, made him advance 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'
