box, with direct apprehension, with amazed recognition, and that had been concerned since then in every throb of his consciousness.What it came to was that with an absolutely new quantity to deal with one simply couldn't know.The new quantity was represented by the fact that Chad had been made over.That was all; whatever it was it was everything.Strether had never seen the thing so done before--it was perhaps a speciality of Paris.If one had been present at the process one might little by little have mastered the result; but he was face to face, as matters stood, with the finished business.
It had freely been noted for him that he might be received as a dog among skittles, but that was on the basis of the old quantity.