Nabokov has Humbert go through some of the familiar pedophiliac tropes, going to parks where children are playing, enjoying the nearness of girls on the busses. He is trying to be good, yet he cannot entirely give up his true yearnings:
The fact that to me the only objects of amorous tremor were sisters of Annabel’s, her handmaids and girl-pages, appeared to me at times as a forerunner of insanity. At other times I would tell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that there was really nothing wrong in being moved to distraction by girl-children.
Meanwhile, as he struggled with his soul, Hummy continued stealing his little glimpses into girl-paradise and enjoyed his illicit fantasies.
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How marvelous were my fancied adventures as I sat on a hard park bench pretending to be immersed in a trembling book. Around the quiet scholar, nymphets played freely, as if he were a familiar statue or part of an old tree’s shadow and sheen. Once a perfect little beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavily armed foot near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me and tighten the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun, with my book for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her skinned knee, and the shadow of leaves I shared pulsated and melted on her radiant limb next to my chameleonic cheek. Another time a red-haired schoolgirl hung over me in the metro, and a revelation of axillary russet I obtained remained in my blood for weeks. I could list a great number of these one-sided diminutive romances.
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Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up.
-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov
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