en--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, made him advanc