e and retreat, feeling half ashamed of his
impulse to plunge and more than half afraid of his impulse to wait. He
remembered for instance how he had gone back in the sixties with
lemon-coloured volumes in general on the brain as well as with a
dozen--selected for his wife too--in his trunk; and nothing had at the
moment shown more confidence than this invocation of the finer taste.
They were still somewhere at home, the dozen--stale and soiled and
never sent to the binder; but what had become of the sharp initiation
they represented? They represented now the mere sallow paint on the
door of the temple of taste that he had dreamed of raising up--a
structure he had practically never carried further. Strether's present
highest flights were perhaps those in which this particular lapse
figured to him as a symbol, a symbol of his long grind and his want of
odd moments, his want moreover of money, of opportunity, of positive
dignity. That the memory of the vow of his youth should, in order to
throb again, have had to wait for this last, as he felt it, of all his
accidents--that was surely proof enough of how his conscience had been
encumbered. If any further proof were needed it would have been to be
found in the fact that, as he perfectly now saw, he had ceased even to
measure his meagreness, a meagreness that sprawled, in this retrospect,
vague and comprehensive, stretching back like some unmapped Hinterland
from a rough coast-settlement. His conscience had been amusing itself
for the forty-eight hours by forbidding him the purchase of a book; he
held off from that, held off from everything; from the moment he didn't
yet call on Chad he wouldn't for the world have taken any other step.
On this evidence, however, of the way they actually affected him he
glared at the lemon-coloured covers in confession of the
subconsciousness that, all the same, in the great desert of the years,
he must have had of them. The green covers at home comprised, by the
law of their purpose, no tribute to letters; it was of a mere rich
kernel of economics, politics, ethics that, glazed and, as Mrs. Newsome
maintained rather against HIS view, pre-eminently pleasant to touch,
they formed the specious shell. Without therefore any needed
instinctive knowledge of what was coming out, in Paris, on the bright
highway, he struck himself at present as having more than once flushed
with a suspicion: he couldn't otherwise at present be feeling so many