 again - no one but himself knew how often - it appeared
to have been that he might demonstrate what else, in default of that, could be
made. Old ghosts of experiments came back to him, old drudgeries and delusions,
and disgusts, old recoveries with their relapses, old fevers with their chills,
broken moments of good faith, others of still better doubt; adventures, for the
most part, of the sort qualified as lessons. The special spring that had
constantly played for him the day before was the recognition - frequent enough
to surprise him - of the promises to himself that he had after his other visit
never kept. The reminiscence to-day most quickened for him was that of the vow
taken in the course of the pilgrimage that, newly-married, with the War just
over, and helplessly young in spite of it, he had recklessly made with the
creature who was so much younger still. It had been a bold dash, for which they
had taken money set apart for necessities, but kept sacred at the moment in a
hundred ways, and in none more so than by this private pledge of his own to
treat the occasion as a relation formed with the higher culture and see that, as
they said at Woollett, it should bear a good harvest. He had believed, sailing
home again, that he had gained something great, and his theory - with an
elaborate innocent plan of reading, digesting, coming back even, every few years
- had then been to preserve, cherish and extend it. As such plans as these had
come to nothing, however, in respect to acquisitions still more precious, it was
doubtless little enough of a marvel that he should have lost account of that
handful of seed. Buried for long years in dark corners at any rate these few
germs had sprouted again under forty-eight hours of Paris. The process of
yesterday had really been the process of feeling the general stirred life of
connexions long since individually dropped. Strether had become acquainted even
on this ground with short gusts of speculation - sudden flights of fancy in
Louvre galleries, hungry gazes through clear plates behind which lemon-coloured
volumes were as fresh as fruit on the tree.
    There were instants at which he could ask whether, since there had been
fundamentally so little question of his keeping anything, the fate after all
decreed for him hadn't been only to be kept. Kept for something, in that event,
that he didn't pretend, didn't possibly dare as yet to divine; something that
made him hover and wonder and laugh and sigh
