Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 3.djvu/245

 answerless question, 'After all—after all?' which the Princess had planted there the night before when she spoke so bravely in the name of the Revolution. 'After all—after all, since nothing else was tried, or would, apparently, ever be tried' He had a sense of his mind, which had been made up, falling to pieces again; but that sense in turn lost itself in a shudder which was already familiar—the horror of the public reappearance, on his part, of the imbrued hands of his mother. This loathing of the idea of a repetition had not been sharp, strangely enough, till his summons came; in all his previous meditations the growth of his reluctance to act for the 'party of action' had not been the fear of a personal stain, but the simple extension of his observation. Yet now the idea of the personal stain made him horribly sick; it seemed by itself to make service impossible. It rose before him like a kind of backward accusation of his mother; to suffer it to start out in the life of her son was in a manner to place her own forgotten, redeemed pollution again in the eye of the world. The thought that was most of all with him was that he had time—he had time; he was grateful for that, and saw a kind of delicacy in their having given him a margin—not condemned him to be pressed by the hours. He had another day, he had two days, he might take three, he might take several. He knew he should be terribly weary of them before they were over; but for that matter they would be over whenever he liked. Anyhow, he went forth again into the streets, into the squares, into the parks, solicited by an aimless desire to steep himself yet once again in the great indifferent city which he knew and loved and which had had so many of his smiles and tears and